Introducing - Poodll Paper

One of the biggest challenges for teachers is managing a massive workload. Grading student assignments or worksheets is a big part of this. I know first hand. AI promises to help, but while AI tools are fantastic for helping with digital assignments, they don’t do much good if your students are still using paper and pencils. And that is the reality for a huge number of classrooms.

To help bridge this gap, we’ve put together a new Moodle activity called Poodll Paper (mod_paper).

It’s designed specifically for teachers who want to use AI to speed up their manual grading, but whose students are not using computers or logging into Moodle to do their work.

What is Poodll Paper?

It’s a Moodle activity that lets you distribute paper assignments, scan them once they’re completed, and have them automatically evaluated by AI. The results can then be printed out and handed right back to the students.

Here’s a look at some of the main features:

• Custom Template Designer: You upload a blank worksheet (PDF or JPG) and draw boxes with your mouse over the areas where students will write their answers. You can set the grading criteria and maximum score for each box.
• AI-Powered OCR: Once you scan and upload the completed worksheets (either as one big multipage PDF or multiple files), the system uses OCR to extract the handwritten text.
• Automated Grammar Correction: The plugin connects to an LLM (via an OpenAI API key) to evaluate the extracted text, offering automated feedback and grammar corrections.
• Manual Grading Sidebar: AI isn’t perfect, so you get an interactive sidebar where you can easily review the student’s original handwriting next to the AI’s transcription, adjust the grades, and add your own specific feedback.
• “Display Only” Snippets: If your worksheet has multiple-choice questions or drawings that don’t need OCR, you can mark those areas just to be retained visually.
• PDF Evaluation Reports: The module generates clean PDF reports that overlay digital feedback onto the students’ original work, ready to be printed and handed back.
• Gradebook Integration: If you want, it can automatically sync the final scores right back into your Moodle gradebook.

How it works in practice

The workflow is designed to fit into a normal teaching routine:

1. Setup: Upload your blank worksheet into the Moodle activity and map out the response areas.
2. Scan: After class, gather up the finished worksheets and run them through your scanner.
3. Process: Upload the scanned PDFs back into the activity. The system assumes one page per student. Moodle’s cron will take over, processing the OCR and evaluation in the background (it usually takes a minute or two).
4. Evaluate: Use the Evaluation Report to review the AI’s work, tweak any grades, and finalize the feedback.
5. Report: Print the combined PDF report and hand it back to your students.

Getting started

If you want to try it out, you’ll need an OpenAI API key (to use the OCR service), and Ghostscript installed on your server (for PDF-to-image conversion). Ghostscript is possibly already installed, especially if you use PDF annotation in Moodle assignment feedback.

Installation

1. Get the plugin zip file from the plugin’s github page. https://github.com/justinhunt/moodle-mod_paper

2. Visit your Moodle site’s : Site administration -> Plugins -> Install Plugins page

3. Drag the zip file into the plugin’s upload area and follow the installation steps.

Help us

Poodll Paper is still beta and there is a lot of work to do. Any feedback you can give will help. In particular seeing the worksheets that you want to use with it is helpful. Send them to us via our helpdesk

Further Notes

• Currently, the worksheets must be A4 size and in portrait orientation.

• We’ve included some sample files (testworksheet.pdf and testworksheet_submissions.pdf) in the plugin’s samples folder so you can take it for a spin without having to create your own assignment first.

We hope this helps make your grading pile a little more manageable!