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rubrics

Efficiency and effectiveness with rubrics

March 19, 2013 — 2 Comments

I’m the chair of our university’s Faculty Development Committee. We recently conducted a survey of our faculty members, in part to discover what were perceived to be the most valuable breakout sessions to offer for our Fall 2013 faculty development kick-off.

As I reviewed all the responses, one theme emerged, in terms of what breakouts ranked highly. It was apparent that the majority of us feel the squeeze of wanting to accomplish more tasks in limited time. I plan on doing a series of posts about faculty personal productivity in the coming months. In this post, however, I start with one way to both save time and provide more meaningful feedback to students: creating and using rubrics.

GETTING STARTED

When I first began developing rubrics, I followed my Mom’s tried-and-true method of finding a book on the topic. Stevens’ and Levi’s Introduction to Rubrics proved invaluable in establishing a process for speedy rubric creation. Continue Reading…

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It’s that time of the semester

April 20, 2011 — Leave a comment

Get ready. It’s that time of the semester. Here come the emails with requests for extra credit and explanations of how if this particular student fails your class, s/he will no longer be able to attend your university… all because of you/your class…

I encourage you to take heart, recognizing that the key learning from your course may just be to take responsibility for one’s own actions and accept the consequences. Here’s a quick read on the subject from The Chronicle:

http://chronicle.com/blogs/onhiring/why-do-i-have-an-f

“Part of learning to be a college student is learning to accept the consequences of your actions, especially those that hurt your grade.”

By Eliana Osborn

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iPhone App perfect for faculty – take attendance with ease

April 11, 2010 — Leave a comment

I’m getting ready for the new iPhone to [likely] be announced in June, but before then… not a day goes by that I don’t think about the current iPhone’s usefulness.

Attendance

Check out the Attendance application for the iPhone, which for $2.99 will make your attendance tracking much more streamlined. I still plan on having my students sign in (calling roll seems silly at their age and I teach classes of 45-50 most of the time). After each class, I can quickly update the information electronically and have it accessible on my iPhone anywhere and anytime.

Attendance also lets you email the information to yourself, making it that much easier to get the information into Excel for further number crunching. Each student can have a photo associated with their record, making learning names that much easier. The developer also regularly updates this application and is incredibly open to feedback.

Enjoy getting more efficient with the Attendance application. Let us know what other iPhone apps are helping you get more done.

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Online Learning: Privacy versus Protection

July 24, 2008 — Leave a comment

Cheat

The Chronicle of Higher Education reported this week that in a new 1,200 page bill before Congress “is a small paragraph that could lead distance education institutions to require spy cameras in their students’ homes.”

Many are concerned about the privacy issues involved in such a measure and that somehow distance learning institutions would be treated with harsher anti-cheating requirements than traditional classroom-based universities.

I am still shocked at the extent students will go to in order to cheat on an exam.

The obvious question for this guy is “if you’re smart enough to know Photoshop and to go to this extent to cheat on an exam, why not just learn what you need to know for the test?”

Students in my classes who were aware that I was going to run their papers through TurnItIn.com, an anti-plagiarism solution, have still used students papers from the previous semesters in the hopes that they won’t get caught. Of course, some might argue that they were looking to get caught, when they made such little effort to conceal their academic dishonesty.

I hope the debate continues and that we seek to protect students’ privacy while maintaining academic integrity and ethics. If we’re not talking about it and fighting to keep the quality of our programs sound, the Coke can bottle guy wins and learning loses.

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Two Basic Excel 2007 Tips for Grading Efficiency

July 21, 2008 — Leave a comment

The upgrade to Excel 2007 brought with it some great new features to make managing data easier. When creating Excel-based gradebooks in the past, we would have had to do a lot of manual set up to create design features that are now just a few clicks of the mouse away.

I highlight two such features here, but encourage you to share other tips for grade tracking in Excel 2007 in the comments section.

AUTO TABLE FORMAT

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Excel has 44 built in auto-formats for tables. To use one of these great-looking formats:

  1. Sort your data (under the data tab)
  2. Highlight your data
  3. Choose format-as-table from the home tab and select your desired format

I find this makes the data more easy to read on screen, since each row is kept more visually separate. It also makes printouts much more appealing and professional.

CONDITIONAL FORMATTING

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Another great feature is the ability to see visually how each person did in comparison to the others. You used to be able to do this in Excel 2003, but you had to program in the conditional formatting (for example, you might have indicated that if someone scored below 70% that you wanted the font to be displayed in a red color).

Excel 2007 makes this much easier, plus you have far more options available in terms of your formatting.

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In my example, I selected the red/yellow/green arrow formatting, to quickly see which students scored the best and worst on the final exam. To create custom formatting:

  1. Select the collumn you want to format
  2. Choose conditional formatting from the home tab
  3. Indicate which custom formatting you wish to use

This only scratches the surface of what you can to in Excel to track data, but I know it is better to give information in bite-sized pieces. Give it a try as you set up this next semester’s gradebook and feel free to share other tips in the comments section.

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