iPad Marking

Ben Maughan

2013-06-10 Mon

1 Summary
My overall experience of assessment and feedback using an ipad and stylus
has been extremely positive. I have found it to be advantageous over marking
with pen on a paper copy, or with typed notes on a pdf.
The key advantages I found were:

ˆ ability to make high-quality annotations including hand writing, equa-

tions, sketches, highlighting, arrows etc
ˆ keeping electronic records of my feedback for students

ˆ the ability to email detailed feedback to students before our meetings

ˆ the ability to search in documents and bookmark key pages

2 Overview
I used the iPad over a period of 6 weeks, for marking undergraduate and
postgraduate assignments. I read and marked the reports on the iPad, using
a stylus to make annotations, in my oce, at home, and on the train.
In total I marked
ˆ 5 MSci lab reports (6 pages each)

ˆ 2 BSc and 1 MSci project report (20 pages each)

ˆ 2 MSc theses (100 pages each)

ˆ 3 PhD progress reports (5 pages each)

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 I found the software easy to use and quick to learn, and the hardware
excellent. The iPad screen size and resolution is sucient to comfortably
view a full page of A4, with the ability to easily zoom to examine details
of e.g. gures. With a little practice, writing with a stylus was easy, and I
was able to write equally clearly as with a pen on paper. I tried a high-end
"bamboo" stylus, and a set of very cheap styluses, and found them all to be
easy to use.
To make the annotations, I used the application notability which I
found to be very powerful and easy to use, and well integrated with google
drive, so I would recommend it.

3 Work Flow
The work ow I used in order to move work submitted through "Turn it In"
onto the iPad for marking, and then return to the student is given below. I
am using a linux desktop PC, but the steps described below are the same
for any operating system.

1. Download work from blackboard to local computer

ˆ at this stage, convert to pdf if not in pdf format

2. Upload work to google drive using the web interface (for Mac and PC
users, a desktop client is available for upload).
ˆ N.B. it is possible to upload a whole directory at once

3. Import to the notability app on the ipad

ˆ this must be done one le at a time

4. Annotate the pdf in notability and export as pdf to google drive

ˆ or use the autosync feature in notability to do the upload au-
tomatically
5. Download from google drive to local machine or send private link to
marked-up pdf to student.
ˆ for users of the desktop google drive client, the annotated pdf
should download automatically.

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4 iPad Tweaks
I disabled multi-touch gestures in the general ipad settings to prevent them
detecting my palm touching the palm rest as a gesture.

5 Notability Tips
ˆ notability allows customisable "subjects" to be dened, and then for
notes to be added to a subject. These are analogous to directories or
folders on a computer.
ˆ I use the autosync feature to backup all my annotations to a directory
on google drive. Each subject in notability then creates a direc-
tory of the same name within the specied backup directory on google
drive. Annotated pdfs are then saved automatically to google drive
every time the user exits a document, providing there is an internet
connection. The backups can be saved in various formats, including
pdf, or notability's own format.
ˆ Tapping on the pen icon after you have selected it brings up a menu
to change pen size and colour - I found the default pen size too large.
ˆ The magnifying glass icon creates a zoomed in box at the bottom of
the screen, which is much easier to use for handwriting.

6 Diculties Encountered
ˆ I had one large document (an MSc thesis that was exported as a pdf
from a Word document) that could not be exported by notability
once I had annotated it. The original document also caused Preview
on the Mac to crash so I don't think this is a problem with notability
itself.
ˆ The exported annotated pdf has slight quality reduction for images.
This should be taken into account if the presentation of the images is
judged subsequently

7 Advantages
The overall experience was very positive, and I identied the following ad-
vantages compared with traditional pen and paper marking

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 ˆ The ability to make high-quality annotations including hand writing,
equations, sketches, highlighting, arrows etc. I found that easily be-
ing able to switch colours and switch between pen and highlighter
and typed text helped me to make more legible and presentable an-
notations. The use of the eraser and undo functions in notability
enabled me to make clear notes with no crossing out or errors.
ˆ Keeping electronic records of my feedback for students. With the notes
automatically backed up to google drive as well as easily exported back
to my desktop through google drive or by email, I found it easy to keep
well-organised electronic records of my feedback for students.
ˆ The ability to search in documents - this was useful to e.g. check
when an acronym was rst dened, or look for other keywords in the
document.
ˆ New pages can be added to the end of the document to allow for lengthy
notes
ˆ Signicant reduction in the amount of paper being carried around

Student feedback has been very positive, with one student commenting
specically that they found it very useful to be emailed the annotated copy
of their work prior to our feedback meeting so that they could be prepared
for a more detailed discussion of the feedback in the meeting. Sever students
said they would nd it much easy to locate this feedback for later reference
compared with a paper version.