A Rubric for Adding Posts to Student Blogs

A View From The Mokai Range
A View From The Mokai Range

Hi Everyone (though with my slack posting of late, I doubt that I will have much everybody left 😉

I am quite tired, so this isn’t going to be one of my traditional sprawling tales.  We had our annual Pukeokahu School Horse Trek over the weekend, and I spent the weekend serving up 6am breakfasts, peeling various vegetables, feeding hungry trekkers and sleeping poorly in a smelly shearers bed (it was actually a wonderful weekend and I had a fantastic time, especially driving around the Mokai Range and maybe the party on Saturday Night 8-).

Anyway, so I just wanted to share the rubric my students and I created during the first three weeks of school this year.   My goal was for my students to create an easy to use tools which would allow them to self assess their posts on their ePortfolios in a way that they would be able to make improvements with less and less input from me.

We began by brainstorming (in small groups, then compiled as a class) what makes a fantastic blog post, after which we put the brainstormed points in to five headings, Interesting, Tools, Attributions, Punctuation and Spelling, Categories.  That night, I made up the blank rubric and entered the points into the Expert column.  The next day I modelled filling in one square per column, I then gave my three pairs of students two heading each to fill in.  Finally, we all came together and shared and debated the final wording, while I typed it in on my laptop.  This is our finished product:

Post Rubric

I must say that, this rubric was created by kids which had a good six months of blogging behind them through the Student Blogging Challenge.  So far the kids have used it for two posts, and they are not using it independently yet.  I need to constantly remind them to check back to the Rubric, and I am always saying that they need to strive for at least an Advanced level.  However, apart from my nagging, kids do actually enjoy using it.  They find it easy to use and relavant to their ‘Real World Wide Audience’s’ needs and are beginning to remind each other to use it.

So that’s it really, I just wanted to share this with you as you might find it useful.  But if you do decide to use a rubric to help your kids blogging, you must remember that the only way the kids will take ownership of the rubric and find it enjoyable is if you help the kids create the rubric themselves.

Attributes:

Photo by Tristin at Pukeokahu Schools Flickr Album:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pukeokahuschool/5506905651/in/set-72157626093421921/

Teaser Three – Watching the Progress Bar turn Blue

Lately I have been using Camtasia to create Screen Casts for my eWindows site.  Now usually I am a strictly freeware kind of girl (well that’s a little bit of a fib because I have paid for Edublogs, Voicethread, Flickr and my domain names, anyway …)  but I am really impressed with Camtasia.  So much so that I may even fork-out for it after my free one month trial (this is awesome, try before you buy!).

Camtasia is easy to use, has great support and tutorials.  It runs seamlessly with my Mac and uploads directly to YouTube.  At one easy payment of $99.00 (Education Pricing) I do believe it may be a keeper, though it may have to wait until after I recover from my little trip to Christchurch (only 9 more sleeps!).  O, and after we wallpaper the living room.  Below is my weekly-ish offering to the Blog-o-sphere.  My third ever Screen Cast on how to add a Wordle.net Word-cloud to a post.  So readers, I would really like some feedback here, how did I do?  It’s a lot harder than it looks.

Beijing ’08 is Great

This is the first year of my teaching career where I have been the Teacher, not the Student for the Olympic Games and its been fantastic. It is a wonderful platform for inquiry learning and my students are fully engaged in their investigations. I am also very impressed with the Chinese Olympic Mascots. The Fuwa relate perfectly with both the games and the Chinese Culture, not to mention incredibly cute.

The Fuwa

All About The Fuwa

Our class inquiry this term is centred around three questions based on information I would like them to discover. Along with this the students are required to complete five independent learning activities based on five different sub-topics based on the Olympics.

Here is a copy of the stations and activities (all based on different HOT tools):

Inquiry Rotation

As a side note we have decided to un-pack the curriculum value of Excellence, which is well matched with the games.

Curriculum Values Display

Anyway thats all for now, much TV to watch now

😉 Marama