Orlantha

Tasks: Find information on their course Rubric for Written Assignments and apply it to an exercise. Author's Note: In this activity, I would look for student's understanding of the Rubric for Written Assignments. This activity also provides me with assurance that the student's have read the rubric. I thought about this after reading your comments on my week one assignment. After students have done this activity at the beginning of the semester. I can even add a discussion board or a Wiki (now that I know how to use a Wiki) where students can work together in analyzing sample work to improve their own analysis of their written assignments.
 * Orlantha Nin, Learning to Use Online Tools**
 * Title of activity: Rubric Activity**
 * Goals: ** Students will learn how to locate the course materials on Blackboard, they will learn how to post an assignment, and they will be given an incentive for reading through their rubrics completely and testing their understanding. This relates to chapter 4 in "Engaging the Online Learner." **Instructions**: Your first activity for this course is to find your syllabus for the course and review the course expectations and due dates for assignments. All assignments will be submitted either via the "assignments" tab on Black board or as a discussion board entry. When you locate your syllabus, you will notice a document entitled "Rubric for Written Assignments." Print up your Rubric and keep it handy. Now, under the "course documents” tab you will find five sample excerpts of written assignments related to this course. Please read each excerpt and assign a grade for each excerpt based on the criteria specified in the rubric. After each grade, you must explain why you assigned the grade utilizing your own comments supported by the criteria in the rubric. Your grades and comments for the five excerpts are due to the "assignments" tab on Friday, February 19 before 11:59 PM.

Cindy's critique of Orlantha's lesson plan

Orlantha—I like this assignment on multiple levels. First, according to Conrad (p. 38), “The best way for students to learn to use the online course tools is to actually use them. The more opportunities that are made available to students to increase their comfort level with course tools, the sooner the actual course content can be introduced.” You have given the students several opportunities to “use the online course tools” with this activity: find the syllabus, find the rubric, print the rubric, find the course documents tab, find the examples, submit the grades/comments. Good exercises! They will be fairly familiar with the layout of your course management tool after this activity. Second, I like that you are giving the students the experience of grading papers and using the rubric. What a wonderful way to ensure that they study and are familiar with the rubric! It’s so easy to let details slip by, but this really gets their minds focused on those details. Third, I think the repetition (grading five readings!) is key – they have to keep going back to the rubric and examining it from different angles. I wonder if you should make it clear whether this would be a graded assignment? If it is graded, you should let the students now how it will be graded. However, the merit of this assignment is really what they learn from it, so it might not be graded at all. I am always hesitant to let students know when something will not be “graded” because there are always students who will just opt out of doing the assignment…when I’m not grading something, I usually don’t let on that I won’t be grading it. J Cindy

Jody Johnson's critique of Orlantha's lesson plan: Orlantha - What an interesting alternative to the usual "Syllabus quiz". In addition, this activity will help students understand the components to be met for each grade--may even save having to endure arguments over the points you assign. It would be interesting to open this up to a discussion board activity where students reflect on the experience and comment on each other's posts.

As an authentic activity, this example meets the items on the checklist on page 86. Students have the opportunity to learn from their mistakes, especially if you were to provide the grade you would have given to the 5 essays. Students would also be able to apply what they learned from this exercise to their writing assignments throughout the course of the class.

Referring to Conrad's checklist on page 75, I thought

Orlantha,

This activity is powerful in that it doesn’t just bring the rubric to the students’ attention (here’s how you’ll be graded), but gives them a chance to really understand how the grading process works AND to see examples of various levels of quality work. If you haven’t already thought of this, I would suggest that as a follow-up, one they have all graded these samples, that you present how you would have graded them—that will really give them a great idea of how to attack their assignments!

LeeAnn