Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Week Six: Rubrics and Rubix

It’s only a coincidence that the Rubix cube and assessment rubrics share a similar name as well as a somewhat similar appearance.

  • Visually, both present a rectangle divided into rows and columns of smaller rectangles.
  • Designed to amuse (and to teach 3D thinking), the Rubix Cube is a brightly colored plastic puzzle developed in the 1970s by Erno Rubik, an Hungarian obsessed with 3D geometry. It became a popular toy craze around the world in the 1980s.
  • Designed to evaluate student work, rubrics help us assess student performance along a continuum from exceptional to unsatisfactory. If rubrics are not exactly a craze among teachers, it’s probably because developing a good rubric for an assignment takes time and careful planning (and it probably takes a little longer to evaluate a student’s work using a rubric than giving a subjective grade based on the teacher’s over-all impression).

I found very good information on rubrics at Virtual Assessment Center and The Advantages of Rubrics and I felt successful in designing a rubric for the Individual PowerPoint Project I assign to students. Since Blackboard/WebCT has a grading form tool in which I can create a rubric and use it to automatically enter my assessment into students’ grade books, I definitely intend to try using these sophisticated grading rubrics in my online course.

Technology Resources

Again in Week 6 of CIS237 I am amazed at the online resources available. After seeing Shelley’s Jing demonstration of embedding an animoto video, I hope to use Jing to create my own instructional videos to demonstrate Microsoft Office tools that students most often find difficult to master. These demonstrations will be invaluable RLOs (reusable learning objects).

I especially liked Devon Adams listing of “Required technologies” and “Suggested Technologies” in the first week prompts that were shared with us via Google Docs. I plan to use this model to add to my own first week prompts. High on the list of “Suggested Technologies” I will share with students the resources for online storage that Shelley shared with us this week.

2 comments:

Shelley Rodrigo said...

great image of the generic format of a rubric and what it means. THANKS!

Unknown said...

set up a free online storage space (1GB is free, and 15GB is for a nominal fee). In all likelihood, your .pst email backup file is less than 1GB. Simply upload this file to your Box.net account. www.acnc.com