Tuesday Tech Tip: Designing Opportunities to Digitally Track Mastery

As a continuation of our post from last week (Aligning Work Digitally to Track Student Mastery), this week's post takes a look at the next step:  designing activities in COLE 3.0/Schoology that will align with standards or your own learning objectives.

Once you have identified which standards you want to address, you can think about what kinds of activities & assessments will best meet the demands of those standards.  Will you be asking students to create something? Interact with peers in a discussion? Present information? Respond to assessment items?  What opportunities will you design to aid in their learning, and how can you track their progress?

Designing in Schoology: Assignment*
Is creating something (a piece of writing,  a presentation, a project, etc.) the best way for students to demonstrate their understanding ? Or maybe they will be modifying or adapting something you've provided?  Regardless of how it will be "turned in," choose "Assignment" from the "Add Materials" pull-down. In addition to working for offline activities, student work can be collected in a Schoology assignment as well. Students can digitally create a written response, upload a file, link to something they've done online, or record themselves speaking.  As long as the assignment is aligned (see below), you'll be able to track how students do and provide feedback.

To align in Schoology, look for the blue target icon

(Tip: If your assignment hits more than 1 standard, your best bet is to create a rubric in Schoology and assess each standard separately.)

Designing in Schoology: Test/Quiz*
If students will be responding to an online assessment in Schoology to show what they know, you'll want to choose "Test/Quiz."  You can create your own questions or use ones that already exist in a Test Bank in Schoology. The following question types are available:

1. True/False
2. Multiple Choice
3. Ordering
4. Short answer/Essay
5. Fill in the Blank
6. Matching

The assessment itself isn't aligned to standards, but each question can be aligned separately (using the blue target icon in the question builder).  Schoology can then measure how well students do on aligned standards based on the points the students receive on the questions.

Designing in Schoology: Discussion*
Perhaps a class discussion is the best way to have students meet your chosen standard(s).  Discussion responses in Schoology can either be typed or submitted orally, but they are available for the entire class (for interaction between class members). After choosing the "Discussion" option, align the topic to standards or objectives.  (Again, if the Discussion topic will be addressing multiple standards, use Schoology's rubric tool to assess those items individually.)

The most important thing is deciding how to best assess students in relation to standards.  After students complete an activity that you've designed in this digital space, you can provide digital feedback.  We'll be addressing that topic in the next blog post.

*For more information, visit Schoology's Help Center article on Course Materials (or contact your technology support folks).