Assessment

So - you've set up a class blog project - now how are you going to assess it?  You may consider providing a rubric that describes what a good post is and what good comments are and assign point values based on your rubric.   I'm using this rubric in my ESL class this semester.

Krista Kennedy, an instructor in the Department of Writing Studies, created this presentation about using blogs in the classroom and offers good suggestions about the pros and cons of using individual, group or class blogs.   At the end of the presentation, she offers examples of rubrics she's created for assessing student blogs.  

In second language teaching, pointing out grammar-errors on a blog can prove to be difficult.  How can you get into the post to highlight the errors?  A blog doesn't offer the same flexibility as a wiki does in this respect.  But, as jchambers points out in his blog post, "Using Diigo for Intensive Language Feedback" there are other tools to provide this type of feedback.  We won't be covering diigo in this course, but if you're interested in using blogs and providing more pointed grammar feedback,  you might consider using diigo.  

How would you assess a blog?