Interactive Rubrics

      While reading Phil Gobel's blog, I came across an interesting post from Edutopia- Michelle Lampinen's thoughts on using interactive rubrics as assessment for learning. Especially as a Social Studies teacher, I found this a powerful way to augment the ways that I assess students. Yesterday, in fact, my students completed a RAFTS prompt in which they were to explore thoughts on the Articles of Confederation from viewpoints of stakeholders at the time- large state residents, small state residents, women, and slaves. After having read Lampinen's post, my thoughts immediately turned to how powerful an interactive rubric could have been for this instance- I could have linked students to specific articles detailing each role's experience, as well as provided resources to help with quoting sources- a skill my students have historically struggled with, as well. Certainly, for future writing prompts, I will make every effort to make rubrics more interactive- in fact, I can easily see how this one rubric for performance task could be the "hub" for a unit. Students could click and self pace through the selected content and skill-based videos, and then complete the task when they have finished. This would be especially powerful in a setting where 1:1 technology, or a BYOD policy existed.

References: Lampinen, M. (2013, December 3). Interactive rubrics as assessment for learning. Retrieved from http://www.edutopia.org/blog/interactive-rubrics-assessment-for-learning-michelle-lampinen

Reflection on "7 Things You Should Know About Virtual Worlds"

Recently, I came across Educause's short introduction to virtual worlds. Within this short piece, the authors describe a scenario where a student doctor interacts with virtual patients while being supervised by her instructors. In this scenario, the instructors are free to pause the interaction at any time to provide feedback on developing patient relationships. The thought of this seems intriguing to me- I imagined a lesson in which I sent my students into a virtual world with a discussion topic- perhaps to research and share their findings about a historical event. From there, I could moderate and adjust the flow of conversation as necessary by providing feedback. This seems like a neat laboratory to try a real constructivist approach to lesson development. Has anyone tried, or can offer recommendations about virtual worlds that might work for that purpose?

References Educause (2006, June). 7 things you should know about virtual worlds. Retrieved from https://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7015.pdf