A Blogging Rubric

For those of us using or planning to integrating blogging as an instructional activity in class, the rubric below from the University of Wisconsin Stout is definitely a must have. This rubric is available for free and can be downloaded in PDF format.

This rubric is intended to help you evaluate students blogs along a set of pre-defined academic criteria. Students can also use it to self assess their blogging and identify the extent to which their blogging activities align with these academic criteria. This rubric use six criteria to evaluate students blogging activities. These are :

1- Content and Creativity
This is supposed to assess students content in terms of the depth of insight, understanding, and argumentativeness of the viewpoints expressed around the topic.

2- Voice
This one assesses students writing style in terms of clarity of tone, awareness of the audience addressed, and the word choice employed.

2-Text layout and use of graphics and multimedia
This criterion checks students incorporation of multimedia materials in the composition of their blog posts.These materials include the use of graphics and images, the use of captions and annotations with pictures, and quality of graphics used.

3-Timelines and Tags
This one checks whether the students update their blog content, how often they do so and whether they categorize and tag their posts appropriately.

4-Citation
This is to check for the citation practices of students: whether they appropriately format and cite sources and how they deal with copyright materials and permissions.

5- Quality of writing and proofreading
This last criterion assesses students written responses in terms of grammatical, spelling and punctuation errors and whether or not their writing style  facilitates communication.

The rubric is available for download from this page.