Saturday, November 27, 2010
Friday, November 19, 2010
Assessment Rubrics
Rubrics are great tools for teachers and students. They help teachers to “define the quality of completed assignments” and students to “critique and revise their own assignments before handing them in” (Shelly, Gunter, & Gunter, 2010, p. 396).
Stevens and Levi (2005) define a rubric as a ”Scoring tool that lays out the specific expectations for an assignment” (p. 3). To accomplish this task, rubrics “divide an assignment into its component parts and provide a detailed description” of acceptable or unacceptable performance levels for them (Stevens & Levi, 2005, p. 3).
Writing good rubrics require diligent study and practice. As an activity, I was assigned to design a rubric for a previously developed project. In a precious assignment, I had designed an extra credit “digital storytelling” project for a unit in my college freshmen preparatory algebra course. In this assignment, I was assigned to design a rubric to assess that project.
Although I had designed few rubrics—primarily for math and visual arts—before, I found designing this rubric somewhat challenging. In this assignment, I had to examine my own sample project—which I have provided for the students as a reference—as I was designing the rubric.
To design this rubric, I considered a maximum points (21) and the designated criteria. After careful considerations, I finalized on three major categories: “Content,” “Duration and Quality,” and “Format and Timely Submission.”
To view my sample rubric, please click here.
References
Shelly, G. B., Gunter, G. A., Gunter, R. E. (2010). Integrating technology and digital media in the classroom. (6th ed.). Boston: Course Technology.
Stevens, D. D. & Levi, A. (2005). Introduction to rubric. Sterling, Virginia: Stylus Publishing.
Friday, November 12, 2010
Curriculum Page: A Digital Storytelling Example
A curriculum page (CP) is a “Teacher-created document containing hyperlinks to teacher-selected Web sites that assist in teaching content-specific curriculum objectives” (Shelly, Gunter, & Gunter, 2010, p. 418). Given my recent exposures to the CP, especially during the development processes, I have come to the conclusion that such a tool is not only necessary for online courses, but also highly beneficial for face-to-face (f2f) classroom format. In addition, I have determined that digital storytelling should be an integral part of a successful CP design.
As an activity, I was assigned to design and develop a digital storytelling project as an example of the type I plan my students to produce. I designed this project for a college freshmen preparatory algebra course. Moreover, this project relates to “Translating Words into Expression”—a concept included in the designated unit for my CP and ultimately my final project.
Given my prior positive experience with Prezi, I selected the same tool to develop this project. In developing this project—compared with a previous one, similar in terms of concept and selected technology—, I was more mindful of its contents. Moreover, given that my students will use this digital storytelling project as an example for developing their own, I devoted more time on planning the overall design. In addition, I was conscious of its format by comparing both the design and its implementation with the rubric which I will be using to grade my students’ projects.
The topic for the project—in the selected unit of algebra—will be to, “Describe a real life situation, and translate it to an algebraic expression.” Further detail information, instructions, online resources, and the assessment rubric will be provided in the corresponding project page available via a link in the unit’s CP. Here is an example of the project, explain above. This project will also be included in my curriculum page later.
Reference
Shelly, G. B., Gunter, G. A., Gunter, R. E. (2010). Integrating technology and digital media in the classroom. (6th ed.). Boston: Course Technology.
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