The cheats guide to homework marking part 1 - Thumbnails

 Context

At my school we set weekly homework tasks in one of my subjects and fortnightly in the other at KS3. Homework is weekly at KS4. Teaching just over 400 students a week I needed to come up with some cheats else I would never have time for anything other than homework! I would love to take credit for these cheats, but they’ve evolved from conversations with many other teachers over the years.  

For context I’m in a school where every student has a chrome book and we use google classroom to set homework’s.

Thumbnails

On google classroom you can get an overview of all students work on an assignment with small pictures of each assignment. If you can design tasks that allow you to see from a small picture that they have both completed their homework, and got the right idea you’re on to a winner! 

This can work many ways:

1. Coloured boxes: get them to drag and drop the boxes into the right places. At a glance you can check they have a) moved, and b) got the right colour order. For example, listening to a piece of music I get students to put the boxes into the order that things occur. Or for learning where the notes are on the piano I will get them to fill in a piano diagram with the name of each note on it. 

2. Fill in the chart: if all your questions are in the left of the table, and their answers on the right, you can very quickly check they have done their homework. I open 3 or 4 to check understanding so far. At the start of the lesson we go through the answers together, explaining any issues that I’ve noticed arise. 

3. Highlight a paragraph: this works well for getting students to identify what the difference is between evidence and explanations. Highlight evidence in red, explanation in green. 

4. Sketch note: students read an article/watch a video and have to come up with 5 pictures with 1/2 words for each about what the most important things were. Allow them time to debate at the start of the next lesson and then get a class ‘top 5’ helping them to learn how to take notes and take in new information! Give them a grid to fill in, so you don’t end up with one picture per slide.

5. Research grid: create a one slide template with key things they need to find out - e.g. name of a composer, dates alive, a picture of them, a YouTube clip to one of their pieces etc. Giving them a precise webpage they should use generally helps ensure accuracy in their research - particularly with younger students. 

6. Visual representations: I challenge my year 7 students to find items round the house to represent different musical structures - my favourite one showing where there is an initial idea (A) a new idea(B) and then return of the first idea (A) was a photo of my student with one of her twin sisters on either side. She could remember this structure for the rest of the year with ease because she giggled every time! 


Final thoughts

Most importantly don’t set yourself up for additional work by adding feedback etc. My students know they will get a “1” if they have completed the homework (no matter if it is correct or not - we have to track homework effort) and a 0 if they have not. As a result I can mark a whole class of homework in about a minute, plus pick out any particularly great examples for display boards or as a resource for future years! Verbal feedback is given in lesson allowing for support and questions. 

Do you have any great tips for homework cheats? Please use the comments below to share.

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