Marking with Tally
Tally is a really nice little utility that I only recently discovered. It’s made by Agile Tortoise, the developer of the wonderful Drafts app.
The concept is extremely simple: when you open the app, all you see is a large zero in the centre of the screen. When you tap on the screen, the zero becomes a one; each time you tap again, the number increments by one.
All of the other controls are gesture based. Swiping down decrements the number by one; swiping up reveals controls where you can adjust display settings and reset the counter to zero. Left and right swipes open menus where you can manage multiple tallies and change other settings.
Recently I found a really great use for Tally: counting marks in tests. When I’ve finished marking a set of tests, I go through and count up the total number of marks for each student. Now you might think that, being a maths teacher, I would be pretty good at counting, but it’s surprisingly easy to get distracted and lose count, or get out by ten. Sometimes I need to stop and re-mark something as I’m counting, and again it’s easy to lose count.
With Tally, I just have my phone on the desk by my left hand, and a red pen in my right hand. As I flick through the pages, I just tap on my phone screen. I can double or triple tap for multiple mark questions, and I don’t even need to be looking at the screen while I’m doing it. Using Tally in this way allows to me concentrate on reading the student’s work and my own marking. I can stop and make corrections without worrying about losing count. Even if I don’t need to make any corrections, I find I am much quicker and more accurate at counting the marks in this way, and as an added bonus I feel like I’m a World War II Morse code operator as I tap tap tap away.
With some tests, it’s easier to count the number of marks lost, and Tally supports this too. Using the sidebar on the right of the main screen, you can change the number to which the the counter resets and whether it counts up or down. So for a test out of 75 marks, I set the reset value to 75, and make the counter count down instead of up.
I can imagine many other uses for Tally in the classroom. Keeping track of merits or other student awards would be an obvious one, although Tally wouldn’t scale if like me you teach multiple classes. I would love to see Tally implement multiple collections of tallies, so that I could have one for each class, but I could understand why the developer, Greg Pierce, might be reluctant to complicate what is a beautifully simple app. On the other hand, Drafts, one of my very favourite apps, manages to combine absolute simplicity with the possibility for amazing levels of complexity, so perhaps that’s something that could be achieved with Tally as well.
Tally is a free download on the App Store with a £1.99 in-app purchase to unlock unlimited tallies and dark mode.