Well I'm stumped. Bamboozled. I get like this when my teaching constitution gets challenged and amendments to that constitution become impossible to ignore. Once again, it seems that change in the only constant. It's never easy, is it? Now that I have embraced technology integration in my own classroom, and made the commitment to unraveling access to the blogosphere for me and my students, I am faced with reconfiguring a whole SLEW of things. There is much to do in this new frontier of student learning. But the most confounding challenge I have right now is how to assess blogging in the classroom. I really like Konrad Glogowski's opinion about assessing blogging when he posits that grading and blogging DON'T go together ( But as he also points out, students “have been trained, unfortunately, to equate learning with a letter or a percentage. It’s not learning, in their view, it’s not school, unless there’s a grade attached.” I also really like KG’s approach to helping students learn about how to think more critically about their own work in the blogosphere…about how to be good digital citizens and make a worthwhile contribution to society. I loved the examples Konrad gives of the Individual Progress Reports of studetns, in which he puts the onus on the students to assess their progress themselves. This is a very constructivist approach to classroom blogging as it helps to build a partnership between student and teacher as students begin to build confidence in their own blogging abilities. I like this approach because blogging is so new to students and most teachers alike. It's a way that we can learn together about best practices when it comes to blogging. In his same article, I also thought the student self evaluation chart with "echoes of Anderson and Krathwohl" were very good. This allows students to plot their assessment and visually see where they are going in terms of personal growth as effective bloggers.
I also found Megan Poore's Blogagogy very helpful in assisting me in determining how to go about tackling this very difficult but important idea of assessment. In her section on assessing blogs Megan gives some great pointers as to the "do's and don'ts" of blog assessment as well as some other blogging essentials we must keep in mind. So how would I go about assessing my own students' blogs and those of responding students? I would want to come from a place of encouragement rather than straight up assessment. And I would only use this rubric to assess after having gone through the processes I discussed above, in which students receive coaching and time to self-evaluate their own progress. From the information I gathered, I think I would go about rubric development as indicated in the attachment below.
I also found Megan Poore's Blogagogy very helpful in assisting me in determining how to go about tackling this very difficult but important idea of assessment. In her section on assessing blogs Megan gives some great pointers as to the "do's and don'ts" of blog assessment as well as some other blogging essentials we must keep in mind. So how would I go about assessing my own students' blogs and those of responding students? I would want to come from a place of encouragement rather than straight up assessment. And I would only use this rubric to assess after having gone through the processes I discussed above, in which students receive coaching and time to self-evaluate their own progress. From the information I gathered, I think I would go about rubric development as indicated in the attachment below.
rubric_for_assessing_student_blogging.docx |