The SmartRubric Blog | SmartRubric

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...

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...

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 ....

I'd like to share a really simple, one-off lesson that is both fun and really digs deeply into some technical aspects of creative writing. It was my go-to lesson whenever I had to do cover for an English class (best for year 8 & up): it fits beautifully into a 55 minute slot (with plenty of scope for extension if you teach longer lessons) and requires no prep, powerpoint or resources. It's fun, and it resulted in a lot of 'aha' moments for kids and hilarious writing. Sold? Good. Try this lesson: Objective: Explore the effects of choices about tense and voice in your creative writing BEFORE YOU BEGIN: Get each student to choose a number between 1 and 3 , and a letter between a and c . Have them write this down on a piece of paper and swear solemnly not to change it after the lesson begins. Extension for very able students: add another letter - either y or z. Starter:   Outline this simple plot: A boy is walking down the road, holding a balloon. A car goes...

It's exam prep season, which means that sadly, KS3 probably isn't getting much love at the moment. To rectify this, I'm going to share a couple of really easy English Speaking and Listening lesson formats that take approximately zero planning and work from years 7-9, plus a couple of downloadable rubrics to make sure that you're evidencing progress. If you're just here for the freebie rubrics, I've bundled together a discussion rubric and a presentation/speech rubric. You can download the bundle  here . It's aligned with the current National Curriculum expectations for KS3 English, but you could easily adapt them up or down.  As always, if you are a SmartRubric user, you can bypass the printable and use the interactive version of these rubrics. It means all of your rich formative assessment data will be automatically captured, and targets, levels and grades will be generated for all of your students. They're in the template library. If you aren...

You've marked an entire set of books (or just one student) using SmartRubric, and now you would like to pass that feedback on to your students. Great! Here's how you do it.  (If you would rather watch a one-minute video demonstration, you can do that here ) Option 1: I want to print (or save a PDF) a feedback sheet for a single student : When you have finished marking a piece of student work, you will see something like this:  Click it! Click 'Go to detailed student report'. This brings you to the report for that student. Scan it over, make sure you like what it says, and then go ahead and click the print icon in the top right corner of the report:   Now, if you want to print it out right then and there, you can go ahead and do that. You might need to mess around with the layout (change from portrait to landscape or vice versa depending on your particular printer/browser configurations). If you print in colour, you'll get snazzy colour blocks to h...

A good rubric isn't an assessment tool, it's a learning tool. Download this rubric for free to help students develop the vocabulary and skills they need to become reflective, strategic learners. If you're already a SmartRubric user, you can add this rubric to your library by getting it from the Template Library. Just click here and 'add this rubric to my library' . This rubric would be a great starting place for a conversation with a student about their learning during a tutorial, mentoring session or one-on-one meeting. Here's a list of questions you can use right now to elicit meaningful student response to your feedback: General: What is your biggest priority to work on for next time? Why? Explain one specific thing that you are going to do before next time to improve. Why do you think it is going to help? Make a list of small, specific actions you can take next time to improve on a target. What are your goals for next time? What are y...