Working with rubrics
Here are some good sources for working with rubrics:
Rubistar You can create a rubric by selecting a subject, then the specific criteria you want to use.
Simple rubric template Template can just be filled in with your own criteria and performance guidelines.
Rubrics in a nutshell The basics of creating a rubric.
Rubric collection 1 Collection from a graduate school that works with educators
Rubric collection 2 Another collection for educators
Rubric collection 3 Another collection for educators
Internet tools | Comment (0)New ideas delivered to your emailbox
Part of teaching is sharing ideas with other teachers, and the Internet has made sharing with teachers around the world easier than ever. All it takes it subscribing to an email newsletter. Some of these come daily, some weekly. Here are some you may wish to explore:
Some weekly compendiums of teaching ideas that use Internet resources:
- TeachersFirst is one of the best. Tells you topic area, age group, how tech-savvy you need to be to use a resource, and any concerns (such as potential access to inappropriate content). http://www.teachersfirst.com (scroll to the bottom to signup for weekly enewsletter. )
- National Council of Teachers of English (but you don’t have to be a member) http://ncte.org/newsletter
- Secondary educators http://712educators.about.com/
If you like getting lots of idea every day, here are some daily reviews of teaching resources:
- Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/. Larry works with high school ESL (English as a second language) students, particularly in English and Social Studies. His groupings of resources are among the finest on the Internet, and his ideas are worth hearing. Strong on ideas, but leaves evaluation of appropriateness up to you. (Scroll down – email subscription tucked into right hand side.)
- Free Technology for Teachers http://www.freetech4teachers.com/. Strong on ideas, and a very strong proponent of technology use, but leaves evaluation up to you.
On a more variable publication schedule:
- Pro-Con provides in depth information about many controversial issues. http://www.procon.org/ Very rich resources here. (Email signup is on lower left-hand side.)
Will every idea work for you? No. But you will find new ideas that freshen your approach in the classroom and give you links you may want to add to your class Edline pages to enrich your students’ learning.
How to subscribe. Click on the blue link above. If you decide you want to subscribe, look for the place to subscribe to emails somewhere on the webpage (if it’s hard to find I’ve described its location above). You give your email address, and sometimes will have to verify that you’ve actually requested to receive these emails. Then, every time the publisher writes a new entry, you’ll receive an email. (And each email will tell you how to stop the emails if you decide you don’t want them any more.)
Have you found a good resource like this that you can share with the rest of us?
Edline, Internet tools | Comment (0)On-line discussion with middle schoolers
Lessons learned with online discussions with middle school students on Edublogs
I wanted to give my English students an experience similar to the online threaded discussions I had participated in as part of online classes. These discussions were engaging, rewarding and enriching. And since my students love all things online, I knew they would enjoy the experiment. And since I also teach their daily technology class, we had the time.
I set up a blog on Edublogs (www.mrslo.edublogs.org ) so that my 8th grade Language Arts students could have online discussions about To Kill a Mockingbird. I wanted to give the quieter kids a chance to participate in ways they can’t during face-to-face discussions; I also wanted to give students a chance to think about what they wrote, not just shout out ideas during class. And of course, I wanted to give them another reading and writing experience. At the same time, I wanted to keep them safe from strangers online, and from each other (since middle school kids can be ruthlessly mean).
Since students don’t have school emails in my school, and not all have personal emails, I used the gmail workaround to create dummy email addresses. The whole business of setting them up was very time-consuming. (James, are you listening?) If you are an elementary school teacher with 20 kids, that’s fine, but secondary teachers like me have 80-150 students, making this just too impractical. I had to limit this to my two 8th grade classes, much as I would like to expand it to all my students. I’m an Edublog supporter, so I was able to bulk-add students to my blog. But first, I had to set each student up with an individual userid (which I created, using first 3 letters of first name + first 3 letters of last name) and password (which Edublogs created) and then a dummy gmail email account. One at a time. (If you think I could have given them careful directions that they listened to patiently and followed precisely, you have not done much work with 13 year olds.)
I did not want to have to monitor students’ personal blogs, only to have an online discussion. As middle school kids are less than mature, I needed a platform where I could moderate all student work before it was published; the moderating comments function works efficiently and effectively on Edublogs (thank you, James!)
I told students to change their passwords to something they would remember on first log in, since the initial assigned password is not memorable. Problem number two came when students forgot their passwords. I couldn’t get at the passwords, though some students were able to get an email sent (to my gmail) resetting the password. It’s easy to say the teacher should keep track of the passwords, but that’s not practical – they tell you the wrong information, they forget on the way to telling you, they decide to be stinkers and “forget.”). The forgetful students ended up having to be like the students who didn’t have parental permission to participate in the online discussions: reading the discussions, but giving their entries to me on paper.
The logistics were mostly transparent to my students, though, and they loved it. Loved it. Intently made their first post and waited for it to be moderated. Once I returned a few punctuation- and spelling-challenged entries, everybody got more focused on getting mechanics more correct. Then they wanted to see what others had written. They LOVED referring to each other’s comments (and of course being referred to).
The first question I posted taught me a lot about what works and doesn’t work; don’t give a choice of two questions to answer – you can’t get a conversation going. With the second question we discussed, I added a “landscape post” midway through; this helped them focus their followup comments. By that time, they were asking in our “real” class when we would have another online discussion and referring to parts of their online discussion. They also wished we had done it earlier in the year during other projects, which prompted a discussion of wikis and how we could use them for our mock trial teams.
Afterwards, I asked students to tell me what they liked and what they would change. They enjoyed the deeper discussions, the chance for everybody to participate, the chance to think. They wanted more questions, but without an arbitrary word count. They felt they “just wrote” to get to the 200 words needed for an A, and pointed out that if they have something effective to say in 100 words, why should they write more? They also found having to post twice about each question artificial; I had enjoyed that in my adult discussions, but this didn’t always work so well with these younger students. They – and I – felt that having two classes work together was too much, also – there were just too many posts to read. So next time I’ll have each class do its own discussion (though they’ll be able to peek at the other class’ work). And they can write shorter posts and will only have to post once for each discussion (but can post more often if they choose).
Yes, moderating and then grading the discussions was extra work. But quieter thoughtful students did get to take part, students did think more deeply, and everybody got to participate, not just the most energetic hand-wavers. This was also the perfect teachable moment: when the only way to get your message across is writing – and that is so much of the online world – then writing well matters.
Will I do it again? Yes, and earlier in the year, so we can include these discussions throughout the year.
Special thanks to Sue Waters (www.theedublogger.edublogs.org ) and others at Edublogs for their ideas, technical assistance, and encouragement.
Internet tools | Comments (2)Has anybody pretended to be you?
Recently, I discovered that a student thought it would be funny to create a Facebook page, using my name; he pretended to be me. He doesn’t think it’s so funny anymore. But anybody can impersonate you online, so I thought it would be useful to tell how to identify if this has happened to you.
Every couple of months, Google yourself. Go to Google and in the Search field, enter the name you normally use, and put it in quotes, like this: ”Fran Lo” This way Google searches on your name, not on just your first name and just your last name; you’ll you have fewer entries to look at. You might also want to do a search like: facebook “my name” or myspace “my name” You can do this in just a few minutes.
You will be amazed at how many people around the world have your exact name. And you may discover something a student has posted about you without your consent. Because if kids can do stupid things, kids will do stupid things.
Internet tools | Comment (0)Why no Wikipedia example
If your students want to know why they shouldn’t use Wikipedia, here’s a perfect example. A college student deliberately inserted a fake quote into the Wikipedia page about a public figure who had just died – and the fake quote was included in many newspaper obituaries as if it was something said by the public figure.
Kind of amazing when the quote was listed in Wikipedia without a link showing where it came from (usually a clue that the information may be bogus). Only a few of the newspapers have apologized…
| Student’s Wikipedia Hoax Fools Newspapers – Science News | Science & Technology | Technology News – FOXNews.com http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,519283,00.html |
