Reviewing Reports as a Colleague

Your Role as a Reviewer

When a colleague assigns you a Review Pack, you are helping make sure their comments are clear, accurate and ready for families to read.

Your job is to flag things, not to fix them. Everything you mark goes back to the teacher, who decides what to change. ReportRocket deliberately gives you no editing or rewriting tools, so a comment is never quietly changed out from under the person who wrote it.

Finding Your Packs

Click Packs to Review in the sidebar. Packs waiting on you appear under Assigned to Me. The page shows the current semester by default, so use Show all semesters if you are looking for something older.

Reviewing a Report

Open the pack and work through the students one at a time. For each comment, read it against the things a reviewer is best placed to catch: does it make sense, does it say something specific about this student, does it sound like your school.

Adding an Annotation

Select the text you want to comment on. A small panel opens, and the first choice is what you want to happen to it. A word or short phrase opens on Replace, and a longer selection opens on Comment, but you can switch between them:

• Replace: type the wording you would use instead in Replace with. For a short selection, the box starts with the words you selected, ready to edit.
• Remove: the selected words should come out of the comment.
• Comment: a note about the problem, when you don't have exact wording in mind. The teacher can turn it into a suggested fix.

Add a note for the teacher (optional for Replace and Remove, required for a Comment), then click Add Annotation. A category is chosen for you (Suggestion, or General for a comment), and you can change it from the Category menu to label the annotation more precisely:

Suggesting a Better Word

When you select a word or two with Replace chosen, a Suggest synonyms button appears in the panel. Click it and ReportRocket offers alternatives that fit the sentence and respect your school's list of words to avoid.

For a single word, a Thesaurus button sits beside it. It looks the word up in a built-in thesaurus instead, so plain alternatives appear straight away.

Picking a word from either list fills in Replace with. Adding the annotation is still your call.

Writing Annotations That Get Acted On

The teacher's side turns your annotations into one-click actions, and how you write them decides how well that works. A Replace or Remove annotation tells the teacher exactly what to change, so they can apply it in one click. A Comment only describes the problem, so the teacher has to work out the fix.

• Less useful: a Comment that says "Fix this"
• More useful: a Replace with "the reading strategy she improved in"

• Less useful: a Comment that says "Wrong"
• More useful: a Replace with "their"

Editing an Annotation

Each annotation card carries two small icons. The copy icon puts the highlighted text on your clipboard, handy for quoting the original in a message. The pencil icon reopens the annotation so you can rewrite the note or change its category. Click the pencil, make your changes, then click the green tick to save or the X to cancel.

Semester 1 Side by Side

When you review a Semester 2 comment, the student's Semester 1 comment from the same school year sits under it in a Semester 1 comment panel you can open and close. It lets you spot a Semester 2 comment that repeats what families have already read.

The same panel appears inside Check comment. There, each phrase the two comments share is highlighted and numbered to match its Semester 1 overlap card, and hovering a card lights up the phrase on both sides. An overlap card can also show the matching Semester 1 wording, with a Show it in the Semester 1 comment link that opens the panel at that phrase.

If the student has no Semester 1 comment, the panel does not appear.

Check Comment

Each report has a Check comment button, which runs the same checks the teacher's own workspace runs: spelling, grammar and punctuation, repetition, words your school avoids, overlap with the student's Semester 1 comment, length, and names.

The Names check flags a classmate's name (checked against the other students in the pack) or a misspelling of the student's own name. It always runs, because a wrong name should never reach a family.

The reviewer version works differently to the teacher's in one important way. The comment is read-only, and there are no rewrite tools. Instead, each finding has a tick box. Tick the ones worth raising, then click the button that appears (Add 3 as annotations, and so on) to send them to the teacher, landing exactly where the issue sits in the comment.

Use the filter above the results to turn the other checks on or off. Findings that duplicate an annotation you have already added are dropped automatically, so you will not send the same point twice.

Per-Report Feedback

Under each comment there is an Additional Notes box for that student. Use it for things that are not tied to a specific phrase, such as an overall observation about tone or a point the comment has missed entirely.

Marking Progress

As you finish each report, click Mark as Reviewed. The arrow beside that button marks the report reviewed and opens the next student in one go, which is the fastest way through a pack.

Finishing the Pack

The Pack Summary section holds three things: the Review History timeline showing every round the pack has been through and who did what, the Overall Comments box, and your review actions.

Overall comments are required when you send a pack back. This is where you explain the pattern behind your annotations rather than repeating them.

Then choose an action:

All three actions run a check first. If any reports are not yet marked as reviewed, ReportRocket lists them and offers Mark All as Reviewed so you can confirm you have looked at everything before the pack leaves your hands.

If a Teacher Needs Their Pack Back

A teacher can recall a pack while it is still with you, but only until you open it. Once you have opened it, recall is blocked to protect the feedback you have started, and the teacher will ask you to send it back instead. Use Send Back for Changes as normal and your work goes with it.

If a pack disappears from your list before you opened it, that is a recall. You will get an email letting you know.

Tips for Reviewers

1. Be timely. Your colleague is waiting, often close to a deadline.
2. Be specific. Give the wording you would use, not a description of what is wrong.
3. Flag the good bits too. A Positive annotation stops something strong being edited out.
4. Run Check comment early. It clears the mechanical issues quickly and leaves you free to think about the writing.

Next Steps

• Using One-Click Revisions
• Creating Review Packs
• Review Pack recall