Friday, January 27, 2012

A reminder: TOAST is for eating and grading blogposts.

Hey everyone, hope you're having/have had a great CNY break, and that you'll be ready to come back to school on Monday and get back to work! BOOO! I've spent a lot of time relaxing and planning torture homework and lessons for you, and now I'm working on the 170 unread blogposts I have yet to grade this semester. FUN¡

However, before I start leaving comments on your posts and you start getting all kinds of email notifications on your scores and I start getting all kinds of emails complaining about your grades, remember how I grade posts: using our tried-and-true TOAST method. As I've stated before:
Usually, if we're working on formal 5¶+ essays, I'll use this little rubric to base my score. However, for something like a blog post, which is short, informal, and often times more to-the-point, I think it would be unfair to grade off of the same rubric. For this reason, I've developed a new way of giving points for posts, called TOAST:
  • Technical elements: grammar, linguistics, spelling, etc.
  • Originality: creativity, new perspectives, different outlook.
  • Appropriateness: Completion of the objective of the assignment (e.g required length, subject matter, quality).
  • Supplements: Inclusion of applicable multimedia (e.g. images, video) and formatting (e.g. lists, links, blockquotes, text formatting).
  • Time invested: visible effort put into the assignment, not simply thrown together.
I'll usually give 3-10 points per element, meaning that each post (depending on its level of difficulty) can be worth from 15 to 50 points.
Got it? So please, before you write me angry emails complaining about your final score, please take a peek at how I've graded you so you'll understand why you failed epic-ly earned that grade.

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