Rubistar

I don’t know how many people of have heard of rubistar before, but it’s an online tool that can be used to make rubrics for class projects.  I first learned about the tool in one of my other education classes, however, I didn’t really get a chance to check it out yet so I decided to look more in to the tool for this week’s class. 

From my experience with the tool this so far it seems to be really simple and easy to use.  You can either make your own rubric from scratch or you can choose a premade template based on the type of project you are assessing.  Some examples would be posters, lab reports, writing, oral presentations, art projects, and much more.  If you pick and already made rubric you still have a lot of choice in what goes into the rubric you pick the areas of which you wish to assess and then the tool gives you suggestions for how to asses each category.  If you don’t like the criteria or the amount of points that the tool suggests you can change it to what will work best for your class.    

I think this is a great to tool for first time teachers to know about.  It’s quick and easy to use.  After you pick all the criteria or type the information in yourself it creates the chart for you which is great because you don’t have to try and mess around in word or some other program trying to get everything to fit just right.  You could even have students create their own rubrics based on what they feel they should be assessed on.  This tools is also great because once you have a log in you can safe your created rubrics on the site as well.  For what I can tell this tool makes creating and using rubrics fast, simple and easy.  Using a rubric in general for assessing student work is also good for the students because everything is laid out and they now what is expected of them.  I also believe having students complete projects that can be assessed with something like a rubric is a much better way of assessing students knowledge than by using a test.