Doctopus gives teachers the ability to mass-copy (from a starter template), share, monitor student progress, and manage grading and feedback for student projects in Google Drive™.

Its tentacles copy and "hand out" Drive files to a roster of students, giving teachers full control over starter template, sharing configuration, folder organization and file naming, as well as visibility over all work in progress -- including the ability to bulk revoke and revert student editing rights around submission deadlines, as well the ability to fetch word, revision, and comment counts on all student files.

Created by veteran science teacher and school administrator Andrew Stillman, Doctopus is built with teacher workflow in mind -- taming complexity and unlocking the power of Google Apps for differentiation and collaborative projects.  

Doctopus increases student collaboration and enables a powerful shift in teacher workflow --  scaling teachers' ability to manage and assess writing tasks and projects that motivate rich, authentic student production and collaboration (e.g. the development of core career, college, and 21st-century skills).

The Goobric Chrome extension works alongside Doctopus to enable rubric-based grading of Google Docs™ right in a browser popup window using the rubric of your design.  Once a rubric score is submitted, Goobric auto-records scores in your spreadsheet and automatically provides students instant rubric scores and comments via email.  Heck, if it's a Google Document™, Goobric even pastes the filled out rubric into the bottom of the Doc.


CORE FEATURES OF DOCTOPUS

- Creates a standardized folder structure for your classes --OR-- imports your existing folder structure from gClassfolders or Hapara Teacher Dashboard.

- Manage a single assignment for your class from one spreadsheet.

- Use your class roster to create and manage pre-shared student copies of a master Doc of any type (document, presentation, spreadsheet, PDF, etc.), or a folder of Documents in four handy sharing configurations:

  -- individual - all the same: Creates the same separate, individual Doc for each student in your class.

  -- individual - differentiated: Creates one copy of a Doc for each student based on their level.

  -- project groups: Creates one shared copy of a Doc for each student project group.

  -- Whole class: Creates a SINGLE shared copy of a Doc for your whole class.

- Automatically grant view-only or comment-only privileges to the rest of the class to facilitate peer review protocols.

- Pre-organize assignments into a folder of your choosing for easy grading, and also deliver assignments to student-level folders.

- Copy and distribute whole folders full of Documents to students (with subfolders and files up to one level down)

- Standardize file naming and organize links in your spreadsheet to improve your workflow when grading.

- Omit individual students from an assignment by flagging them: "Exclude".

- Monitor the time of last edit to help you intervene when students are off track.

- Gain insight into teacher feedback and peer-collaboration.  Fetch numeric statistics on the number of revisions by student, comments by teacher, student, and peers, as well as number of peer files and comments on peers by each student.

- Easily remove and restore student editing rights during grading and revision cycles. Great for timed essays!

- Send optional notification emails upon sharing Docs with students.

- Easily send grades and feedback via email.

- Install the Goobric chrome extension and attach a rubrics to the Doctopus assignment spreadsheet to enable a rubric-based grading widget right in the browser.

- The Goobric extension automatically passes rubric scores back to Doctopus and (optionally) emails completed rubric to student editor(s).

- Now offers Google Classroom™ users the ability to import assignments and grade them with the Goobric extension.


A NOTE ABOUT STUDENT DATA PRIVACY

Have questions about how Doctopus handles student data? Please see the Doc linked below:
https://docs.google.com/a/newvisions.org/document/d/11J_mLOEPG5Zf-ZLyw-GylIRjPnHkhYQAqguE0fGxSsc/edit