What is Mark Mate? How could it help the Drama teacher do the boring stuff that takes ages?
After a short Zoom training session with James Holmes of Mark Mate, I am convinced that this online marking and assessment tracking software is going to be central to my Drama department in the future. Mark Mate is much more than an online mark book.
In 30 focused and clear minutes of individual online training, James takes me through copy and pasting in set lists (30 seconds), setting up an assessment and individual assessment objectives, logging marks and tracking across the year, and most excitingly for me, verbal feedback capture and turning this into an immediate A4 sheet of detailed and useful feedback for each student, which can be printed and also emailed to them straight away. I am already counting the hours that Mark Mate can save. I can easily watch practical work, record my comments, and turn those into feedback sheets too.
The excellent online training session I receive from James is standard for newcomers to Mark Mate, and, as I am from the ‘80s, extremely straightforward and tailored to meet my questions. So, by the end of the Zoom session, I am confident that I can go from creating a class, to marking a piece of work, and downloading or printing a detailed sheet of A4 feedback.
The quality of the verbal capture demonstrated is pretty spectacular compared to voice capture software I have attempted to use in the past. Those moments of going around at the end of a theory class and finding an essay full of detailed handwritten feedback by me left behind by the one student in the class who really needs detailed, written feedback may finally be over.
Mark Mate is also able to sync with school platforms such as SIMS and ISAMS. As the uncertainty over exams this year still hovers, Mark Mate suddenly also looks like the perfect way to easily track progress in a user-friendly format and, simply and effectively, turn that progress into a Excel spreadsheet for your examinations officer if we are looking at teacher assessments again for final grades this year.
I am sold. Mark Mate is definitely worth your time investigating. Simple and easy to set up and use, and, at £89 for a year's subscription, a real steal.