First a WoPAC (Word, Phrase, Acronym or Concept often used by educators)

If you're around educators for any length of time, the word 'rubric' will always come up.

And if you're a techie, the word is likely new to your vocabulary. Or, at least it was to mine.
The first thing I always thought of when I heard the word 'rubric' was Barney Rubble from the Flinstones.
Rubble, rubric - that's the closest association I could make to anything I already had stored away in memory.

So it was on my shortlist of words to understand at the start.

Here's what Google has to define it:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&defl=en&q=define:Rubric&sa=X&oi=glossary_definition&ct=title

A rubric, from what I understand so far, is a way to structure a 2 dimensional grid that lets teachers more easily assign scores to tasks to be learned, as well as categorize them by level of expertise and expectations.

The rubric helps teachers to better classify students as beginner, intermediate and expert, and what knowledge constitutes somebody being at that level, and then also assign scores within level depending on how well they are doing at that level. It's almost a 3 dimensional graph in 2 dimensions it seems.

It provides a way to structure the scoring process, for things that may be subjective, to make it easier to take all the considerations into mind while scoring, and keep it organized and flexible to help in representing just where the student is on the important aspects of whatever the rubric might be setup to measure.

Techie's might use rubrics also, without realizing it, whenever they evaluate a new product and/or service - they have certain criteria they might be looking for, and they rate the product/service based on that criteria, which results in a final score for the product/service. But, I've never heard a techie say the word 'rubric'. 'Product evaluation form' is the phrase that comes to mind for something similar in the tech world. I'd probably say a rubric is a product evaluation form on steroids.

On a different note...

A wonderful article, I thought, on the educator's mindset...
http://www.drrobertbrooks.com/writings/articles/0509.html
I don't know that it's the mindset that all teachers have, but in any case, thought it a good perception to have of their mindset, and something to help them work towards if they aren't working towards it already.

gthomson

A venture into the mindset of teachers

If you are a teacher that came to this site looking for information about technology, you're probably in the wrong place. This site is for just the opposite! It is written by a techie, but a techie who has found himself in the position of needing to understand the educational side of things better.

This is my venture into doing just that...

Some background on why -
I'm a techie that does web-based development on a program called EdWeb 2.0. It provides teachers with an easy way to create and maintain a web site, and it was designed primarily with K-12 level teachers in mind.

I got my B.S. in CIS long ago, and have been in the tech field for about 20 years, so I know tech pretty well I'd say.

But I'm finding myself more often talking with teachers who sometimes seem to use a different set of common words in everyday talk. Things like 'pedagogy', 'rubrics', 'constructivist learning theory', etc... These concepts are all very new to me, and I'm working towards understanding the meaning behind them better so that I can, in turn, both talk more intelligently with teachers talking their language, and also use some of the same terminology in my application and help system so that we have a common base of understanding of how to describe the types of problems they may need help in solving via technology.

There are plenty of sites, blogs, etc... out there to help teachers understand technology. This isn't another one of those. This site is more to help technology people better understand teachers.
Teachers are welcome here too, but you all probably already know this stuff, and have no need to learn about it from a techie. But if you find something useful - have at it!

I've even heard it said these teachers have not only a secret language they use, but a secret handshake as well. I haven't seen it yet, but am curiously watching, and will keep you posted if I hear any more about that...

gthomson