Abstract:

Mobile devices can help the teacher to assess the activity of the students in both theoretical and lab sessions. During the last years, we have been working on the development of a set of Android applications for that aim.

First of all, to assess the work of students in labs/seminars, in ICERI 2015 we presented Assessment Notebook Creator, an Android application which creates electronic notebooks (for Evernote®) which can then be used to register evidences of the work done by students in those sessions. A digital notebook is flexible enough to collect different types of evidences (text, pictures, audio or video) as required in labs/seminars.

Then, in ICERI 2016, we presented Evalcoa, another Android application which allows the teacher to easily and quickly register the participation of the students in the classroom. The application shows the pictures and names of the students, and just by clicking on “plus” or “minus” icons next to each picture, the teacher can register positive or negative points for that student.

We have now integrated both tools and added new functionalities. Thus, a single tool, the new version of Evalcoa, can help the teacher to (1) register student participation in theoretical sessions, (2) allocate students to different lab groups, and (3) create digital notebooks in Evernote to assess the activity of those lab groups. Those digital notebooks have as many pages (or notes) as lab groups have been defined, and the notes are entitled with the names of the groups and their components. Moreover, the notes can be created completely empty or having some initial content according to a template predefined by the teacher (for instance, the notes can be designed in order to include several sections devoted to assess different topics along the subject). Besides, we have also added a new functionality to the application, based on flashcards, which allows the teacher to easily learn the names of the students (as we have realized that knowing the name/surname allows the teacher to locate the student picture in the application much faster, when adding positive or negative points to him or her).

Finally, we have also created a version of Assessment Notebook Creator for PC. This version, besides allowing for the creation of digital notebooks in Evernote, it offers to the teacher the possibility of creating templates for the notes of those notebooks in an easy and intuitive way by means of a template editor.

In this paper, we describe the set of applications developed and how they can be used together (and with other external applications like Evernote) in a complete ecosystem for assessing the activity of the students in face-to-face sessions.

The applications are currently available at https://devpost.com/gcotablet

Keywords:

Continuous assessment, Android application, PC application, theoretical sessions, lab sessions, participation, note-taking, Evernote.