Creating Your Own Shortcuts For Efficient Grading

More and more teachers are making the switch from requiring students to turn in physical copies of papers to the electronic copy route. I won’t get into which way is the right way to go because lets be honest, there are advantages and disadvantages for both systems. However, with Google creating Google Classroom, lots of teachers have made the switch.

So let’s say that you are a teacher that has about 50 electronic papers waiting for your attention in your Google Drive account. You want a way so that you can still provide meaningful feedback but you don’t want to spend hours doing it.

Here is your solution, create your very own shortcuts! Basically, if you have phrases that you write out a lot – why not create a short cut so that you don’t have to write out all of the words that you want to say. It is very easy to do:

1. Go to preferences under the Tools menu

2. You will notice that Google already has shortcuts created for you. (If you don’t want them, you can delete them.) You are able to create your own shortcuts to make Google more helpful for you. You will notice two empty boxes: ‘Replace’ and ‘With’. Type a short cut in the ‘Replace’ box and write the phrase or sentence that you want to pop up in the ‘With’ box.

For Example:

• Every time you write wc – you can have Google automatically replace it with Word Choice – think about what you are saying here 
• Every time you write ro – you can have Google automatically replace it with Run on Sentence
• Every time you write cit1 – you can have Google automatically replace it with ‘link to a YouTube video demonstrating how to cite a source properly’