Heidi Plocher is a high school English teacher and International Advisor at Michigan Lutheran High School in St. Joseph, Michigan. Michigan Lutheran High School is nationally accredited and has served families in Southwest Michigan and Northern Indiana for over fifty years.
How many students do you have?
I teach ninth and tenth grade. Between both grades I have about 75 students.
What do you teach?
This year I teach an ESL class for students who need targeted English language instruction. I also teach high school English. I am using Structure and Style for Students: Year 1 Level C with both ninth and tenth graders. I split the curriculum. My freshmen usually get through Unit 6, and then my sophomores start with Unit 7. My sophomores spend a lot of time writing essays their second year of high school.
How do you receive and return student papers?
Students submit their papers in Google Classroom, and then I sync their papers in IEW® Gradebook. After I have graded their papers, I print them out and staple their KWO and checklist to it. Each student receives a KWO, printed final draft, and checklist all together.
What do you think of IEW Gradebook?
I love that IEW Gradebook identifies the dress-ups and sentence openers. For me that is the biggest time saver.
Another feature that is equally my favorite is the ability to remove stylistic elements from the checklist. This gives me the ability to modify the checklist for a student using the EZ+1 philosophy. I appreciate this option because I have students who are not ready for different dress-ups or sentence openers. For those students I can simply click the 👁 (eye symbol) and remove a style element from their checklists. I used to do that math by hand, so this feature also saves me a lot of time!
How long did it take you and your students to get started with IEW Gradebook?
My students submit their papers in Google Classroom, so their process didn’t change. For me, it took a few papers to get used to everything—like learning to use Quick Keys or the embedded comments. I made a few mistakes on the first couple of papers, but learning to use IEW Gradebook really wasn’t difficult.
How else does IEW Gradebook save you time?
I give two kinds of grades with my sophomores: a content grade and a style grade. For the content grade, I read their papers and make comments on their content. For the style grade, I simply run the checklist in IEW Gradebook. It’s so fast when the students correctly identify their dress-ups and sentence openers. I'm at the point now where if a student hasn’t marked dress-ups, I just mark them as zeros. Looking for the dress-ups and sentence openers was the part that used to bog me down, but now IEW Gradebook saves me so much time by identifying them for me. It’s wonderful!
What is your advice for teachers new to IEW Gradebook?
Go through the tutorial and try grading the free sample papers. I would recommend grading a couple times to get the feel for it. Really, learning to use IEW Gradebook is easy!
by Hannah Averitt
