Month: September 2009

My Search for Student Blog Evaluation Rubrics

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I currently have one of my freshman level classes blogging and doing other web2.0 type activities to earn 40% of their class grades. I have thought about how I should grade the blogs and decided to ask my Twitter Personal Learning Network (PLN) for help.

Received a response from Professor Wendy Drexler whom is teaching a graduate level class and she shared her rubric blog checklist with me. I thought it was pretty good but it did not fit my needs as her class was blogging to earn their participation grade. I then decided to do a little research to see what I could find.

I found several great rubrics which were freely shared and after sharing them with Professor Wendy Drexler, I decided to blog and share them with others.

Here were my findings:

From Professor Barbara Nixon’s blog here whom I follow on Twitter:

Professor Barbara Nixon demonstrates how she uses Google Forms to allow her students to self evaluate their own blogs before she grades them. Great idea, I will be revising this for my own class.

She also provides a link to the actual rubric that she will use to grade her student’s blog. Again, another awesome idea which I will adopt.

Here is a blog rubric from another professor who teaches, “Using Tech in Education” at a University.

Also found another blog rubric used in an Education class at the Univ of Regina. I later found out that I do follow Professor Alec Courosa who created this rubric, on Twitter.

Here is another provided by a Tech ed consultant, Tony Vincent for free on his site here

Lastly, I found another freely shared rubric from
this site which is a higher education rubric creation site.

I plan to revise one of these to use with my class. As you can already see, most of these resources came from the wonderful colleagues that I follow on Twitter. I cannot say this enough, I have learned so much from my PLN and the members just rock!! Hope this collection helps someone find the perfect rubric for grading their student’s blogs.

Short Student Assignment Yields Lots of Learning

Last week, I decided to make up a very small assignment for my college level Multimedia Presentations Class. The assignment was to use a royalty free picture site such as Http://www.sxc.hu to find 10 Jpg formatted photos in a topic relating to multimedia. For example: 10 photos of musical instruments to represent sound.

They were supposed to download them to their desktop and then use the MS Paint software to save 2 each in the following formats, Tiff, Gif, Png, Monochome BMP and regular BMP. Our book chapter concerning graphics had discussed all of these. After converting these, they were to use their Google sites , create a new page and insert a table that would display one photo in each cell.

Well, at first I was thinking that this assignment was very elementary and probably an insult to their level of graphics related knowledge because most students in this class were digital media majors. However, I was in for a big surprise.

As the students started working on this assignment, one student called me over.  She had just converted the first photo to a Gif format. She asked me why the image did not look as good as before and seemed blurry.

Well, this gave me the opportunity to tell her and the class that the Gif format should never be used for regular photos. It should only be used for logos, thumbnails and small animated images. It had a limit of only 256 colors which were not enough to create sharp looking photos.

The next student quickly called me over and asked me why the photo she just converted to the Monochrome BMP  format was now black and white. I quickly told her and the class that this was exactly what Monochrome BMP format was supposed to do.

Still another student called me to her workstation and asked why she could not upload the two .Tiff format images to her Google site to insert into her table. This gave me the opportunity to tell the class that when you convert a .jpg to a .tiff format, the image sometimes gets corrupted and that is why it would not upload.

Of course, most of this information was covered in the chapter in our book but I guess that the information did not hit home until they actually completed the hands on assignment.

So I guess I learned a valuable lesson.  I should never overestimate what my students already know as doing so might result in a missed opportunity for my students to learn new things. I am now more confident that none of the students are going to miss questions about these topics during the midterm exam.