Assessment and Blogging

Many teachers have contemplated using blogs with their students, and many have started doing so. One difficult question most have is how to assess and manage all the posts.This will hopefully help people who are doing or about to be doing this in their classrooms.

*This is designed for teachers using Kidblog but could be applied to other blogs too.


Formative Assessment

Writing Ideas

• Practice language skills by making a post asking students to show examples of something (eg: complete sentence, action verb, correct comma use).

• Student to student feedback
• You can give students instructions to give targeted feedback to others’ posts
• This could be done as partners or small groups, or you could ask them to give feedback for a certain number of people

• Teacher to student feedback
• This could be done in addition to student feedback or by itself
• You could go into their post and highlight or add different colored text to draw their attention to areas for improvement or areas of success
• You can make your comments private in Kidblog if you feel that is best

• Personal reflection
• You could instruct students to assess themselves using a rubric or some other format
• Students could reply to their own post and write about their self-assessment, or they could write a reply post about the feedback they got from others

Reading and Other Ideas

• Ask students to identify examples of something or defend something from a reading (noun, descriptive adjective, character motive, climax)
• Remember that no one sees others’ posts until you approve them, so they have to provide original thinking!
• Ask students to post a hypothesis about something and defend their thinking
• Ask students to post pictures of different types of geometric shapes and label them.

*Any type of checking for understanding could work

Summative Assessment

The main form of summative assessment with blogs is to have students post their final work as a blog post. Then you can assess it using your criteria or rubric. Here are some ideas about how that could work:

• You can paste your rubric directly in your comment and provide feedback that way.

• When you add a comment to the student’s post, you can click the box that reads “make this comment private”. That way only the student can view it.
• You could ask the student to respond to your assessment.

*Important things to consider

• Managing posts
• It might be best to make instructional posts by title and numbers for students (and parents) to follow as well as a paper copy for them to follow
• If you set up groups, you can go to the groups icon under Users and then view posts from there. That will be helpful because you can follow the response train better.
• You can also instruct students to title their post a certain way (eg: final writing post) and go through posts by title
• If I was doing it, I would use groups to organize things and add to my gradebook or student notes as I approved posts and comments. That way I could grade efficiently while making note of missing/ problematic posts.

• Site navigation may be difficult for some. It is a good idea to provide instructions to students and also parents (direct them to a web resource or a printed resource)