There are several posts (linked below) providing information on how to manage your assessments through technology. This post deals specifically with receiving a document from your students e.g. a lab report or an essay and providing feedback on that asssignment.

The YouTube video below shows you how to set up an assignment to receive documents from your students. It will take a bit of time to set up (roughly 5 minutes) but it will save you an incredible amount of administration time connected to the assignment and from a quality assurance point of view will provide a potentially better experience for both the student and teacher.

The challenge that you will face is being able to read the documents that they have submitted. Every student may not have MS office and even if they do, it might not be the same version as yours. This will result in potentially a lot of extra contact with your students asking for appropriate versions of their documents. one way around this is to ask them to submit PDF versions of their submission. There are numerous versions of “PDF creators” allowing anybody to convert a file into PDF format for free. The one I use is CutePDF.

From a lecturers point of view it is now possible to annotate  a pdf enabling you to provide individual feedback for your students by using adobe reader

Related articles

• What is Moodle? (enhancingteaching.com)
• How to download Adobe reader (youtube.com)
• student generated content as an assessment (enhancingteaching.com)
• Feedback through technology (enhancingteaching.com)
• how can a student upload their assignment through moodle (youtube.com)
• How do I find the files that students have submitted (youtube.com)