Chalkup
www.chalkup.co

Nearly everyone loves Google Apps for Education (GAFE), and Google Drive seems to be only increasing in popularity among teachers and students. If you are among GAFE faithful and looking for a better way to manage your class workflow online, then you need to check out Chalkup. With great tools for helping students keep up with due dates, excellent collaboration features, outstanding grading tools, and seamless integration with Google Apps, Chalkup is a powerful tool for your virtual classroom. It’s easy to use, yet robust enough to use with Blended Learning and Flipped Classrooms — and it’s free.

Designed with Students In Mind

Estimated Workload

Keeping up with assignments and due dates is a seemingly never-ending struggle for students. The estimated workload feature is designed to help students stay on top of tasks and manage time better. Each student is provided with a task list of their assignments, but Chalkup takes this one step further by estimating how long each task will take and providing students with an estimate of how long it will take to complete their entire to-do list.

Discussions and Collaboration

Although you might want to describe Chalkup as a Learning Management System (LMS), you’ll have a hard time finding that term on the the Chalkup site. They prefer the term “class collaboration platform.” Chalkup makes it easy for students to share notes, create flashcards, and collaborate online. Discussions are intended to keep conversations and learning going on outside of class. The simple navigation, and familiar interface make it easy for students to use discussions to collaborate and ask each other for help. This is a must-have feature when trying to create an online community within your virtual classroom.

Teachers Love Chalkup

Paperless Classroom

If you’re looking to go paperless, Chalkup can help. Organizing and sharing class materials and resources is easy with drag and drop folders and seamless integration with Google Drive. Students can use Chalkup to turn in assignments. Not only can you grade assignments, but you can also comment and use built-in rubrics.

Grading and Rubrics

No more downloading and opening attachments; grading is
much easier and faster using Chalkup’s
file preview. In addition to assigning a grade, teachers can add comments, highlight, and draw on student work.

Perhaps my favorite teacher-feature of Chalkup is the ability to create and use rubrics. Teachers can create rubrics for each assignment. These clickable rubrics speed up grading and provide detailed feedback. The rubric will automatically total the points for the assignment based on what you have clicked.

Google Apps for Education Integration

Chalkup works seamlessly with Google Apps for Education and simplifies the sharing of resources from Google Drive. While a ton of scripts and settings are available for managing student documents in Google Drive, I find most of them time consuming for me, and many of them confusing. Chalkup takes care of the behind-the scenes work, allowing students to download, collaborate, and turn in assignments without leaving Chalkup. Files from Google Drive can even be annotated by the teacher (details below).

Chalkup App

Chalkup’s mobile app is well designed with many of the same features found on the website. Teachers can create assignments, grade assignments, use rubrics, and annotate assignments within the app.

Students can use the app to keep up on assignments with the to-do list and even submit assignments from their mobile devices. Messaging features and push notifications make for a pretty robust app. It’s currently only available for iOS, but an Android version is in the works.