When turning to distance learning tools, it’s important to make sure the tool fits the gap you are looking to fill. Educators around the world use Edulastic to deliver engaging distance learning assessments or assignment to students including:  

distance learning

  • Formative assessments
  • Summative assessments
  • Quick checks (warm-ups, performance tasks, exit tickets, etc.)
  • Assignments
  • Worksheets
  • Labs
  • Homework
  • Lessons

No matter what the end goal or type of assessment, there is something on Edulastic for every educator at every grade, and for every subject. Educators can easily manage assessments and assignments through Edulastic’s assessment dashboard, instant reports, and other management tools.

Edulastic offers a robust way to ask questions, track learning standards, and get actionable student data for those who are looking for state test prep. Educators simply looking for ways to work with students and offer online learning can also develop their assignments or assessments by pulling from the online library, making their own questions, or mixing and matching. 

Here’s how to use Edulastic for distance learning at your school:

1. Add Your Student Roster

Adding your student roster is quick and easy. Upload your students by one of three basic ways: sync your roster with Google Classroom or your LMS, upload manually, or provide your students with the class code. Add your students the way that works best for you and you can set class settings as well. Learn more.

Edulastic seamlessly integrates with Google Classroom, Microsoft 356, Clever, Canvas, and several other learning management tools. You and your students don’t have to keep track of multiple passwords because Edulastic will automatically sync and sign-on for you. Learn about Edulastic’s integration with Google Classroom here, and learn about Edulastic’s Automated SIS syncs for all districts and schools here. 

2. Assemble Learning Tasks for Your Students

With Edulastic you can deliver world class assessments and all types of learning tasks: exams, worksheets, lessons, and more. Browse the Test Library to find over 35,000 pre-built learning tasks, or the Item Bank for pre-built questions. Search the “Edulastic Certified” Collection to find high-quality pre-vetted content. You can directly assign the content you find, tweak it for your students, or create your own content from scratch! Author your own questions from over 50 technology-enhanced item types. One of the great things about Edulastic is that you have the option to tie each item to standards for better mastery tracking while teaching remote. 

Need a quick assessment fix? Try out SnapQuiz. Simply upload your PDF and add item widgets for each question to make your document ready to collect student answers. 

3. Set Up Playlists ($)

With Edulastic Premium you can set up your whole curriculum in Edulastic. Craft and assign a playlist so students can work through your planned content and learning checkmarks. Here’s an example of what teachers could present to students all at once in a Playlist:

  1. Pretest (See what students already know)
  2. Introduction lesson (Ease students into the material)
  3. Practice work (Light homework or worksheets)
  4. Core lesson
  5. Practice work
  6. Knowledge Check (Formative assessment)
  7. Review lesson
  8. Summative assessment (Graded)

As you can see, the Playlist can include the whole bundle of learning activities and tasks. 

Pretests: Give students a diagnostic assessment to see where they’re at with the learning material before the unit begins. This gives you an idea of what you might need to emphasize and what might need less instruction time. 

Lessons: You can create lessons by recording or incorporating videos, adding passages, or linking websites and instructions so students can learn the content. Embedding multimedia is an engaging way to introduce content and you can even embed simulations to give students time to play around with models or even do online science labs, for example. See how to craft excellent online lessons.

Practice work: This could be in the form of a worksheet, homework, lab, or supplemental problems. Practice work gives students a chance to try out different problems and practice demonstrating their knowledge of the content taught in the lessons. Since Edulastic can autograde work, both you and the student can know whether more practice is needed, or if the student is right on track! Settings to help deliver and facilitate practice work: 1) Set to “practice” so the grades can be filtered out of the reports. 2) Pre-set redirect to give students the chance to take and retake assessments. 3) Turn on “Check Answer” so students can see if they are getting the problem right or wrong. 4) Give students hints – By giving students hints they can get immediate assistance when they get stuck.  5) Give students the solution – A description of the solution can give students a better understanding of what the answer is and why, right on the spot.

Summative Assessment: This will be the final exam of the learning unit so students can demonstrate that they’ve picked up the knowledge. Make sure your questions are linked to standards if you want the Mastery Reports to work. You can watch the results roll in live on the Live Class Board and then you can review the work overall, student by student, or question by question.

Playlists can offer a whole package of instruction and learning tasks during distance learning. You’ll also find that playlists are also great for students in the classroom when you are in person.

4. Review the Results

The Live Class Board(LCB) is usually the first hub you’ll visit after delivering an assessment. On the LCB page, the graphs show overall student progress and performance. Each individual student card gives an overview of how each individual student is progressing. If a student is absent or needs a second chance on an assignment, you can manage that from the LCB.

When the assignment is done and “in grading”, it’s time to review the results and give students feedback. The majority of the question types on Edulastic self grade, which saves you time that you can use towards something else, like instruction. 

If you gave an open response or drawing response question, you can review the student work and score the questions. Grade assignment responses question by question or student by student. Some teachers like to put the assignments in present mode so they can blindly grade student work to avoid any potential bias. Rubrics ($) can help you score open response questions in a quick and measured manner. 

The Express Grader($) is accessible through the LCB and is another location to view results and enter or edit grades where needed. If you are teaching in a hybrid form where you have some students taking the assessments manually, you’ll be able to quickly enter student answers or scores here.

Done with grading? If you haven’t already, you may release scores to students so they can enter into their accounts to review their results and see your feedback. 

5. Reports and Sharing

There are several places where you can review student results and analyze their progress. 

  1. Live Class Board
  2. Gradebook Tab
  3. Reports Tab
  4. Playlist Insights 

Each way offers its own benefits and will help you get a great picture of student results and progress. 

The Live Class Board, as mentioned previously, is your go-to glance-at-guide while students are working on a learning task. It shows overall class progress, progress on each question and individual student progress and results, as well as the Express Grader. 

The Gradebook Tab($) gives you a place to quickly see how students are progressing on what you’ve assigned them. You can see if they’ve completed a task and the results! There are filters so you can sort students or view student groups.

The Reports Tab contains a suite of reports to view student data for multiple learning tasks, individual learning tasks, standards mastery, and to see a drill-down of data by student. There are filters and functions to help you pinpoint information and analyze the data, so you can better support students in a distance learning setting. . 

Playlist Insights ($) show you how students are doing as they move through the learning tasks on an assigned Playlist. 

Additional Tools, Tips, and Best Practices

  • Edulastic offers a number of anticheat tools you may want to use such as timed assessments, shuffle questions and/or answers, and secure exam browser. While these tools are very helpful for distance learning and high-stakes assessment delivery, do keep in mind that without being in the same room, it’s harder to watch students and keep them from finding other ways to cheat.

  • Use SnapQuiz for a quick way to turn your paper-based test into an online assessment. Simply upload your PDF assessment into Edulastic and add question “widgets”, so students can respond digitally. Many teachers use this when they have pre-made assessments that they don’t want to retype but still want instant data and results for. Learn all about SnapQuiz and how to turn a paper-based assessment digital here.
  • Make assessments more engaging and embed multimedia into any question type, assessment, or assignment. With Edulastic, it’s easy to add anything from photos to videos, music or audio recordings. When teaching from home, you could record a short lecture or lesson, upload it to Edulastic, and ask your students to respond using a variety of technology-enhanced items. Alternatively, you could add images or text for students to respond to. Simulations like PhET Sims can also be embedded into questions to give students an interactive experience. The bottom line is, you can get creative here!
  • Redirect is a favorite feature of teachers and students across the country. With Redirect, you can give students another chance by allowing them to simply “re-do” the assessment. You either can re-send the assessment to individual students or the entire class. This encourages a growth mindset and gives students another chance to relearn topics they may be struggling with, which is especially important when distance learning is in place.
  • Not all students have access to technology or the internet at home. With this in mind, you can print assignments from Edulastic to send home with your students. Students can then answer the questions on paper at home, and later you can insert the results into Edulastic via the Express Grader to leverage the benefits of automatic grading. Learn how to print assessments here.
  • With the Express Grader ($) teachers can quickly enter student answers or scores directly into Edulastic. This is of particular use if one or more students do not have technology or internet home and the teacher needs to enter the answers online for them. 
    Here’s how it could work. When needed, a teacher can print an assignment in Edulastic and give students a paper-based copy. The students record their answers on the paper-based version. When students return to school and turn in their assignment(s), teachers can efficiently enter the scores or responses using Express Grader.  This ensures that you can continue using the automated data analysis tools in Edulastic, yet students don’t have to take an assessment digitally to have their progress tracked.
  • Looking to give an assignment or assessment during a specific time period? No problem. On Edulastic, you can manually open, close, and pause a learning task at the times of your choosing. This assessment management tool helpful when students are taking quizzes and tests from home because it increases test security and gives you more control over the testing environment. Learn more about managing your assessments here.
  • Use Present Mode to anonymize names and responses on the Live Class Board so that, as a group, the class can go over the questions and answers on an assessment. 
    In conjunction with Google Classroom, a teacher can assign an assessment, discuss with students, and then, using Google Hangouts/Meet can share the live dashboard in Present Mode to analyze the class results with students– all in a virtual learning environment.
  • Student feedback is critical to support continued learning and growth. The sooner students can receive feedback the better because the information is fresh in their minds. In addition to getting instant results from automatically graded questions on Edulastic, teachers can also provide their comments on individual questions or the entire assessment.
    Edulastic makes it easy for you to give your entire class and/or individual students feedback. This is especially helpful when teaching at a distance when in-class feedback is not possible. Learn more about how to give feedback on Edulastic here. 
  • Collaboration
    • Co-Teacher: When teaching remotely, teamwork tools are extremely helpful. Edulastic’s Co-Teacher feature allows you to team up with another teacher or admin in the district and share rosters, assignments, and data. This fosters collaboration among colleagues and helps you respond to student needs with additional teacher support. 
    • Co-Author: Add a co-author to an assessment or other learning task you are creating so you and your colleague can work together to craft questions.
    • Share Settings: Once you have created and published your learning tasks, you may choose to share in your private, school, district, or the public library. By sharing with your colleagues, you can work collaboratively to build useful content. 

With these tools and resources, you’ll be able to provide engaging distance learning assessments or assignments to your students and monitor their progress. If you are looking for more ways to engage with students through online learning with Edulastic, we encourage you to check out our online courses, visit our teacher training hub, and connect with other Educators in our Edulastic Community Group. If you are new to Edulastic and ready to get started, sign up for your free account today. 

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