Reflecting on Rubrics

For this week’s activity, I continued to add to and refine my curriculum page for the six traits of writing project my third grade students will be completing.  This week I created a rubric for assessing students’ learning.  I wanted to focus on whether or not they actually learned what their assigned trait is and if they could explain how their examples of the author’s writing display the trait.  If they can teach the class WHY the author’s writing is a perfect example of the trait, then I will know that they have a good understand of the trait.  I also am requiring pictures or graphics in a presentation format so I can see if my students understand how to use technology to create a presentation that includes pictures or graphics.

I created my rubric using a site I learned about in my class module called iRubric.  You can view my rubric from my curriculum page or at http://www.rcampus.com/rubricshowc.cfm?code=G49A7B&sp=yes.

I learned some valuable information when creating this rubric.  I had heard of creating rubrics online before.  Many of my colleagues have told me about rubistar.  They said it was great for creating rubrics and finding already made rubrics.  However, I never used a program to create a rubric before because I like my rubrics to be very specific.  I think an advantage of using a rubric is that it provides authentic assessment, rather than just giving a test or grading completely subjectively and just guessing a grade.  Because of this, I did not think that any premade rubrics would benefit me.  Since I was creating my rubric from scratch, I didn’t see any reason why creating it in a rubric program would be any better than creating it in Word, so I always just used a table in Word. 

What I did not realize all this time is that creating a rubric online has two major benefits… 1.  It is there for my students and I to access at any time so they can’t say they lost it. And 2.  It TOTALS the scores for you.  I had no idea that you could just click in the box you want, and the program would total the score for me.  You can even create a class list.  This is so much easier than having a bunch of papers and having to circle the box for each category and then going back later to total all the grades.  I could just click on the appropriate boxes as the students are giving their presentations, and they could learn their grade immediately after completion. The creation of the rubric in iRubric was also quicker than it is in Word because some of the boxes are filled in for you, such as the Superior, Excellent, Good, etc. or whatever you choose to label each column.

I think I did well with this activity.  My rubric was more detailed than usual, and I am actually going to use it with my class.  We are going to do a reading comprehension lesson on understanding the rubric and decoding the difficult vocabulary words.  I think it is beneficial to my students to expose them to all types of text structures, so this will be a perfect way to introduce them to a new type of reading.  The lesson will serve two purposes at once (reading comprehension of a rubric and understanding the rubric for their project). 

In conclusion, I am so glad that I learned about creating rubrics in programs online.  I think that this will benefit me greatly in the future as the rubrics make it easier for the students because they always have access and for me because I can just click, score, and give immediate feedback.     

Example Presentation

           For this week’s activity, I created an example of the presentation I am going to have my students create for the 6 Traits of writing.  I will be assigning each pair of students one of the six traits, so for my example presentation, I did the “plus 1” trait, which is presentation.  This way the students can get an idea of what they will be doing, but I did not give them any information that I want them to research and discover on their own.  I then added the example to my curriculum page http://mylovie.wikispaces.com/ so that my students can access it and use it as a model for their own presentations.  If you would like to see my example Prezi on presentation, click the following link. http://prezi.com/rjwvbwebglhm/presentation

            While completing this project, I learned three main things.  The first knowledge I acquired was that saving pictures and scanning is more complicated than I expected.  I ran into a few issues while trying to save pictures to include and while trying to upload my scans of the pages of text.  I was able to problem solve to resolve these difficulties, but my eight and nine year old students may need help if they have trouble.  This led me to the conclusion that if I am really going to do this project with my class, I should make sure it is a time when I can get a few parent volunteers to come to the computer lab and assist my students with the technology.

            The next thing that I learned is that I still need some practice with non-Microsoft programs like Prezi.  I made mistakes such as not italicizing the titles of the books, simply because when I pressed “control I,” the program did not automatically italicize for me.  I will try to continue to explore new technologies so that I can become familiar with a variety of programs.

            The third aspect I realized was that I am becoming skilled at creating examples for my students.  When I first started teaching, I would make examples to the best of my ability and ended up with examples that were way above a 3^rd grade level that would scare my students away from the project and would be too difficult to mimic.  Now I am better at creating examples that seem like intelligent slightly above grade level work.  My students see that they can achieve a product that is similar to mine, so they are excited to begin.  They are also able to comprehend the text and vocabulary so they know what they are doing.  I want to challenge my students, but I do not want to overwhelm them. 

            In conclusion, creating this example presentation helped me learn that my students are going to require assistance, my own skills in Prezi need work, and my example making skills are improving.

Curriculum Page Creation

For this week’s activity for my Master’s class, I began creating a curriculum page on my Wiki.  It is not a finished curriculum page, but if you would like to view it, you can click the following link:  http://mylovie.wikispaces.com/  

            Surprisingly, making this curriculum page was not very difficult, though it did take a fairly long time to do.  My curriculum page is going to be for my third graders to use to learn about one of the six traits of writing in more depth, research an author who is an exemplary model for the trait, and finally create a digital storytelling presentation using Prezi or PowerPoint.  I followed a web quest template provided in one of the lessons in my class to begin my curriculum page.

            The first thing I learned while completing this activity is that a curriculum page can be extremely useful.  Coincidentally, my third grade team all had substitute teachers today so that we could meet to have a “curriculum day.”  We focused on our reading and math curriculum and made sure that all the benchmarks of the Sunshine State Standards are covered in our textbooks.  Then we decided which benchmarks could use some supplemental material to make sure we are teaching them in enough depth and with enough frequency.  We printed copies of most the additional activities we are going to use, which became tedious and was difficult to organize.  Then I came home and created my curriculum page for this assignment.  As I was making it, I realized how useful it could have been for our team to just have created a curriculum page as we went along today and created links to the different activities, rather than printing them all out.  We could have created one page for ourselves to use as a reference and another that our students could use to complete the activities.  Now that I know how easy they are to make, I will suggest that we make one or a few in the future.

            Another fact that I discovered through this activity is that a quality curriculum page is not too complicated to make, but it is time consuming.  I only did a few parts of my curriculum page, and it took a very long time.  If I would have created a complete page, there is no way I would have been able to complete it in one day.  Additionally, if my team had made a curriculum page for reading and math today, I think we would have needed to divide up the additional work and finish it outside of school.  The benefit of the curriculum page is that once you have completed it, everything the students need is right there.  You do not need to be scrambling for different resources, websites, rubrics, etc.  It is much more organized, and the students can’t lose anything because it is all online.  This definitely takes time to do thoroughly.

            A final aspect I discovered while creating this curriculum page is that I need to become more familiar with the specific Benchmarks of the Sunshine State Standards.  Other teachers on my team have them memorized down to the exact wording.  Since I had just gone over them today, I figured it would be easy for me to list the SSS that my curriculum page would address on my Wiki; however, I was not able to remember any of them.  Since I didn’t know them off the top of my head, I just left them out of my curriculum page.  I will look them up and add them in later, and I will hopefully have time to study them too.  I know what I need to be teaching in general as I have taught third grade for four years, but I need to work on being able to write specific benchmarks in my own words without looking them up.  This will help me teach them if I know what they are at all times, not just when I’m in front of my computer or binder.

            In conclusion, I hope that my curriculum page is the start to something I will truly use in the future.  In making it, I learned that curriculum pages are useful and fairly easy to create, but take a lot of time to make properly.  I also learned that I need to study my Benchmarks and Sunshine State Standards so that I do not have to look them up every time I am writing a lesson plan or making something like this curriculum page.  I look forward to finishing my curriculum page in the weeks to come.