Kathy’s updated assessments

Over the last few years, student products have changed.  The Common Core State Standards force us to focus specifically on new sets of criteria.

And so we find ourselves independently developing new rubrics and assessments.

Happily, my/our dear friend Kathy Schrock stepped up to address the wheel-reinvention issue.

Her updated assessment Guide covers assessment options for a variety of new products, including wikis, Glogs, blogs, threaded discusssion, and tweets.

And her latest content includes CCSS-aligned assessments.

I recently chatted with Kathy, who is currently teaching in the Discovery Education/Wilkes University Master of Science in Instructional Media program.

She explained her motivation:

As people remap their curricula, they have to be looking at the CCSS.   I started looking  for tech-based assessments that meet the Common Core standards in a meaningful way. I poked around but couldn’t find much and also found it a challenge to search.  What started the whole thing, was that I was reading the recent issue of EdLeadership. It was totally devoted to the Common Core, but it had only one article about technology.

Kathy believes that infographic and digital storytelling products make perfect assessments of the type of skills the CCSS address.  In fact, she is currently working on a presentation connecting digital storytelling to the standards.

Among her favorite CCSS assessment discoveries are

Common Core Rubric Creation Tool, by EssayTagger, a free, customizable, sharable tool that breaks the CCSS into manageable, assessable elements.

• State of Delaware’s Text-Based Writing Rubrics for K-12
• Curriculum Corner’s Common Core Checklists for K-6,
• The resources created by the Elk Grove Unified School District

Kathy shares that relating to the CCSS, her page is a work in progress.

If people find out and they have something else they would be proud to share, hopefully they’ll let me know, using the form on my Guide.

And while we’re talking rubrics, one of my personal favorite assessment tools (and Kathy’s as well) is:

Bernajean Porter’s expert advice on evaluating digital projects and her customizable Digitales Scoring Guides.

For our own school, I keep a list of rubric portals here.

Filed under: assessment, CCSS, rubrics