Flubaroo...Let your computer do your grading for you!

I attended a Kansas Business Teachers Conference in Wichita last fall and came home with a new, exciting grading tool called Flubaroo.  My teachers told me, “It’s life-changing”, and “I can now spend more time watching Law and Order”. 

What is Flubaroo?  Flubaroo is a tool found in Google Docs.  It automatically scores selected response questions and can email results to students.  Basically you create a quiz/assignment as a form in Google Docs, create an answer key (by taking the quiz yourself), have the students take the quiz, grade it, and then review the grades.  Flubaroo will even include extra information such as which questions were scored at less then 60% as a class for reteaching, charts, graphs, etc. Here is a quick 3 minute video of how it works:  http://dave.abouav.com/flubaroo-demo/ and detailed step-by-step directions can be found in the user guide of Flubaroo at http://www.flubaroo.com/flubaroo-user-guide. 

Flubaroo is pretty simple, but I wanted to give you a few helpful pointers we found when actually using it.  When you are setting up your quiz, your first couple of questions need to include questions that identify your student: Name (first name, last name-we did separate so we could later sort by last name), class hour or number, and possibly email address if you want Flubaroo to email the student their results.  When Flubaroo grades it puts it into a spreadsheet where you can further sort by different categories.  Once you have the form created you can send the form directly to students email where they can take it through a link, you can post the link on your class website for them to click on, I sent mine by Edmodo, I posted it on my LiveBinder, and I emailed it to them directly.  You could even create a QR code with the link if you were using on the iPad (yes, it works on the iPad!).

Another great hint is when you are creating your quiz you might have to word your questions differently or use a different tool than you first think of.  For example, there is no question choice for true and false.  However, you can use the multiple-choice question and just have 2 responses: true and false!  The drop down menu choice works well for matching.  You need to put the list of words as a dropdown choice, such as for vocabulary.  We found when using this as a choice for vocabulary it works well, but if you have a lot of words break it down into 2-3 drop down choice questions because one list of 15 words that the kids cannot physically cross out own makes the question confusing.  There is a section where you can make an essay question, however, Flubaroo cannot grade essay questions at this time, you will still have to manually go in and read those.  However, it will do short-answer by letting you put in key words to look for when they are answering.

Another great thing about Flubaroo is you can choose to have the results emailed to the student.  They will be instantaneous when they are graded and you can choose whether Flubaroo gives them the correct answers or not.  The student can take the test more than once and everything is time stamped as you can see above so you can track when the last time they took it was.  See a screen shot below.

I shared this video with our staff when I was teaching it to them and it seemed to help with the overall idea.  Please let me know if you have any questions!  We have used this both at our middle school as well as our high school.  It does take a little bit of time initially to set up but once you have it in there, it is well worth the time spent creating it.  Flubaroo grades it all in about 30 seconds! 

~Staci Hanson, TRC Facilitator for Hesston USD

An example of a test we gave in 7^th grade Social Studies:

An example of the results you get when Flubaroo scores your test