Reflective Blog Talk: Towards Reflective Blog Talk, by educator, Konrad Glogowski, shows how students are provided with higher order thinking tasks via student blogging. The blogs are an application practice in topic writing and conversation. The reader/writer interaction between students is an on-going learning experience that is partly peer-lead and very student- centered. I especially appreciated the assessments made by students in their comments and how student admiration of a topic provided the student-writer with additional thinking and writing confidence. This is so much more effective than me handing a student back a graded paper. Many of my students are non-talkative in class and blogs will give them more of a classroom voice.
Glogowski provides students an assigned student assessment task, The Ripple Effect, which enables students to have higher thought/reflection on the assessment of writing strengths and weaknesses. This assessment task-strategy provides an opportunity to reflect not only on one’s own work but also on the work of other writers on several levels, such as their level of interest, clarity, and content accuracy. Unfortunately, student assessment by my students will have to come with part-2 of our class blog. I will require multiple student comments, but without the task of rating their comments, until their confidence is adequate.
Reading Blogs as Web-based Portfolios, a liner assessment strategy, I can see the possibility of assessments for multiple grades and subjects covering a couple of years. Making what is a student-centered learning blog a living assessment-of-learning artifact. These are challenging tasks for setting up, but well worth their value for a linear collection of data. Since I teach two grade levels, 7th and 8th, it is something I will re-visit for consideration of possible implementation.
Mark Sample posted on Prof Hacker, A Rubric for Evaluating Student Blogs, on the blog page of The Chronicle of Higher Ed, a 5-point rubric scale to assess student blogging. The rubric frames rating points for student posts according to the level of
critical thinking and engagement found in their student comments. The rubric is an easy point assessment tool with 4 as exceptional, 3 - satisfactory, 2 - underdeveloped, 1 - limited, and 0 - for no credit. Sample explains that grades can be superficial and that descriptive feedback is necessary for the purpose of deepening a student’s understanding. The format of this rubric for my students is suitable for summative assessment, such as an end-of subject blog score. I agree with Sample that grades can be superficial, however by providing more criteria details with the use of the rubric I can share more meaning of scores with my students.
For a more formative learning assessment, I have selected to extend Sample’s five point scale format to resemble the rubric found at Log Book 2NDE. This blog assessment rubric has five criteria categories: regularity, language, reflection, vocabulary, and accuracy. Each of these five categories can be measured from zero to five points. Five points for rigorous content and zero to one to reflect little to no development of content. Using a four point scale with three criteria categories for a rubric that addresses the blog topic message, the first category on my assessment tool is “Message conveyed with clarity and meaning.” The student content should present a well thought out understanding of the blog subject, with an example or an analysis of the information. The terminology and vocabulary criteria is an area my students have the most instructional support from my sheltered classroom instruction. Learning the terminology and the subject concepts for targeted content learning is more critical for understanding during classroom instruction and learning. However the use of spelling and grammar is a norm for the use of blogs and a necessary criteria for my English Learners to adapt to for participating in virtual leaning environments. Inside the classroom I do not rigorously assess correct spelling, however for this blogging rubric spelling and grammar are a criteria category and will be viewed as a requirement for student publication tasks (see below, Table 1, Rubric Blog Assessment)
Reference:
Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful Web tools for classrooms. Thousand Oaks, Calif: Corwin.
Table 1
Rubric Blog Assessment
Glogowski provides students an assigned student assessment task, The Ripple Effect, which enables students to have higher thought/reflection on the assessment of writing strengths and weaknesses. This assessment task-strategy provides an opportunity to reflect not only on one’s own work but also on the work of other writers on several levels, such as their level of interest, clarity, and content accuracy. Unfortunately, student assessment by my students will have to come with part-2 of our class blog. I will require multiple student comments, but without the task of rating their comments, until their confidence is adequate.
Reading Blogs as Web-based Portfolios, a liner assessment strategy, I can see the possibility of assessments for multiple grades and subjects covering a couple of years. Making what is a student-centered learning blog a living assessment-of-learning artifact. These are challenging tasks for setting up, but well worth their value for a linear collection of data. Since I teach two grade levels, 7th and 8th, it is something I will re-visit for consideration of possible implementation.
Mark Sample posted on Prof Hacker, A Rubric for Evaluating Student Blogs, on the blog page of The Chronicle of Higher Ed, a 5-point rubric scale to assess student blogging. The rubric frames rating points for student posts according to the level of
critical thinking and engagement found in their student comments. The rubric is an easy point assessment tool with 4 as exceptional, 3 - satisfactory, 2 - underdeveloped, 1 - limited, and 0 - for no credit. Sample explains that grades can be superficial and that descriptive feedback is necessary for the purpose of deepening a student’s understanding. The format of this rubric for my students is suitable for summative assessment, such as an end-of subject blog score. I agree with Sample that grades can be superficial, however by providing more criteria details with the use of the rubric I can share more meaning of scores with my students.
For a more formative learning assessment, I have selected to extend Sample’s five point scale format to resemble the rubric found at Log Book 2NDE. This blog assessment rubric has five criteria categories: regularity, language, reflection, vocabulary, and accuracy. Each of these five categories can be measured from zero to five points. Five points for rigorous content and zero to one to reflect little to no development of content. Using a four point scale with three criteria categories for a rubric that addresses the blog topic message, the first category on my assessment tool is “Message conveyed with clarity and meaning.” The student content should present a well thought out understanding of the blog subject, with an example or an analysis of the information. The terminology and vocabulary criteria is an area my students have the most instructional support from my sheltered classroom instruction. Learning the terminology and the subject concepts for targeted content learning is more critical for understanding during classroom instruction and learning. However the use of spelling and grammar is a norm for the use of blogs and a necessary criteria for my English Learners to adapt to for participating in virtual leaning environments. Inside the classroom I do not rigorously assess correct spelling, however for this blogging rubric spelling and grammar are a criteria category and will be viewed as a requirement for student publication tasks (see below, Table 1, Rubric Blog Assessment)
Reference:
Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful Web tools for classrooms. Thousand Oaks, Calif: Corwin.
Table 1
Rubric Blog Assessment