Category: Classroom management

Rubrics are a well-accepted, even transformative tool for assessing student knowledge over a breadth of criteria. Their deep granular detail enables students to quickly understand what is expected of them, teachers to receive critical feedback on student learning, and both sides to benefit from an agile yet objective tool for measuring workflow competency.

But they are not without their problems. The pre-online versions weren’t dynamic or flexible, couldn’t be re-used, and few teachers had the time or energy to build these summative, purpose-built assessments. That changed with online rubrics. These webtools offer standard topical text that can be quickly personalized, saved for re-use in the future, and easily updated year-to-year to reflect changes in the curriculum and desired learning outcomes.

There are many online rubric creators, each with a little different twist on the norm. Here are three that fill different needs. Decide which works the best for you:

Rubistar

Free

Rubistar is the gold standard of online rubric creators. It lets teachers personalize categories and qualifications, save, and then edit for another class. You can use the site rubric templates or modify them to better serve your particular needs. Rubrics can be created in English or Spanish, in ten different subject areas, with ten or more skill categories (this varies depending upon the subject chosen).

Here’s how it works:

• Set up an account so you can save your rubrics, making them available to be re-used and edited for future needs. This is optional–rubrics can be created without registering.
• Pick the subject category you wish to create a rubric for.
• Start with a generic template or from scratch. Alternatively, search by keyword or topic for rubrics other Rubistar members have created and remix those.
• Pick a grading scale–either numeric or descriptive.
• Pick a category for each row from the drop-down list and the rubric automatically populates with language defining what the category would look like based on the rating.
• Edit criteria so it perfectly fits your needs or accept the well-considered defaults.
• When you’re done, submit.
• Once the rubric is rendered, you can print, download, or make it available online to your account.

Educational applications

Rubistar is invaluable in creating personalized, quick rubrics that are easily edited for varied needs. For registered users, there’s a vast library of rubrics created by members that can be used. Teachers can also use the rubric to evaluate student performance. For example, if a third of students scored poorly on ‘Diagrams’ in the math rubric, the teacher knows immediately this is an area that requires review.

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Because I teach graduate classes for educators, I talk to lots of teachers all over the country. It’s become clear to me that for most of them, adding technology to their lessons means layering more work on top of their already overburdened lesson plans. Despite the claims of tech gurus that technology makes the job of teaching easier, few educators see it that way. Even the ones who love it put in lots of extra time to do one or more of the following:

• learn tech tools and then teach their students
• learn tech tools only to discover it’s not what they need
• learn a tech tool they love only to have it either disappear or switch to a fee-based program
• rework existing lesson plans in the school’s mandated digital program that too often, changes every year. This means they have to re-enter the lesson plan in a new format for a new LMS
• find a tool they love, but no one else in their teaching team agrees, understands it, or cares
• the tool won’t work on the Big Day of the lesson and nothing will bring it back to life
• the digital devices–computer or Chromebooks or iPads–won’t work on the Big Day

But the biggest reason is this: Students don’t know the technology, so their projects become rudimentary displays of their knowledge rather than anything resembling the higher order thinking we teachers aspire to. I’d put it at S- in the SAMR Model (if you don’t know what that is, click to get a brief primer).

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Earth Day is April 22nd. Someone in your school, maybe the parent group, will raise the question of WHY NOT a paperless classroom? Everyone will nod their heads, agree this is a revolutionary idea, and move on when Earth Day passes.

Really, though: There are benefits to adopting web-based alternatives to paper:

• it’s easy to collaborate when everything’s online
• nothing gets soda dripped on it or eaten by the dog
• students can easily collaborate without requiring parent time and gas fumes
• teachers can answer questions in a timely manner
• teachers can provide feedback on projects that students respond to and resubmit
• student work is easy to copy, backup, and share as needed

To kickstart your paperless digital classroom requires a modicum of preparation. Take a few weekends this summer to set up a class blog and class website and get comfortable with the digital side of your school. This may include:

• Google Apps for Education and/or Google Classroom–this serves as a basic digital portfolio for students, a collaborative tool with classmates, the teacher’s inbox and her tool for returning graded and analyzed student work.
• an LMS like Edmodo, Otus, or MyBigCampus–these often include an interactive gradebook, parent inclusion devices, a student discussion forum, polls, a way to collect and share resources, a class calendar, and access across a variety of digital devices.
• digital portfolios for students–this can be accomplished with whatever LMS you use, Google Apps, Google Classroom, or even Dropbox

Three pieces that you especially want to look for:

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If you don’t have children, you may not have noticed the massive changes going on in the local schoolhouse. Those geeky tech tools that we adults like to avoid are taking over the classroom. Every year, students face new iPads, apps, online grading systems, webtools, digital devices, LMSs, cloud-based homework, digital portfolios, and more. As a teacher for twenty five years (the last fifteen in technology), it has my head spinning.

But–this may surprise you–students don’t mind a wit. They’re ready for tech, wondering what’s taking us so long to adopt the tools they can’t get enough of at home. Technology is in their DNA where we adults–it’s like bringing out the fine china for a special guest.

This year, make tech your everyday china. Use it often, dynamically, bravely, and with a smile. Here are the top 22 digital tools your colleagues are using in their classrooms:

• annotation tool
• avatars
• backchannel devices
• blogs
• class calendar
• class Internet start page
• class Twitter account
• class website
• digital devices
• digital note-taking
• digital portfolios
• dropbox
• email
• flipped classroom
• Google Apps
• journaling
• maps
• online quizzes
• screenshots and screencasts
• video channel
• virtual meetings
• vocabulary decoding tools

Each brief description includes the appropriate grade level, whether the tool is critical/important/optional, a ranking from 1-5 scale for how intuitive it is, and popular examples.

Digital Devices

K-8, Critical, 3/5

Digital devices include PCs, Macs, Chromebooks, laptops, iPads, and Surface Tablets. They might be packed into a cart that’s rolled from class-to-class, collected in a lab, or offered as a 1:1 program that puts a device in every child’s hand. But one thing all programs have in common: They’re popular with students because they’re how kids want to learn. Because they blend rigor with passion, they should be part of every educator’s toolkit.

Annotation Tool

K-8, important, 4

A digital annotation tool allows students to take notes in class PDFs. If you use books or resources in this digital, portable format, you likely also have this tool. With it, students can take notes in their books, fill in online rubrics and quizzes,  and automatically link to additional resources without having to retype URLs.

Popular digital annotation tools include Acrobat and iAnnotate. Since student needs are not extreme, pretty much any tool your school makes available will accomplish student goals.

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Whiteboards have long been a de rigeur staple in classrooms, occupying pride-of-place at the front of the room. Despite the popularity of hi-tech Smartscreens, the simple whiteboard remains the favored method of sharing information during class time.

But one change has revolutionized their use: They can now be projected from your iPad. Before introducing three amazing must-have whiteboard apps, let me note that there are dozens of options, all with varied traits and prices. I selected these three because they are intuitive, multi-functional, and work as a classroom tool rather than just another new widget teachers must learn.

AirSketch

Free to try

AirSketch is a basic, uncomplicated whiteboard that lets you do anything you’d normally do on a whiteboard. It’s similar to web-based options like AWW or Scriblink with two dramatic differences: It works through a iPad and can be mirrored to a computer (and from there, the class screen). This untethers teachers from their desk.  All that’s needed is an iPad, AirSketch, a class computer, and a class screen.

Here’s how to do it:

• Open AirSketch on an iPad. In the lower right corner, it provides the page’s IP address.
• Type that IP address into the computer browser and the iPad screen appears.
• Project this to the class screen while using the iPad as a whiteboard

Pros

AirSketch is simple to set up and intuitive to use. It’s exactly like using the whiteboard–though instead of markers, you use a finger. Students no longer have to traipse up to the (intimidating) front of the room to answer questions. Instead, they borrow your iPad and draw their response.

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I recently chatted with a tech coordinator on the East coast who asked about software alternatives to the webtools we were discussing. That surprised me. Usually, teachers want free, easily-accessible-from-anywhere webtools in place of expensive, installed software. When I asked why she had some excellent reasons:

No ads

Almost all free online tools and apps include advertising. I understand — someone has to pay the bill — but kids don’t understand how to ignore that glitz. All they see is a  new toy. And besides the annoying ads, the developers constantly promote the paid version of the free apps. Again, kids don’t understand marketing.

You get the entire program

When you purchase software, you get the entire program. With online tools, you might get one or two levels of a few of the included games with the expectation that you will purchase more levels and more games. My most recent disappointment is Starfall. The mobile version of this wonderful online reading website is a very limited version of the original. To get the entire program requires multiple apps and significant in-app purchases.

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Dear Otto is an occasional column where I answer questions I get from readers about teaching tech. If you have a question, please contact me at askatechteacher at gmail dot com and I’ll answer it here. For your privacy, I use only first names.

Here’s a great question I got from Christy:

HI!

I love your site – holy buckets of information! I was looking for examples of great classroom blog sites – I do marketing for our school and we had set up “classroom” blog pages for the teachers to control and be able to put up information – i.e. links to great sites relevant to their kids, their bio, hot reference sheets (memory work schedule, etc.) –

We are updating our website and the principal wants to take the blogs down so that it is not so much work for the teachers and they don’t have to take the time to update.

This is not surprising as our teachers are not great at keeping themselves tech savvy – so it is not like they are excited to have a blog page and are mostly just using it to “post” a periotic classroom update vs. making it a rich parent resource page.

I am curious with your tech wisdom – is this a trend for strong schools that teachers have a page for parents – does it help the school or classes stand out in a parents mind? Does it help with the marketing of the school and the value it offers in and out of the classroom? (we are a private school)

Is it worth me outlining a case to keep the blog and how to take them to a higher useful level or drop it – as it doesn’t matter and is not really a trend in classrooms today anyway?

Hi Christy

I’m sad to hear that your principal wants to remove the teacher blog pages. It may solve the problem of out-of-date and non-relevant information, but the unintended consequences will be worse. Parents expect teachers to connect to them on a tech level, to offer 24/7 access via an online site like a blog (or a wiki, website, or any number of other albeit more complicated forums). They expect to be able to find homework help, links, resources, school materials at 7 at night while organizing the next school day with their child. Removing that access because teachers have difficulty keeping it up-to-date will solve one problem while causing many more.

Let’s back up a moment: Do you know why teachers aren’t keeping blogs up-to-date? Maybe:

• they don’t know how–a training session or 1:1 help might get them over this hump
• they think it takes too long–maybe a template with simple fill-ins, add-tos, or tweaks would make it faster. Truly, all teachers really need to start with is weekly lesson plans–resources, dates, reminders, newsletters. Fancy and involved can come later.
• they don’t think they are techie enough–recurring tech training might be necessary. Kids are baptized in iPads and smartphones. We can’t meet them where they are ready to learn if we’re afraid to enter that geeky room. Kids love learning with blogs, iPads, apps, online webtools–that sort.

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I was chatting with Mary over at the Dial My Calls site (click to see my review of Dial My Calls) and she had some great suggestions for  how teachers can use technology to stay in touch with parents:

A lot of emphasis has been given to getting parents involved in their child’s education, but with a teacher’s already full schedule and parents who are already stretched thin, this is not always easy to accomplish. Luckily, technology has intervened and come up with some very innovative solutions that make it quick and easy for a teacher to stay connected with parents.

Create A Class Website

Setting up a class website is a way for parents to see what is going on at their own convenience. It should feature a calendar that has highlighted all of the special events as well as test dates and special assignment due dates. It should only take the teacher a few moments to update the website and calendar weekly, adding in daily homework assignments, special announcements and achievements.

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If you’re looking for project websites for Valentine’s Day, go to my post last Friday and you’ll find 20 Great Valentine Websites for your students. If you’re looking for something else, read on:

• Here’s Valentine history, according to Wikipedia. Who knew it all started with Geoffrey Chaucer?
• Three great Valentine love poems from new efriend, Chris Wood. You can also drop by St. Valentine’s Day website for an entire list of heart-jerkers
• Are you looking for pithy, concise Valentine sayings? Try Creating Really Awesome Free Things. Be forewarned: They belong on candy hearts. These are a bit longer, but still saccharin.
• You not a serious, mushy sort of lover? Click here for quotes with a sense of humor.

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Dear Otto is an occasional column where I answer questions I get from readers about teaching tech. If you have a question, please contact me at askatechteacher at gmail dot com and I’ll answer it here. For your privacy, I use only first names.

Here’s a great question I got from a reader:

I have a lesson plan I created in MS Word and then converted to PDF so I could share with my grade level team (everyone doesn’t have Word). It took us a while to go through it–lots of changes–and when I tried to find the original document, it was nowhere to be found. I tried a few PDF converters, but they didn’t work well and I’d have to retype most of the lesson plan. Can you help?

This is an all-too-common problem for teachers. Much of our work is shared with others or updated year-to-year, but when we try to find that original document, it’s either misfiled, corrupted, or just plain lost. All we have left is the uneditable PDF which means a lot of retyping if we want to update it for the new school year. Converting from DOC to PDF format is easy and often native to the word processing program used so you’d think the reverse would be easy also, but that’s not true. Docs.Zone is a great solution for this problem. It’s intuitive, user-friendly, with a clean uncluttered interface and no download required. Their Optical Character Recognition programming will convert PDF to an OCR Word document quickly and effectively.

Here’s how it works:

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