Posts

Showing posts from August, 2017

Get organised now!

Image
Your future self will thank you! Hello teacher friends! I hope your summer holidays have been both restful and restorative. Since it's the beginning of the year, now would be a great time to take advantage of the many organisational tools that SmartRubric offers to help you conquer your marking before it turns into a giant snowball/hamster wheel of doom. But first, some housekeeping: For those of you who are setting up SmartRubric for the first time, please check out our series of helpful tutorials and videos to help you make the most of your new SmartRubric account: How to  set up your account and start marking in less than 10 minutes  (<-- start with this one) How to set up your account - more detail and resources How to set up a class How to create a smart rubric How to feed back to students Once you have your account set up, you might be interested in some of the more advanced features of SmartRubric. You can find a list of relevant tutorials here . 

New Feature: Tracker

Image
So, a few weeks ago I hinted in this post at some brand new features that come out of the ability to set up assessments for multiple classes at once. Well, here's one for you! This feature is available to teachers and administrators who belong to a department or school SmartRubric account (Sorry, solo teachers! You can upgrade for as little as 10 GBP/month ). The Departmental Spreadsheet will be a familiar beast to most of you, and, to be completely honest, it isn't something that SmartRubric has been able to replace... until now . Now that you can create linked assessments for a bunch of classes at once ( this post tells you how), you are probably  going to want to look at a nice, friendly, top level overview of how all of the students are doing on these linked assessments. You probably want something that looks like this: Just imagine   the efficiency. You, as department administrator, can set up all of your formal assessments for the whole year (if you want!),

How to roll up your cohorts up in SmartRubric

Image
If you are a department administrator or a single teacher (you don't share your SmartRubric account without other teachers at your school), you're probably going to want to roll up your cohorts for the start of the 2017/18 school year. That way, your dear little year 7s will become cheeky year 8s, your 8s will become sulky 9s and so on. Graduating students get sorted into an alumni group, and a new incoming class is created.* *Before you do this, make sure the list of year groups accurately reflects your school's intake. So, if you are a secondary school, you should have a Year 7 group even if you don't have any students in it. Otherwise it'll snarl up the magic.  The more eagle-eyed amongst you may have already noticed that there is (for a limited time only) a great big button to help you do this. The button appears in the summer, and lasts for three months into the school year. If you miss the window, don't panic. Just drop an email to  support@smartru

New Feature: Multi-class assessments

Image
As a department lead, you may wish to schedule formal assessments for your entire department in advance.  So, for example, you know that the top three year 10 English sets are going to sit a partial mock exam just before Christmas. As long as all of the assessments use the same rubric , you can link them together by creating a multiple class assessment. All you need to do is click on the yellow 'New multiple class assessment' button on your dashboard, or select 'Assessments > New Multi-Class Assessment' from the navigation menu.  The process of creating a multiple class assessment is identical to creating a regular assessment, except instead of selecting a single class from the drop down, you can select as many as you like.  When you create a master assessment in this way, a new assessment for each class you select is added. These new assessments behave exactly like any other assessment -- they show up in the to-do list and gradebook of the responsib