Being the only educator in a classroom can be difficult. Often you may feel like you are being pulled in a million different directions. Luckily, there are tons of edtech tools available that help with effective collaboration among colleagues! By working together you can save time, improve instruction, and take your students’ learning experience to the next level.
Teamwork Triumphs in Education
Collaboration is the process of working with others towards a common goal. When teachers work together, it can lead to higher rates of student success.
According to a study from the University of Pittsburgh, the time educators spend collaborating with each other is “a significant predictor of student achievement gains.”
In the study, as the educators worked together, they promoted shared knowledge and ideas. This improved how educators instructed their students and created their lesson plans, which benefited students in the end.
Putting Teamwork to the Test
Edulastic is a digital assessment platform that offers ways to connect and collaborate with other teachers across your school, district, and beyond. While you can use Edulastic as an individual, if you use the public library or even the Edulastic Certified library, you are still collaborating!
Edulastic’s digital assessments provide a way for teachers to find common language and unity in their instruction. They can easily work together to track progress of student mastery and discuss areas where students were struggling. With this common tool, teachers can have discussions in their subject-based or grade level Personalized Learning Networks (PLNs) to determine the best ways to remediate students.
Working with your other educators is important for helpful for both teachers and students. One of the benefits of teacher collaboration is improved instruction. As teachers share ideas and help raise awareness of useful, high-quality resources, they can support students better.
Check out these four ways Edulastic can help you collaborate with your colleagues!
1. Share Assessments on Edulastic
When you make an Edulastic account, you immediately gain access to free assessment collaboration features. After an assessment is published, the author has the opportunity to set the share settings. Teachers can share assessments publicly, across their district, and across their school. Conversely, you can locate and use assessments shared publicly, across your district, and across your school using the filters in the assessment library.
In addition to assessments, you can also locate questions that other teachers have shared using the filters in the Edulastic Item Bank. Accessing content from the Item Bank and the Assessment Library can save you time you’d otherwise have to spend creating your own questions.
Only want to share your assessment with a select few people? Select “link share” in the assessment share options menu. This feature enables you to keep your assessment private except for the select colleagues you give access to.
2. Unify Content and Standards-Aligned Discussions
When you use Edulastic with your colleagues, you can sync your assessment process, give common assessments, and can more easily track student progress across standards.
West High School in Knoxville, TN saw the benefits of a unified assessment platform when they adopted Edulastic. Using digital assessment brought them closer as a school community, and they were able to work together better which lead to higher test scores and student performance.
Edulastic’s instant standards reports support collaboration with other teachers in a number of ways. Teachers can use the reports during discussions to quickly point out learning gaps and improve instruction. This means educators can spend more time talking about solutions, rather than spending time trying to make sense of a ton of data points.
With Edulastic’s detailed reports, teachers can use student learning data and collaborate to figure out the factors that affect student learning. The data allows them to determine students’ needs and design programs to address those needs, quickly and effectively supporting their students.
3. Edit Assessments with a Co-Author ($Premium)
Team up on assessments by co-authoring an assessment with a fellow educator or learning specialist.The co-author feature lets you build digital assessments with your colleagues and co-edit in real time.
Creating and assigning assessments from scratch can take time and energy. Co-authoring assessments saves time because you can share the workload and spend your energy elsewhere, like personalizing or differentiating instruction for students.
Better yet, the assessments you co-author can be published to your school or district library. Not only does this feature help you, but it can also help your colleagues save the same time and energy too!
Learn more about how the co-authoring works.
4. District or School-wide Teacher Teams ($Enterprise)
Collaborate on a school or district-wide level with teacher teams.
Teacher Groups are set up through an Edulastic Enterprise administrator account. Members of a teacher group can select reports to share with the group. Sharing reports allows all members in the group to view data from assessments. These reports also are viewable with different settings: peer performance, question analysis, etc.
The ability to share reports can prompt collaborative conversations on a bigger scale. Teachers can compare and contrast student results with each other. This facilitates learning from colleagues’ successes. If one teacher is facing a particular problem as visible on the reports, they can have a group brainstorm session to find a solution.
Here’s how to create teacher groups.
With these collaboration tools on your side, you’ll see instruction improve, you’ll have stronger relationships with your colleagues, and you’ll save time, making your life easier! For a more technical dive into how to use any of these collaboration features, visit the Edulastic Knowledgebase.
Start Collaborating with Edulastic
- Sign up today or upgrade with this link!
- New to digital assessment? Finding a buddy and working together will make the learning process a lot more fun! This teamwork can save yourself tons of time preparing assessments. (That’s in addition to the time saved from autograding features.)