Website Wednesday: RubiStar

Search ability in RubiStar

Hello everyone - it's another WEBSITE WEDNESDAY!!!  Today, I want to talk about my favorite place to get rubrics for almost every assignment you can think of.  Personally, as a teacher, I am a big fan of rubrics.  They really assist me when it comes to grading student projects and writing.  Unlike tests and regular worksheets, I find that grading projects and writing is very difficult and hard to remain consistent from one student to the next.

RubiStar is a website in which you can create your own rubrics for assignments or you can search their database of other teacher created rubrics.  You have the ability to create an account and save any rubric you create and also add it to the database they have for others to search.  Often, when I'm not quite sure what project I want to do, I go to RubiStar and do a generic search of keywords.  For example, if I want a math project idea, I go and search the words "math project" and I quickly scan the results. If I find a rubric that sounds like something I'm looking for, I grab it.  Then I work backwards with the rubric in hand and create the project for my students.  Some of my best ideas have developed this way.

Customizable rubric screen

However, sometimes you don't always find a great premade rubrics for what you need.  When this happens, you can create a rubric.  RubiStar makes this extremely easy!  You choose from a list of customizable rubrics for whatever assignment you are creating one for.  From there, they provide you a blank rubric that allows you to go in and create categories and number values.  BUT the best part is, they also provide a drop down box with premade categories for you to choose from.  And these are also editable.  Once you have your perfect rubric created, you can print it or export it into Excel.

Here are my top two reasons why I think every teacher should use rubrics:
1.  Guidelines - rubrics provide not only the teacher guidelines as to how and what they will be grading on but they also provide those guidelines to their students and parents.  That way it is no secret as to what the teacher is looking for in the assignment.
2.  Self-assessment - I personally love to print out the rubrics and give them to my students when I give the assignment.  When students turn in their final assignment, they also turn the rubric back into me which they self-assessed themselves on.  This has been a huge step in getting students to actually look back over their work.

Now trust me, I know there are MANY websites that you can get rubrics from but in my opinion none are quite as fabulous as RubiStar!  And if you are completely clueless as to what to do, they even provide a tutorial for you.  Check it out and tell me what you think.