Higher Education

Learning How to Simplify Rubrics

A short video clip where Jeff Przybylo demonstrates how to use rubrics in GoReact

Watch as Jeff Przybylo shows the simple ways to build, edit, and utilize rubrics in GoReact so that students always know what’s expected of them and teachers save time avoiding complicated rubrics.

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So I start watching the speech. I’m giving feedback through five technical tools. They are rubrics, tags, comments, audio comments, and video comments. There goes my preview for you. I’m going to start with the rubric because I think that’s the thing we’re probably most familiar with. So here in the center, your comments are here, that’s what you’re looking at here. These are all the comments and tags and audios and videos, and I’ll get to all this soon. But this little clipboard in the center here is where you will see the rubrics. And rubrics, you can see the Tessie did a rubric on herself eventually, and then I put them into teams and then they evaluated each other for a peer evaluation kind of thing. So you can see rubrics from all of her teammates. We’re just going to look at mine.

I have used rubrics, soft rubrics with many programs through my life. And I’ve never seen anything with so many options, they’re so comprehensive as what they’ve given you here and GoReact. So some of your questions will be, could I do Likert scale? Could I do Checkboxes? Could I do yes/nos? All of that stuff is programmable. And using the rubrics with GoReact actually pretty easy. I took to it really fast. I’m using a Likert scale as well as some point boxes. So it’s the informative speech, it’s 200 points, 125 for the speech. There’s some PowerPoint, blah, blah, blah. When the speech is done, they have to go in and do this self review, that’s what we would look at here and actually there you go. This is Tessie grading herself. And I go in afterwards and I give the points in this box here. So it’s just a point box.

And then when she does all of her reviews of her teammates, I put the points in here. This is also a score box that I could use for her setting, just to kind of assess her, sound, her lighting, that she brought an audience and all of that stuff. And then as I watched the speech and if I were to click this, you don’t need to see her speech. But if I were to click this button down here, as she watched her speech, I can have the rubric next to me, I can make her bigger and smaller. And as I go through the speech, I’m just going through my rubric. You all know what a rubric is, so here’s mine. So I’m looking at the attention getter and so on down the line. What I love about the rubrics with GoReact is that you can write as much as you want in these boxes when you’re kind of programming your rubric.

So it’s got titles and that’s what these are. And I try to be nice and specific, nice job leading us towards the topic, solid work leading us towards your topic. So I’m in this case, I just changed nice to solid and then down the line. But there’s also subtopics here. And this is a case where I found the students I was giving four points to instead of five, kind of were making the same mistake over and over. So I just typed it in there as the secondary, the main title you could put, which is what these are. And then you could put secondary titles in there and I’ve never really tested it, but it lets you write as much as you want here. So I’ve tried to make my rubrics as comprehensive as possible. And as you’ll see in a second, I’ve also used them as we all do as a teaching tool also.

So I then would rate her central idea, I would rate her credibility. And by the way, this was the introduction category, all right? After the introduction category, there’s a delivery category and so on down the line. But when you put an item, so here I put significance. Actually type the [inaudible 00:10:59] here that designed to be a learning rule. So not only are students seeing here’s, they got a five or a four, but they’re reading what my expectation is for a significant statement. Remember, you need three blah, blah, blah. And I’ve learned to write them generically. So these comments that I’m putting here, they’re significant and they mean something, whether you got a three or a five on the item, on the rubric. And then we did their preview statement and I also kind of defined what a preview statement here is. So as a student goes back and reads their rubric, it’s almost like a little review session for them also.

We’ve got delivery, energy, so on down the line, you recognize some of these things. I didn’t want to get to this particular item. So we judge their use of room. Now in my online class, I have a series of tip videos. One of my videos is how to utilize the entire room, how to not just stand in one place. And Tessie just stood in one place, so she got a one on this. But instead of a description, as I do, for example, here with eye contact where I describe eye contact, I actually put a link to the video there. Now it’s not a hot link they’d have to copy and paste it, but in her comments, I’ll show you later. I tell her, “Hey, under use of room, there’s a link to a video before your next speech, go ahead and watch the video.”

So let your mind go crazy. You could either put descriptions or video links or YouTube videos that you could watch. Just so your rubric isn’t just telling them their score, but I use it to actually be teaching too. I do the same thing here with transitions. Here’s a video on how to write a simple transition. Here’s a video on internal previews and these really developed. I didn’t just sit down one day and throw this all onto a rubric. The rubrics move from semester to semester, so that’s a good thing. Every semester before the assignment starts, I go back in and add links to any new videos that I’ve done. And I reread things, kind of check for grammar, add things, change things. So the video, sorry, the rubric base stays, but you could adjust it from semester to semester. You could also add… Let me scroll to the bottom here. Notice that mine’s pretty extensive. But the rubric actually goes in what the order of the speech is. So I’m really just, I’m not jumping around in my rubric too much, I’m just kind of grading the speech.

When we get to the bottom, you can do some, if you… I have a Q&A session at mine so I have points there. I’ve made a way to do time. If anyone from McGraw Hill is listening, I would love the ability to have a timer in here and then take points off for time. But until that happens, did I say McGraw Hill? I meant GoReact. Sorry. The two companies. Maybe McGraw Hill could help with that, who knows. But I’ve kind of fudged it here. You can do open boxes. So if there was something that they did wrong, I can go minus 10. And then I would explain to her why I took off the deduction in this case, I didn’t have any deductions, so you can put some open boxes there. And then at the end I put in a box for general comments. You could put these boxes anywhere. So if I wanted to put one, after every single item on my rubric, I could put them in there. I prefer to just kind of do them at the end.