Rubistar: An Easy Way to Find and Create Rubrics

Rubistar provides teachers with a great and free way to find and create rubrics to use in the classroom. Teachers can search for a rubric made by other teachers, access their saved rubrics, or create a new rubric. This website targets teachers who want to incorporate the use of rubrics in their assessment of students but may not have the time to make a rubric. Through this website, teachers can use generic rubrics as is or edit them to add more specific expectations. 

Rubistar does not require you to register for an account in order to use and create rubrics. This is a great feature since it does not restrict you from using the contents of the website if you choose not to register, since some people may not want to do so. Choosing to register for an account does provide users with more benefits, such as being able to save and edit rubrics online so you can access previously made rubrics. You will also be able to access rubrics from anywhere, whether teachers are at school or at home. If teachers choose to save their rubric, the rubric is given a unique URL so it can be accessed at any time.

Rubistar breaks down the customizable rubric templates into ten different categories: Oral Projects, Products, Multimedia, Science, Research & Writing, Work Skills, Math, Art, Music, and Reading. Two different types of rating scales are also available: numerical (4, 3, 2, 1) or descriptive (excellent, good, satisfactory, and needs improvement). Providing teachers with these choices allows them to choose what works best in terms of the classroom needs and the grade they are teaching. 

Although this website is beneficial since it provides teachers with easy to use rubric templates, the website itself does not provide information to users on how to create a proper rubric. Unless users are skilled and experienced in creating rubrics, beginners will have to figure it out for themselves. With that being said, the benefits of this website outweigh the disadvantages, and it is definitely a website teachers should reference and make use of when creating and using rubrics.

Website: http://rubistar.4teachers.org/index.php

Mara@NU