Whole forum grading

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I recommend enabling whole form grading if you're going to give your students number grades for participating in discussion forums. 

In this video, I'll show you how to enable it and how to grade students participation. 

Notice I have a forum here. When I click to open it, you can see I have a button to grade users. I enabled that button when I created the form in the settings, I scroll down to whole form grading and enabled point. Notice that you can set the maximum points. You can also categorize this if you want. For this demonstration, assigning students a grade of 100 is good enough. I'll scroll down and save a display. 

Notice I've had 3 students participating in this discussion. When I click the gray grade users button, students are displayed in alphabetical order. Notice Dewey Cheetum has posted twice in this discussion, and I see both on the left side of the screen. Notice I have a box to enter Dewey's grade, and also I can send a notification to him that the grade has been assigned. When I click save, that grade is entered into the grade book. 

To see the next participant, I use the arrows. Notice I see all Warren's participation in this forum on the left hand side as well. I enter Warren's grade, save it, and click to move on. 

Notice on the left side we can see the discussions that were started by Frank. And the ones in which he responded to others. 

The one drawback of using whole form grading is there's not an easy way to add comments here on this interface. If you're interested in doing that, reach out to me, I'll be happy to show you, but the steps are kind of complicated. Once you navigate into the grade book, you do have the option of editing the grades and adding feedback to the students here.