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:

Email Me

Edulastic

Edulastic Self-Paced Training Courses

 

Edulastic for Elementary

Edulastic is in Clever for all YCSD teachers and scholars. It has OST-like questions that align with the academic content standards. For a quick 2-minute overview of Edulastic watch this:

Here are some more quick video tutorials. If you prefer a written tutorial, click here. 

Want help getting started with Edulastic? Contact the Tech Integration Department. We would love to come to help you!

Why use Edulastic in the Elementary grades? Listen to this Ohio elementary teacher to find out.

The NEW Quiz Feature in Discovery Education

Discovery Education has made many updates and improvements since last year. They have also built out many ready-to-use activities that you can easily edit to meet your scholars' needs. Arguably the best update is the new Quiz feature in Discovery Education! It is like an awesome mix of Edpuzzle, ClassFlow, & Pear Deck rolled into one easy-to-use tool.

Video Quiz

Create a Video Quiz to ask comprehension questions at points you choose within a video clip. Assess scholars using the following response types:

• Short Answer
• Poll
• Multiple Choice

Standard Quiz

Create a Standard Quiz to assess scholars using these response types:

• Short Answer
• Poll
• Multiple Choice
• Multiple Select
• Drawn response
• Annotate (uploaded image)
• Audio response

Live Quiz

Launch a Live Quiz to verbally ask scholars a question that they type a response to in real-time. At any point during a Live Quiz, you have the option to launch an Exit Ticket to gauge how scholars are feeling about the quiz. 

Assign a Quiz or Launch a Quiz

A scholar can launch an assigned quiz (video or standard quiz) from their DE homepage and complete it at their own pace. 

When you launch a quiz live, you have two options: Teacher-Led, where you control the pace, or Student-Led, where scholars progress at their own pace. You can invite scholars with a link or with a join code. During a live quiz, you can view results as they come in live and grade them then, or wait until the end. 

View Quiz Results

For all quiz types, you can mark the results correct or incorrect as they come in during the quiz. For live quizzes, this gives the scholar the opportunity to see their results at the end of the quiz. Or, you can wait until the quiz is ended and then view and score the results in the Results Dashboard. If you do not review results at the end of the quiz, you can view them at any time by clicking the Quiz tile on their My DE homepage and then selecting Results from the left sidebar. Quiz Results can be exported to a .CSV file or Excel File with a breakdown of how each scholar did on each question. 

At the top of the quiz results dashboard, you can see a class summary showing the high and average scores, percentage of engaged scholars, number of responses, number of questions, and how long the quiz took. Then, you can look at the results. There are three views: 

• Report View- which allows you to see a quick glimpse of how students performed on questions throughout the quiz. You can look for trends that will help you make instructional decisions from this summary. 
  
  
  
• Question View- which shows each question and the number of responses. You can expand each question to see all scholar responses and mark responses as correct or incorrect. 
  
  
  
• Student View- which shows each scholar and the number of responses and correct answers they have. You can expand each scholar to see all of their responses to all questions. You can also score scholar answers here.