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Here's my blurb: If you decide to do a Digital Storytelling project in your ESL class, how do you go about evaluating it? What kind of rubrics do you use? This site discusses 16 types of communication (or genres) and 9 traits for scoring. It provides example rubrics. In fact, it provides a pretty neat rubric customization tool. There are suggestions and sample lesson plans for both formal and informal evaluation, and peer review activities. Quite nice! The resources section contains lots of PDFs about incorporating digital stories into the curriculum. Here's their blurb: DigiTales.us provides ideas, resources and inspiration for families, individuals, schools, organizations, corporations, churches and everyone else ready to discover the power and magic of merging the art of storytelling with the enchantment of using digital tools.

A helpful website for creating rubrics online. 

Let's say you end up teaching EFL where you have access to the internet but no online academic site like BlackBoard to use for grading. Or, maybe you just don't like BlackBoard all that much. Engrade is an incredibly useful website in that it serves as an online gradebook for tracking academic performance and attendance. I found out about the site from a fellow GA at NAU whose department had decided that Engrade was simply easier to use than BlackBoard. While you can't upload all the content--readings and such--as you can on BlackBoard, at least as far as I can tell, Engrade does allow you to upload rubrics and word lists for flash cards. It also has a system for warning students similar to the GPS system at NAU. Yet another great feature is that if you're ever required to turn in hard copies of your gradebook or your attendance, you can easily export that information. Engrade is also FERPA compliant for those of you teaching in the US. I used it at NAU last semester, and it worked like a charm. I can't recommend it enough.

Alan, I'm glad you posted this. I piloted the use of this program along with a couple of other EFL teachers when I was in China. We ended up using it during the entire year I was teaching there. It has been a while since I used it, but I remember it being fairly user friendly. It also allowed for the sharing of reports with students. It would be interesting to see what upgrades they have made to it since then, as that was about four years ago. I would second your recommendation.

Here's my blurb: This website, hosted by the University of Houston, explores the educational uses of digital storytelling. The site contains practical information regarding different digital storytelling programs, and provides "how to" activities for writing scripts, designing storyboards, and recording audio. There is also lesson planning information, copyright information, and a discussion of rubrics for assessment and evaluation. Here's there blurb: About this Site The Goals of this Website The primary goal of the Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling website is to serve as a useful resource for educators and students who are interested in how digital storytelling can be integrated into a variety of educational activities.

If you do a digital storytelling project with your students, the Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling site linked to a contest for K-12 students to submit their stories and win cool awards such as iPods and has contests for the best stories, and your students could potentially win awards, such as iPod Minis and iPod Nanos, and scholarships up to $8000. Pretty cool motivator, don't you think? Here's the link: http://www.distco.org/