Effective Rubrics, Part II: Using Rubric Tools

Last week, we posted about our Rubrics Teaching Resources: that is, why and how to use rubrics for your own assignments. This week, we’d like to remind everyone about the rubric tools in D2L that are designed to make your grading life easier. Remember, you may choose to use rubrics within D2L’s rubrics tool or within TurnItIn’s GradeMark. (Both can be attached to assignment dropboxes.)

An advantage of using D2L rubrics is the grades transfer directly to the dropboxes; an advantage of using GradeMark through TurnItIn is that you can see an originality report at same time you’re grading. While you are grading with GradeMark, you also can use and re-use drop-in comments from your QuickMark library, and you and your students can toggle between a summary of all these comments, a “general comments” area, and a rubric scorecard.

Are you using these tools? Feel free to share your experiences in the appropriate discussion in the CCCOnline Community.

Visit the Recorded Webinars

Each month we conduct at least one webinar on pedagogical or technical skills. On Friday Oct 1, Turnitin joined us to do their presentation from the conference. As was true at the conference, the presentation was very well received by the attendees.

BUT, what can you do if Friday at 1pm doesn’t work for you? ANSWER: We record our webinars and post them on the wiki Webinar Archive page within a few days of the event. Over the last couple of years we have built quite a list of resources on a variety of topics that you may enjoy.

My favorite part of listening to a webinar is that I can pause the presentation, speed it up, rewind it, or stop it and return to it later. I can also run the webinar and try what a presenter is demonstrating immediately in my sandbox course.

If you haven’t checked this resource out lately, please do so. If you have ideas for additional webinar topics that you would like this year, please post your comments in the CCCOnline Community’s Cultivating Excellence discussion; look for thread “Visit the Recorded Webinars”. Also, please share which webinars you’ve found most helpful and informative whether you attended in person or listened to the recording. We love getting feedback and want to schedule these events to best meet your needs.

Also, check out the Upcoming webinar page for events we have scheduled this fall.

Using TurnItIn: Upcoming Webinar

We heard great feedback about TurnItIn’s presentation at the CCCOnline Conference, but if you missed it, please note that Renee Bangerter and Jan Gilboy of TurnItIn graciously have agreed to present for us again. They will join us at our Webinar next Friday, October 1, at 1:00 p.m. on Elluminate.

This Webinar, titled “TurnItIn’s Markup and Plagiarism Detection Tools: The Mechanics and Beyond,” will address basic how-tos and answer your technical questions. We also will discuss how to use these tools constructively in your courses (i.e., interpret plagiarism results on OriginalityCheck, use this plagiarism detection as a learning tool, and use the markup tool, GradeMark, effectively).

Until next Friday, we would like to gather your questions: what do you want to know about TurnItIn? If you have TurnItIn experience you would like to share, we’d like to hear from you, as well. Please post your ideas in the appropriate discussion in the CCCOnlineCommunity.