Fun Ipad App for Practicing Conventions

The common core states that students should spell correctly and have control over sentence structure.  This leaves many teachers wondering what this means and how do you teach that.  One app called Grading Game helps students practice skills in conventions and it's a lot of fun.  The basis of the game is that students need to find errors in a paper in order to win points or money.  When a student points out an error, the correction is made and explained in a word or two.  At first I thought that it would be easy for students to just click anywhere in the writing until they came across an error, but the app covers that as students will lose time if they are incorrect about an error.  I know I had a lot of fun playing.  The timer is only a minute so it keeps things exciting.

Grading with CCSS?? How does it work?

If science and social studies is integrating with com arts, how do you grade that?  With me teaching com arts and science and social studies to be in different classes, ideas are: do writing together with the other class and both teachers grade it (one for com. arts and one for content) or have a category in the subject area for com arts. The concern with the second is that a student can be really good with science but score poorly because of the com. arts.  The difficulty with the first is having to coordinate the grade to figure out which hour a student has social studies and then having to refile for when they have com. arts.  Key to this would be having students always label a paper with content hour & com arts hour.  After grading one paper, Carrie can refile for me to submit the grade.

Standards Based Grading: Active Grade

Trying out standards based grading for a possibility this year.  I will be teaming with social studies and science along with the common core except that I will be focusing heavily on the com arts skills.  One program, ActiveGrade costs $4.99 per month for a single teacher and looks pretty comprehensive and easy to use.  Currently we are using Skyward so I am looking into how I can use skyward for that same purpose.  It may just be that I put a separate grade for each part of the rubric.