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...

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: ...

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  Because SmartRubric makes it easy to share, duplicate and modify rubrics, sometimes you end up with old, out of date ones clogging up your library.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...

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,...

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 ....

Don't despair. If you teach KS4 and KS5, you are probably in the midst of some pretty serious exam preparation. For many of you, that means practice papers. Lots of them. And if you happen to teach a subject like English, that means a lot  of extended essay questions to mark. So, you know, prepare to spend your evenings and weekends marking. After all, you want your students to do well, don't you? Well, yes, of course. But there's a tool that can help speed up the marking process and improve the consistency and usefulness of your feedback to students. 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 a free trial of SmartRubric and use an interactive rubric to mark to pesky mocks (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 using them for all of your open-ended asse...

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...

Set up your SmartRubric account, add a class full of students, build a custom rubric and create an assessment in less time than you think. I know that as a teacher, your time is really precious. Perhaps you've been putting off getting to grips with SmartRubric because you're swamped with work. I know how it goes. But, did you know that you can completely set up your account, create a custom rubric and start marking real student work in less than ten minutes? For a time investment of just ten minutes, you could be saving hours on time spent marking this term! I recorded a real-time video as I set up a brand new SmartRubric account. I made a rubric for an in-class English Literature assessment, but you could evaluate anything you like. All you need to get started is a SmartRubric account ( get one for free here ), a list of the students in the class that you would like to asses, and a clear idea of the skills or objectives for your assessment. If you haven't a...

We've made it even easier to get high quality rubrics to use with your classes by making some major improvements to the Template Library . Now, not only is it easier to find what you are looking for (rubrics are now grouped by subject and searchable by Key Stage/Grade), but all  users can publish rubrics that they have created to the Template library. Hooray! In this post, I'll cover the features of the new Template library and  how to publish your lovely rubrics to it. Part the first: The new Template Library The new Template Library The new template library has a subject menu, so you can zero in on the rubrics that are likely to be most useful for you. The badge icon lets you know how many rubrics are tagged with that subject. Help us fill them up! A detailed view of a rubric To get a closer look at a specific rubric, just click on it. A detail window will pop up, and from there you can preview the full rubric, copy it into your library or rate it . The gr...

In order to help you make the most of SmartRubric, we've given you the ability to import and export the rubrics that you (and others!) have made. If you would like to share a rubric: It's easy! All you need to do is make sure you have got your rubric the way you want it (don't forget the grade boundaries!), and click 'export' in the library. The file will automatically be saved in your downloads folder. It will have the file extension .srm, which just means that it's encoded and can only be opened by SmartRubric. You can share .srm files by email, post them online or share them on a memory stick. If you would like to import a rubric: If someone has sent you an .srm file or you found one online that you would like to use, it's easy to import it into SmartRubric. From anywhere in SmartRubric, just go to 'Rubrics' in the main menu and select 'Import'. When the modal pops up, click 'select' and find the file you wis...

We are pleased to announce a new feature! Now you have another way to add rubrics to your library.  The template library  is where you will find professionally created rubrics from assessment specialists and master teachers. It's pretty empty right now, because all of the hamsters are running on about fifteen different wheels each simultaneously, but we will be adding more rubrics as time goes by. If you see one you like, just click 'Get', and it will be copied into your library where you can change it, adapt it and add to it to whatever extent you need in order to meet the needs of your students. If you do grab a copy of one of the templates, please give it a star rating to help others make good choices. We will be looking for subject and assessment specialists to help us build a repository of quality rubrics to share with our users. If this sounds like you, and you would be interested in making a bit of cash, please send an email to  info@pinemarteneducation.com ....

We're not gonna lie, creating effective rubrics is tough -- whether you do it the old fashioned way with pen and paper, or with SmartRubric. SmartRubric is designed with assessment best practice in mind to help you create rubrics that are effective for both and your students. Before you create a Smart Rubric, you should have a look through the slideshow. It will help you prepare your assessment materials. Once you have done that, check out the video to see how to turn your prepared assessment materials into a Smart Rubric. Step 1: Prepare your rubric Preparing a rubric from MissLesniak Step 2: Create your Smart Rubric