Using PeerMark

Hello my name is Cecilia Aponte-de-Hanna. I’m a faculty member with the School of Advancement, English and ESL at Centennial College and in this video I want to show you how I use PeerMark with my students. PeerMark is a feedback tool available in eCentennial. Let’s get started!

To create a PeerMark assignment, you first need to go into your course shell in eCentennial and create a module. I did that already and I named it PeerMark. Once inside the module, you need to click on “Add  existing activities” and scroll down until you reach PeerMark.

Once the window is open, setting up PeerMark is a three-step process.  One, creating the submission folder inside PeerMark, not to be confused with the assignments folder. Two, setting the peer-reviewed dates, and three, adding questions to guide students when giving feedback.

First you need to set up the submission folder inside PeerMark, as I said before, at the title I’m going to call it “essay” and you can give it a maximum grade. I tend not to mark the submission, I mark the feedback. This is a learning exercise for students, but giving it a one it’s a good way of giving students that encouragement to complete the task. Of course you have to start the date when you want the assignment to be submitted, as well as the due date, and then set the release date for students to begin to give feedback. You can also add assignment instructions.

Very importantly, you need to go to enable PeerMark. So once you enable the PeerMark, you need to choose your optional settings. Now this is important – I tend to save those but most of the time you can allow submissions of any type.

If you are not asking students to submit an essay, you can ask them to submit any other type of material assignments. If they’re writing, you may want them to check their spelling and their writing. If you attach a rubric it is because you are marking the task, but because I don’t mark the submission, I don’t add a rubric. If you want Turnitin checking to go in to the assignment, if it’s a written assignment then you can also include those parameters. And this is what I do.

Now, I allow students to view the similarity report because I want them to learn what it looks like, and I exclude any bibliographic materials in this case, but it’s up to you and once you’re finished with that you need to submit. The next step for you is to set up the peer review. So you need to click on that assignment that you just created – the external tool that you just created PeerMark – and once it loads you need to go where it says PeerMark and click on that. You’re going to be setting up the PeerMark.

And of course you can also go ahead and give it the maximum points available. I tend to say that the assignment happens to be worth three points mainly because my rubric says students get three if they did really well with the feedback, two if they need more detail, one if it’s lacking substance, and of course zero if they don’t complete.

Once the assignment is submitted you need to make sure that your students can review – maybe for a week, five days, it depends how much time you have. And then allow the peer feedback to be available to each student. You have additional settings and you should click on those.

And you have to make your choices – there are several choices that you can make, but overall I’d like to give students at least two submissions from other classmates to give peer review, and I don’t necessarily want them to self select their own papers, or to review themselves, and we save and continue. The next step is to add the questions. I already have questions in my library, so I can go ahead and do that from my library. So if you have a library of questions you can go ahead and choose the ones that you want. If not you can add each one at the time of creating the assignment. And that’s about it for creating a PeerMark.

If you want to go back to check student submissions and student’s feedback, then you need to click back again on essay. And the first thing is to go where it says PeerMark reviews. You can also check online grading report and you can see what the students have submitted. This is an example of the assignment inbox and here you will see the students’ assignments. You can see their similarity reports. This is a screenshot of the PeerMark reviews, and as you can see some students have not submitted their assignments.

So they would not be able to give feedback or receive feedback. Under submitted, you will see students have submitted two peer reviews and they have received two essays. In this case you will see that in received you have three, and you would wonder why is there three and that’s because I’d like to give feedback to my students from this section, from this window, so I tell my students that one of the peer reviews happens to be mine. And if you click on this window then you would be able to type your feedback.

I hope you found this video useful. Thank you.