Evaluations for Digital Projects

As Understanding By Design, and backwards planning teaches us, the goals and assessments should be the point from which we start when designing curriculum. Although I do not follow this exclusively, I do think it's a good practice and one of the areas in which I feel most challenged is grading. Admittedly, I don't grade as rigorously as I would like. This is the result of many different reasons, not just laziness. However one of the reasons is that I've never had it made as straightforward a process as I recently discovered it COULD be: The September/October 2010 Learning and Leading with Technology featured an article about this topic entitled "Where's the Beef?: Adding Rigor to Student Digital Projects." The author, Bernajean Porter, cites the NCREL "Nine Scoring Traits for Digital Projects." Each scoring guide is divided into two parts that make total sense: content and craftsmanship. Perfecto! It's exactly the combination I seek in all the projects I design for students.

The article goes over other important facets of project design but I got the most out of the scoring traits. I'll be trying these out immediately for sure.