This year my department has gone fully-blended which means that our assignments and projects have gone digital.  So instead of students handing in a notebook at the end of the unit, they work on digital assignments throughout the unit.  My US history colleagues had a horrible experience with their first digital notebooks (incomplete work, incorrectly done assignments, little to no work effort) which allowed me to tweak the process for my World History kiddoes.

And this is why I love Twitter.

I was pondering how I was going to approach the digital notebook assignments with my 7th graders…thinking about how I could make sure that they were 1) doing the assignments and 2) completing them with integrity.

Enter the Single Point Rubric.

It was so unexpected…yet timely.  Someone in my PLN retweeted a link to a site that explained the awesomeness of the single point rubric.

I was all over it.  I created one that morning and by the next day, my colleague and I tried it out with our students.  Each student filled out a single point rubric for one of their peers. What was interesting was…I thought that they would simply give a plus, check, or minus for each category and then leave some sparsely written feedback.  But what actually happened is that they were verbally giving feedback while also writing very specific feedback.  It was so cool!  Students were defending their work but their peers kept referring back to the rubric.  In hindsight, I should have recorded their conversations…at least for posterity’s sake!

That was a couple of months ago.

Since then, my students have used a single point rubric several times for peer review and now self-reflection.  I use the same rubric for my own feedback.  Though I really love listening to their discussions as they still continue to verbally provide feedback while also writing it down…what I love more is seeing that my students are now more conscientious about doing their very best because they know that their peers will be reviewing their work.

And the best part?  The digital notebook assignments are solidly crafted.  My students are redoing their work while also helping each other in the learning process.  Who could ask for more?