Edulastic
Are you looking for a high-quality assessment tool with the ability to search for standard-aligned test questions? Would you prefer to construct your own assessment questions with question types similar to those your students will encounter on their OSTs? Or maybe you'd like an assessment tool that provides in-depth insight into student data? If any of these apply to you, then I highly recommend giving Edulastic a try!
I began using Edulastic over four years ago in an attempt to construct OST practice items for my students. One of the American History Test Prep sites I found had links to Edulastic with access to a few practice test items for students. I was immediately impressed with the idea that students could use Edulastic to answer hard-to-mimic test question types like: Classification, Re-Sequencing, and Multi-part to name a few.
Fast forward to this school year and the district has purchased premium accounts for our teachers. This means access to more tools and deeper data insights! It also means that Edulastic will have a spotlight shone upon it as one of the monthly iterations of our Step Right Up challenge series. However, for those interested in diving into Edulastic sooner, I thought I'd provide a short primer on what to expect upon logging in if the platform is new to you.
Firstly, Edulastic is now integrated with Clever, which means both you and your students can access the site from the Clever platform. Upon logging into Edulastic for the first time, you'll want to navigate to the Manage Class portion of the sidebar. (hint: the sidebar is simply small icons on the left-hand side of your screen until your cursor hovers over it) Inside Manage Class, you'll be able to sync your Clever classes over to Edulastic.
Once your classes are synced, it's time to start finding those assessment items. Personally, I recommend going to the Test tab of the sidebar. Within the Test tab, you're able to search for test items by specific content standards. You're also able to access Ohio Department of Education released test questions. (hint: these can be easily accessed by filtering your search by Collections to Edulastic Certified)
Edulastic also allows you to clone and edit questions you come across throughout the site to tweak them to fit your needs. Under the Item Bank tab, you're able to construct your own questions and let me tell you, you'll be hard-pressed to think of a question that the website won't allow you to assess your students with. The depth of question types is one of the areas where Edulastic truly shines. Combine that with automatic grading (at least for non-written response questions) makes assessing with this tool an absolute gem. I particularly enjoy that I can control how Edulastic assesses certain questions that may have multiple answer options, i.e. Re-sequencing questions.
There will be far more to come on Edulastic as the year progresses, but I hope this post has at least piqued your interest in the platform enough to log in and check it out for yourself. If you have any questions about Edulastic, please click the "Email Me" link at the bottom of this post to send me a direct email.
Useful Links:
.png)
