The SmartRubric Blog | SmartRubric

'Forcing the Fit' in Special Schools When Karl O’Reilly, Headteacher, visited the SmartRubric stand at BETT 2019, he was looking for an assessment management system that would help him solve a really difficult problem at Coppice School, a community day school for students with severe learning difficulties. Coppice School had already implemented other assessment/progress tracking applications, but none of them were able to show pupil progress in a way that was meaningful for their students. I learned from Karl that special schools frequently have to make do with systems designed for mainstream schools, plugging the gaps with a mix of extra systems and spreadsheets to approximate the unique needs of their pupils and staff. At Coppice, 'forcing the fit' in this way meant it was difficult to analyse the true progress pupils are making— meaning a lot of time, money and effort wasted guessing at which kinds of interventions are working and which aren’t. Karl expla...

A new tool for teachers of students with special educational needs "SmartRubric goals will help us to be truly reflective on the progress our young people make and we will no longer have to accept a 'best-fit solution' as our only way of evidencing, celebrating and enhancing the progress our amazing pupils make everyday." - Karl O'Reilly, Headmaster of Coppice School  Join the waiting list for a free 12-week trial I’m excited to announce a new formative assessment application for special schools and teachers of students with special needs to help them celebrate big steps, small steps and everything in between. SmartRubric Goals builds on core SmartRubric functionality, but takes it a step further, allowing educators to create goal profiles for individual students and include a blend of personalised objectives and curriculum targets - all totally customisable and adaptable to each student's unique needs. SmartRubric Goals was develo...

We're happy to say that we are now able to connect SmartRubric to your MIS via Assembly! Here's our post about it if you missed it.  If you are here, I'm assuming that you've already requested a free Data Manager account from SmartRubric, and you have set up an Assembly Account (if not, please kick off the process by emailing  data@smartrubric.com ). How to connect your data:  Before you begin, you will need:  A SmartRubric Data Manager account A working Assembly Account, connected to your MIS Your log in information for the Assembly Platform Sign in to https://www.smartrubric.com with your Data Manager account Go to https://www.smartrubric.com/connect Click the Connect Now  button and follow the instructions on the screen to authenticate with your Assembly account information. Now you will be prompted to configure your connection to Assembly. If you have been using SmartRubric without a connection to your MIS, this is where you connect th...

The run-up to the holidays is often the toughest term of the school year. It's often the longest, it's dark when you leave and dark when you get home, and the honeymoon period of good behaviour in your lessons has worn off. You might be looking down the barrel of mid-year mock exam preparation (and marking!) and the reality that the coursework your KS4 groups were meant to have finished last year hasn't even been started, let alone marked. But there's good news too. Now's a great time to make some changes to your assessment practice that'll pay off big time down the line in terms of impact  and time saved . I give you...  the humble rubric . You can either print these out and use them as a pro-forma (good), or  you can sign up for SmartRubric and use an interactive rubric to mark (better). First, I'll explain what a rubric is, how to make them, and how to use them effectively. Then, I'll give you three really good reasons why you should be usin...

If you are syncing your school MIS with SmartRubric, you may find yourself wanting to add students or student groups (like classes or clubs) that do not exist in your MIS . These are called ad hoc students  or ad hoc student groups , and they are a valuable tool for extending the functionality of SmartRubric. Want to put a group of students on behaviour report? Create an ad hoc student group, add your naughty kids, and make some behaviour rubrics. (You could even go so far as to hijack the moderation feature and get all of the kids' form teachers to contribute!). Want to evaluate a group of trainee teachers progress against the teaching standards? Add the trainees as  ad hoc students  and then create an ad hoc student group  so you can assess them over time, just like any other teaching group. To add ad hoc students and student groups , you can navigate to 'Students' or 'Current classes' in the menu bar, respectively. You will have a button at the top of th...

We are now ready to connect your MIS to SmartRubric via Assembly! Email data@smartrubric.com  to get set up. Over the next week or so I'll publish some more guidance on how this works, as well as tutorials for those of you who have already connected your systems.  I'm really excited to announce that beginning in September, we plan for SmartRubric to be able to integrate with some school management systems -- SIMS, ScholarPack, Bromcom, RM Integris, Arbor and Advanced.  That means that if you connect SmartRubric to your school MIS via Assembly , you and your department will be able to log in and get marking -- no need to set up classes and students ! The integration won't cost you anything if you have 15 or more teachers using SmartRubric, otherwise, SmartRubric will levy a £6/month flat charge. If you would like to start using SmartRubric in your department(s) starting from September with an MIS integration, I'd be happy to offer you a totally free trial ...

As exam season approaches, ensuring that you are providing accurate grades for mock exams and practice questions is really important. In this post, I'm going to explain the tools available to you in SmartRubric for setting up correctly weighted assessment objectives.  SmartRubric is a GIGO  system -- if you set up a good rubric, your marking experience will be smooth, accurate and painless. If you set up an awkward or incorrect rubric, you will not get the most out of SmartRubric. But don't worry -- I'm here to help! You can always  email caroline@smartrubric.com to get personal help.  Typically, exam specifications will give you guidance about how much each assessment objective is worth, but it isn't always clear how best to represent that in SmartRubric. I'm going to go through an example where some assessment objectives are weighted more heavily (worth more) than others. I'll break down the mark scheme, and then build it in SmartRubric. EXAMPLE: ...

If you're just coming across SmartRubric, and would like to know a little more about what it is and why I think it's a game changer for teacher workload and formative assessment, read on. SmartRubric is a formative assessment app designed to ease teacher workload while at the same time improving the quality and usefulness of student progress data for schools. I developed the initial prototype of SmartRubric while I was an English teacher in a secondary school in London. English teachers reading this will know -- my marking workload was very intense. My colleagues and I would spend hundreds of hours every year marking open-ended essays and projects; providing extensive detailed handwritten formative assessment feedback for our students. And rightly so! High quality formative feedback is an essential part of facilitating student learning . But, the way we were (and most teachers are) marking is broken for two reasons: It is inefficient. Because we mark against a crit...

Rubric proliferation can happen to anyone. Here's how to stop it.  Because SmartRubric makes it easy to share, duplicate and modify rubrics, sometimes you end up with old, out of date ones clogging up your library. You won't be able to delete them (unless they've never been used to asses work, in which case go wild. The delete option is under the 'Action' menu in the rubric). SmartRubric won't let you do anything to a rubric that will louse up the marks of students who have already been assessed by it. So, here's what you do. Go into the detail view rubric you want to get rid of (Rubrics > Your Library > {Rubric}). Everything is going to be under the 'Actions' dropdown button, here: 1. If the rubric has been shared with your school, click 'Unshare with school'. Now it has been removed from the School template library, and no one else can accidentally add it to their library. 2. If the rubric has been favourited (the red he...

See how your students stack up by A.O. across multiple assessments.  I've added another high level report  to SmartRubric. Now, if you would like to see how students in your class have performed by strand  across all of your assessments, you can! This is going to be super useful for exam preparation, because you'll be able to spot trends and weak spots at a glance.  To access your Gap Analysis Gradebook, just go into your normal gradebook (Classes > {your class}), and click on the 'Gap Analysis View' link next to the gradebook title:  This will take you into the Gap Analysis gradebook, and you can do all of the usual things, like showing and hiding columns and exporting to CSV. 

The whole point of SmartRubric is to make feedback more targeted and helpful for students, and to make your marking workload smaller and more manageable. If you aren't customising rubrics you might be making your life and the lives of your darling students much more difficult and confusing. Don't worry, it's easy. I'll walk you through it. Here's a scenario for you: You are a KS3 teacher. Your department has a big 'master rubric', which contains all of the strands that are assessed in your subject, and all of the possible levels a student could be at for years 7, 8 and 9. That means, maybe, 12 or thirteen levels and ten strands or so per core skill on multiple tabs. It's colossal, but really  useful because it contextualises and maps out pretty much the entire curriculum. If you are sharing rubrics across a department, I highly recommend having one of these. Email me if you want help building one. So, the beauty of having one of these is that you,...

Or, 'Help my rubric is enormous and my AFL sheets look terrible!' With the addition of the ability to create multiple assessments across different classes , a new and exciting issue has cropped up. Since your 'multiple assessments' all need to use the same rubric , you'll probably end up needing one that covers a much  broader range of abilities (this advice applies to single assessments for mixed-ability groups, too). Sometimes, this means you end up with a rubric that has upwards of eight or nine bands! This causes some issues with formatting your AFL sheets, because SmartRubric tries to cram all of your bands onto a single sheet of paper for your student. I'm working on a smarter, more comprehensive fix, but until that's ready, I've made you a special 'giant rubric' AFL template. From now on, if you try to download your whole class AFL sheets on one of these giant rubrics, you'll get a little alert showing up, like this: "It...

We've recently added so many exciting features that work best with an administrator account, that we thought it was only right to offer you the opportunity to give them a try for free. Administrator subscriptions are just like teacher subscriptions except you can: 1. Invite other teachers from your school to SmartRubric, and then collaborate on rubrics and assessments, as well as share classes and student data. 2. Take advantage of higher level reporting so you can manage student progress across departments and even subjects. 3. Use the moderation  tool to standardise grades and produce detailed moderation and grade justification reports for coursework. SO! Until midnight Sunday, 17th of September  if you upgrade to an Administrator Subscription using the offer code BACKTOSCHOOL , you get your first two accounts completely free for six months. That means you can share SmartRubric with a colleague at your school and  make use of some cool collaboration tools f...

Building solid relationships with your students is, hands down, the most important part of teaching. Every single other aspect of teaching is much much easier if you have put some time into this. But. Every now and then, you will end up with a student that doesn't respond to your respectful but firm boundaries. Sometimes the problem is them, sometimes it's you, and sometimes it's down to forces beyond either of your control.  I had a student like this. Bilal (name changed, obviously) had a very difficult home life, and acted out in school. I tried the usual, followed the behaviour policy to the letter, and quickly learned that all that was happening is he was getting more and more frustrated with me, the school, the work and life in general. Our teacher/student relationship was extremely poor, and getting worse. The lessons I had with him were frequently disrupted.  Then I stopped, and thought. The system wasn't working for this kid. Detentions were pointle...

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 ....

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!)...