Earlier this month, all of the second semester grades for students in Evansville, Indiana were lost through an unfortunate turn of events.  And while that was unfortunate, it raised some questions in the mind of Jeff Giddins, author of the Southeast Georgia Tech Integration Blog, on how assessment is documented. 

Even though a technology glitch can result in lost grades, other kinds of technology can act as a back-up. For example, if all the teachers in a school were able to make digital publishing tools available to students so that each pupil could maintain a digital portfolio of work in a variety of formats and a variety of locations (i.e., Moodles, blog posts, wikis, websites, podcasts, et cetera), the likelihood of losing everything would be minimized. There would always be artifacts of student learning handy if assessment and grading had to be revisited. In the event of a loss of grades, the availability of well-understood rubrics and examples of student work would mitigate a great deal of anxiety.

If you were looking for another reason to justify the use of blogs or other online means of assessment, here is another reason worth considering.