The SmartRubric Blog | SmartRubric

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 subscribing.

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 gre

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 bengali

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!