I first learned about Edulastic at a workshop I attended back in January. We didn't get a chance to go over it in detail at the workshop, so I looked it up and explored it on my own. As soon as I began exploring I was like where has this been all of my teaching life?!
Edulastic is a website that allows you to create assessments online. I work for a Google county, so the first thing I liked was that I (and my students) could sign in with Google with one-click. It also connects to Google Classroom so you can easily add a class and then push assignments to Google Classroom.
There is an assessment library where you can search for previously created assessments or create a new assessment with previously created questions. The function I used the most, though, was creating my own assessments and questions.
You can create assessments for any content area and attached standards from Common Core, NGSS, or state-specific standards. Another feature I absolutely love is Collection option. When you create an assessment you can keep it private to only yourself, you can share it on a school level so that other teachers in your school who have an account with Edulastic can see the assessments (we used this a lot on my grade level team), you can share it on a District level if there are other teachers in your district who have signed up, and/or make the assessment Public so that anyone with an Edulastic account can access it.
The assessments I used and tried with my students this year were in Science, Math, and Reading. This program helps prepare students for the PARCC and MISA (our version of the science assessment for NGSS). You can create classic questions types with items like: multiple choice/selection, essay, true/false, or text drop down. There are also math technology enhanced items like: numeric, expressions, fractions, graphs, label an image, multi-part, or drawing. (these would also be great for science) Lastly, there are ELA technology enhanced items like: passage based, editing task, matching, re-sequencing.
The thing that I have been looking for forever it passage based responses that would allow the reading passage to be next to the question similar to how it is designed on the PARCC assessments. Well with this program you can do that! Did I mention that it also grades the assessments for you?? (except for the written responses obviously)
Under the Assignment tab, you can see which students have completed assignments, see the responses that students have submitted, grade the open-ended/written response questions, and then release the grades to the students so that they can see their scores.
Another feature is the Reports section. This section allows you to see a Mastery Report by standard. This allows you to quickly and easily see what standards the students have mastered and which ones they need to work on.
I am sure there are features that I am missing and/or haven't discovered yet. I am really looking forward to using Edulastic more next year!
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