Half our way ... PBL, Rubrics and WebQuests

Well, another Sunday afternoon and I am enjoying my time here in my place. It has just finished raining in my hometown and the weather is cool and amazing to think and reflect on what I learned about my online course this last week. As I have done in the last four weeks, I started the fifth one doing my readings about rubric and alternative assessment. I realized throughouth the articles that there are different ways in which we as teachers may evaluate students's learning performance. I liked one of the phrases that were in one of the articles I read and it textually says "Alternative assessment uses activities that reveal what students can do with language emphasizing their strenghts instead of their weaknesses". This was really shocking for me because I have seen that we are focused more on pointing out students errors rather than highlighting their effort to do well in the exams.

Also, I read a little about holistic, analytic, primary and multitrait rubrics and as practice I designed a rubric at http://rubistar.4teachers.org/ website. The rubric I designed was based on a poster presentation I am going to have with my Basic English students. This was not the first time I checked this site so it was a little bit easier to work on it.

Besides this, there was something new that I learned this week and it is called "WebQuest". What I mean by saying "new" is because it was the first time I heard about this with this name. A WebQuest is a form of PBL (Project Based Learning) and its goal is to motivate students meaningfully going through the learning process little by little (scaffolding). WebQuests are very useful and attractive to teach and also to learn and I would like to implement it in the future with my students but I need to continue reading about them to get more benefits for my students.