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 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 ...

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. 

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!)...

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...

In order to keep providing you with a high quality tool for maximising your formative assessment, speeding up your marking and improving your progress data, we're going to have to start asking for a nominal monthly subscription fee. Our valued early adopters - teachers who have signed up before March 31st, 2017 can continue to use SmartRubric for free   forever unless they choose to upgrade to an administrator account  (these will be subject to our new pricing model after the change on March 31st). If you sign up after  March 31st, 2017 will get to try SmartRubric for free for a month, and then in order to continue using SmartRubric you will need to pay £3.50 per month for an individual teacher account , or £5 per user per month for an administrator account. We won't take any payment information when you sign up for the free trial, and will send you a reminder to subscribe a week before we suspend your account. You can reactivate a suspended account any time by subscr...

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...

The final feature that we planned to implement before the launch (!) at Bett 2017  is complete, and I am maybe even more excited about it than I was about moderation . You now have access to a fully featured query engine that lets you drill down into specific student groups and track progress. You want to compare how Year 11 is performing compared to year 7 versus the whole school? Easy peasy, lemon etc: HOT.  You want to compare how year 7 EAL history students are progressing against literacy objectives with how they are doing in science? You only need to think it and it is so! What's that you say? You want a nice line graph that maps it all out for you against a baseline? Why certainly! Your assistant head prefers raw data so she can make her own infographics? We have you covered. The query engine means you can filter student progress by a whole range of student, subject and skill characteristics. So, if a key group for you is lower income white boys, or G&T ben...

If you are finding SmartRubric useful as an individual teacher, you might not realise how much more  useful it can be if you use it with a department or school. Broadly speaking, within a department or school, you can share student data and look at how students are progressing against key skills across the curriculum. It also gives you the ability to moderate work and communicate directly with your colleagues. This level is an area that we are excited to develop, and we are really interested to hear what you have to say about what would make SmartRubric most useful for you and your department. All you need to do is upgrade your account by going to your Billing Area  and select 'Administrator Subscription'. Decide how many members of your department you want, and create your subscription. You'll need to log out and back in again once you've done this. Once you have administrator rights (you will know because your navigation bar will turn teal and you get some extr...

I'm not going to lie, I think moderation might be the feature that I was most looking forward to including in SmartRubric. Like many KS4 and KS5 teachers, I have participated in many epic moderation sessions. We can't really help with this  part of moderation. They all start the same way. The big table. The enormous stack of coursework files next to each seat. There is no kettle, but that is intentional. Fleeing to the staff room at regular intervals on the flimsy excuse of a cuppa is one of the only things that keeps you sane. The jovial, strained tones of your colleagues at the beginning of the session, the grim and aching silence at the end. And the worst part -- the sheer volume of admin. There's keeping track of what everyone gave each piece, and why. There's recording your final mark and the justification for it. There's filling in pro forma after pro forma in snatched moments for days afterwards to prepare your sample. There's the horrifying reali...

SmartRubric is designed to help you make really really accurate, sensible rubrics. When you create a rubric, you can slice up and weight assessment objectives and level descriptors however you want. So really, if you are marking work and the calculated grades are coming out too high or too low, that's a problem with your rubric, and the assessment police say: "fix the rubric, not the mark!" However. In real life, there are times when that isn't going to work. Schools are not machines, students are not cogs, teachers are not automatons. You, the teachers, are the professionals, and your judgement is paramount. SmartRubric does not want to get in your way. If you need to edit a mark, just type over it like so: Type over the score shown on the marking page for that student/assessment.  Once you have edited the mark, a little pencil icon will show up next to it to indicate that the mark has been edited. It will no longer update when you click on the matrix. If y...

Great news! Pinemarten Education will be showcasing SmartRubric at the Bett Exhibition in London! It's a really exciting event, and I would highly recommend a visit if you are in the education sector, regardless of your role. It's so inspiring, and the speakers and exhibitors are wonderful. It's such a privilege to be involved! If you would like to attend, you can register here to attend for free: http://www.bettshow.com Hope to see you there!

Hi all! We've just added some new features, and there are plenty more coming soon. You may now start receiving alerts on your homepage either from us or from other teachers at your school. Soon you will be able to create alerts and link to classes, assessments or students as you will to loop in other members of staff. Ultimately, we would like to show you a feed of relevant information about your students and classes whenever you log in. This is the first (baby) step towards that! Additionally, we've made some features available to department leads and school administrators. Now you can transfer responsibility for an assessment from one teacher to another (useful in case of temporary illness), or add additional teachers to a class. This is all in preparation for the release of our biggest round of features between now and the full product launch in January. We are adding moderation  to SmartRubric! This means that you will be able to request moderation for an assessment,...

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 have a lot of great features planned for SmartRubric. We will be updating continuously to ensure that you get the best possible service. Every now and then we will publish a list of what we have added as well as what we have in the pipeline, so check this feed! The Beta is launching with a fully featured marking engine. You can create custom rubrics and use them to assess your students. For those of you who have tried out the alpha version, here are the beta features we are most excited about. Top new features: Batch upload students to your classes (we have a disambiguation process to prevent duplicates!) Import and export rubric files so you can share them with your colleagues The ability to branch rubrics, so if you want to create two similar rubrics you can just copy one and modify the copy.  Search functionality An improved teacher administrator workflow Significant enhancements to the account registration and administration process Coming soon: Student a...