Updated in January 2022
Integrating blogging in your teaching will definitely boost your instructional methodologies and enhance your students learning. The pedagogical benefits of blogging in education is well documented in the literature. More and more teachers and educators are embracing the educational affordances of this digital medium in their instruction.
Blogging can help students develop and hone in their digital literacy skills. It also provides them with a powerful medium for self-expression and reflective thought. Knowing that their work will be seen and read by people beyond their classroom, students’ levels of motivation, focus, and dedication increase driving them to invest more time to improve their writing and search skills.
Blogging also empowers students voice and provides them with authentic audience to interact with. Whether it is to showcase their learning, share creative writing projects, publish stories and biographies, engage in educational video projects, blogging has the potential to transform students learning and create authentic learning experiences.
However, for blogging to be pedagogically effective and to add value to your teaching practices, it needs to be conceptualized within a well-defined pedagogical framework. This framework, as I argued in a previous post, should speak to five main areas: learning objectives, students-generated blogging rules, digital citizenship and copyright, choice of blogging platform, and blogging rubrics. Check out teachers blogging framework to learn more.
In this post, I want to specifically focus on the last element of the blogging framework: blogging rubrics. For your educational blogging experience to be pedagogically sound, you need to design a blogging rubric that clearly outlines the skills you want your students to develop together with the evaluative criteria you will be using to assess students blogging activities.
To help you get started creating your own blogging rubric, I compiled for you this list of resources featuring sample blogging rubrics created by other teachers and educators. Check them out for inspiration and ideas to include in your own rubrics.
1- A Rubric for Evaluating Student Blogs, by University of Wisconsin-Stout
I have been recommending this rubric to teachers for many years now. This rubric is based on a number of criteria including: Content and Creativity, Voice, Text layout, Use of Graphics and Multimedia, Timeliness and Tags, Citations, Quality of Writing, and Proofreading.
2- Blogging rubrics by Teachers Pay Teachers
Check out this page in Teachers Pay Teachers where you will have access to a wide variety of teacher-created blogging rubrics all of which are offered for a low cost. These include: Blog Post Rubric (by Classroom Share), Creating A Blog Assignment+Rubric (by Frankie Says Learn), Blog Project Editable Rubric Distance Learning (by Education with DocRunning), Blogging Rubric: Score Students on Their Posts, Comments and Conventions (by Cleverly Bearly), and many more,.
3- Rubrics provided by University of Houston
The folks in the College of Technology in the University of Houston offer this collection of helpful rubrics to use in your teaching.These materials are in Word files and cover topics such as: blog assignment rubric, critical thinking rubric, discussion board rubric, problem solving rubric, research paper rubric, teamwork rubric, writing assignment rubric, discussion board rubric, and many more.
4- Rubrics by topic, The Center for Teaching and Learning at DePaul
The Center for Teaching and Learning at DePaul offers this collection of helpful rubrics covering three broad areas: Intellectual and Practical Skills (includes inquiry and analysis rubrics, oral communication rubric, written communication rubric, information literacy rubric, and more), Personal and Social Responsibility (includes ethical reasoning rubric, global learning rubric, civic knowledge and engagement, and more), and Integrative and Applied Learning (includes integrative and applied learning).
5- Blog rubric-Middle school
This blog rubric created by Clarity Innovations and accessible through OER Commons is designed specifically for middle school students to self-assess their blogs. The rubric covers the following areas: purpose, content, sources, audience, voice, writing, updates, extra features, and creativity. This rubric is also available to export to Google Docs.
More sources:
Types of rubrics and how to create them (University of DePaul)
What are grading rubrics (South Plains College)
Rubrics: Do’s and Don’ts (by Larry Ferlazzo for Edweek)
Blog Rubric (by Dr. Naomi Johnson Dr. Heather Lettner-Rus)
