Archive for the ‘Using ScootPad’ Category

Introducing the Content Exchange and Redesigned Assessments

Today we’ve launched the Content Exchange and a completely redesigned , device-friendly version of Assessments. This is just the beginning of a series of major improvements announced for release this summer!

Content Exchangec-exchange
Collaborate not only with the teachers at your school or district, but also with educators all over the world! Browse the Question Bank, Assessment Bank, and Wordlist Bank (coming soon) to find standards-aligned, educator-created and curated content. Create your own content using 50+ tech-enhanced item formats and share it with your school, your district or even better – share with the rest of the ScootPad community. Common Core Standards, Indiana Academic Standards and England National Standards are currently available (10 more state and international curriculums are planned for release in the coming months).

Totally Redesigned Assessments
Gauge your students’ progress with formative assessments, benchmark assessments and SBAC/PARCC simulation tests. Our revamped assessment features now help you find content with enhanced depth and rigor. Choose among questions with different DOK levels and TEI formats to build your own assessment, or simply select concepts and let ScootPad auto-generate an assessment for you!

brand new assts

What’s new in Assessments:

  • Auto-generate an assessment or custom build by hand-picking questions
  • Filters: New filters make it easy to find exactly the kind of assessments and questions you’re looking for. Filter by standards, DOK, question formats, and more.
  • Cart to help you add questions and review quick summary of the assessment
  • Bookmark assessments and questions for quick access at any time in future

Create Your Own Questions
Creating new questions is a lot easier now with the easy-to-follow steps and the final question verification before saving the question. Go ahead and create questions using our 50 technology enhanced item formats.

build question 2

Refreshing UI Improvements
Color themes now available for you to personalize your ScootPad experience.

change theme 2

We’ve also made several user experience improvements across ScootPad including a much simpler and cleaner homepage, Parent Invitation Letters with your own custom message and translation to many languages including spanish.

Having trouble with any of these changes?
Here’s a friendly reminder to check your device to make sure it is compatible with ScootPad. The statuses of each item should say “OK”. Click here to check your device now.

Check out the revised Help Center articles for more information on Assessments and the new Content Exchange, or sign up for our free weekly webinars to see these improvements live in action: Teachers: Wednesdays @ 3pm Pacific / Admins: Thursdays @ 3pm Pacific.

We hope you’ll love these improvements as much as we love them.

Cheers,
The ScootPad Team
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Administrator Resources, Features & Changes, Important Product Updates, Parent Resources, Teacher Resources, Using ScootPad

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Adaptive eBooks NOW Available!

We’re excited to announce the availability of Adaptive eBooks feature on ScootPad. Students can now read grade-aligned eBooks auto-assigned to them from their eBook Learning Paths while answering built-in comprehension questions along the way. Each student can read independently at his/her own pace progressing automatically along the assigned learning path with no teacher/parent intervention.

eBook Learning Paths

eBooks LP
Adaptive reading is made possible with eBook Learning Paths now available for all K-8 grades, each with grade aligned fiction and non-fiction eBooks with built-in comprehension questions. You also have the ability to create your own eBook learning paths using our library of 500+ eBooks. District & School Administrators can easily design eBook learning paths and seamlessly share them with teachers to adopt in classrooms.

Reading on Auto-Pilot

ebook LP task

Powered by eBook Learning Paths, students can simply launch their next eBook to read directly from their dashboard. Students are automatically prompted with comprehension questions along the way ensuring each students’ comprehension level with GRL-aligned understanding of the curriculum.

Built-In Comprehension Quiz

Each eBook in our library is now equipped with built-in comprehension questions to assess student comprehension in-line through out the book (unlike most other solutions which assess only at the end of the book). Easily assign any eBook from our library and let ScootPad make sure students read and comprehend each eBook. If built-in questions are not enough, you can even add your own custom open-ended questions and challenge students to submit creative written responses.

Reading Dashboard

eBooks report

As students continue their reading journey along the eBook learning path, ScootPad automatically tracks and analyzes valuable data that you can use to easily measure your students’ reading quantity, complexity, and comprehension in real-time.

Flip & Zoom

Students can now easily flip pages (swipe on touch devices) and zoom in/out of the text on any tablet device or computer. Our auto-bookmark feature let’s students resume reading from the page they last read without needing to manually bookmark.

We hope these new features will further enhance the love for reading in your students. eBook learning paths are now available to ALL Ultra Premium licensed classrooms. New classrooms and newly enrolled students will automatically be assigned their grade-appropriate eBook Learning Path. Existing classrooms that wish to take advantage of these new features are requested to follow these steps to assign an eBook learning path to their students.

Cheers!
ScootPad Team

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Administrator Resources, Features & Changes, Important Product Updates, Parent Resources, Teacher Resources, Using ScootPad

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Create your own questions in 50+ technology enhanced formats

There’s over 50 technology enhanced item (TEI) question formats available on ScootPad. Get started with using these formats and creating next-generation assessments for your students. ScootPad is an “Open” assessment platform, meaning you can browse and use questions and assessments created by other teachers while you can create and share your own.

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What are TEIs?

TEI question formats allow students to solve problems in a more interactive and comprehensive way. For example, a traditional question format will ask a student to select the correct answer to the question. A TEI might ask a student to type out the entire answer and rearrange answer choices in a particular order, rather than just clicking on the bubble.

Why you should care about TEIs

TEIs are becoming increasingly important in prepping students for summative testing in the spring as big assessment consortias like SBAC and PARCC are aiming to be entirely computer-based. Students will be able to practice the same level of rigor and technology used in the next-generation assessments with TEIs. Teachers will also be able to precisely assess and identify students’ needs to develop a more targeted instruction before they must take the summative assessment.

So, what about ScootPad’s TEIs?

We’ve developed all formats expected in the next-generation online testing and even released unique formats that are yet to be presented in assessment consortias like SBAC and PARCC. That means students will be able to experience even more ways to solve and interact with problems. Our question formats fall in several categories: multiple choice, cloze, classification, order, matching, highlight, label image, chart, number line, graph, and multipart – as shown in the image below.

Screen Shot 2015-10-29 at 8.24.16 AM

Educators can create questions and assessments under any grade, any subject, and any standard. In addition, educators can now share their content with the ScootPad community. The question and assessment banks allow educators to collaborate, rate, and reuse all shared content – making content more readily available and usable than ever.

How do I get started?

1. You can create your own questions by going to Assessments 2.0, located on the top navigation within your account.

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2. Then click on the My Own Questions tab. On this page, there will be a green button on the top right labeled +New Question.

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3. Choose a question format you’d like to use. Simply enter your question stem, answer, DOK level, scoring (the number of points), and the standard(s) being assessed. Preview the question on the right and make sure to test to verify that it works. Save the question and assign it to students.

You can also watch a quick 1 minute video to see how you can create questions using each of the question formats. Here is a sample 1 min video on how to create a “Highlight: Circle Shading” type question.

Highlight: Circle Shading from ScootPad Corporation on Vimeo.

How to find questions from the open content bank?

We encourage you to browse through the Question Bank and Assessment Bank, and check out the content created and shared by the community. Click the “Open Content” option under Assessments 2.0, located on the top navigation within your account. For step-by-step instructions, visit our help center by clicking here.

We welcome you to try our question formats and give us your suggestions for any new question formats. We are on a mission to create the MOST comprehensive Open assessment platform and we can certainly use your help to make that possible!

Feel free to start a live chat with us or shoot us an email at support@scootpad.com or call us at 1-800-994-0706.

Cheers!
ScootPad Team

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Administrator Resources, Features & Changes, Important Product Updates, Teacher Resources, Using ScootPad

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Introducing Our New and Improved “truly” Adaptive Placement Tests

Good news teachers! Our Adaptive Placement Test feature has gotten a major facelift with several new capabilities and improvements. Welcome to our new placement test report which shows you all the important insights about how students performed in the placement test down to the exact number of questions in each concept tested. In this new release, we’ve also added new capabilities such as auto-assignment of placement tests and ability to assign placement tests in any grade level right from within the placement test page.

Insightful Placement Test Report

placement-test-report
Our adaptive placement test generates a real-time report showing you a breakdown of how a student performed on each concept within each unit – always available for you – not just after a student is done with the placement test but even while a student is currently working on the placement test. Pie chart at the top summarizes the results showing you an overall proficiency coupled with color coded units with the number of concepts in each and indicating a pass or fail.

Auto-Assign Placement Tests

Auto assign placement
Leave the placement test assignment to ScootPad! This new setting under Math and ELA allows you to have ScootPad automatically assign placement tests. Whenever you enroll a new student or change one’s learning path, ScootPad will automatically assign a placement test for that student so they can be placed in the appropriate unit on their learning path.

Placement Test for any grade level

assign_placement_test
Want to test your students on what they learnt last year? No Problem! Assign a placement test for the grade level you want, right from the placement test page with just 2-clicks! This will move students to that learning path and assigns a placement test for them to launch from their dashboard right away.

You can use the Placement Test at any time during the school year to quickly re-assess how your students are doing and how far they really moved along on their learning path – you can even challenge them with a reward (example: who ever places in the highest unit gets a candy). Well, you get the idea🙂.

Want to learn more about our Placement test feature and how to use it? Visit our Help Center to follow step-by-step instructions. Or, feel free to start a Live Chat with us, email us at support@scootpad.com, or give us a call at 1-800-994-0706.

Cheers!
ScootPad Team

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Category:

Administrator Resources, Features & Changes, General, Important Product Updates, Parent Resources, Teacher Resources, Using ScootPad

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Ringing in the New School Year with ScootPad

It’s that time of year again when backpacks are full of fresh school supplies and the white boards are clear of marker stains. Welcome to the 2015-2016 School Year, folks! While you’ve been prepping for the new school year, we’ve been busy working on new features and improvements (most of which were requested by you).

New Help Center

help

Our help center has undergone a total revamp. Along with newly designed search, we reorganized our help articles to make it easier for you to navigate around and find answers to your questions. We’ve also created step-by-step instructions to Get Started including the Top 10 Ways To Use ScootPad based on best practices you told us.

Assessments 2.0

questions

Create your own assessments and questions in 50+ technology-enhanced formats, and share them with others. We’re also empowering our network of 200,000+ teachers to rate, flag, and recommend content so you get to use and choose the best questions and assessments for your students.

LTI integration

lti

Keeping track of login credentials for multiple tools can be tedious. So, with that being said, ScootPad is now offering LTI integration and allowing single sign-on for students from their existing SIS/LMS systems.

Adaptive Spelling

spelling-lpath

Students can now practice Spelling words on auto-pilot with our new Spelling adaptive learning paths, similar to ELA and Math. Teachers no longer have to manually assign wordlists to students, ScootPad has taken care of creating grade-level wordlists for all K-8 grades which are automatically available for all classrooms. You can also assign your own custom word lists and assignments as always.

Historical Student Mastery Report

mastery-report

We’ve made historical student mastery data available to you so you have greater insight into your students’ present and past proficiency and struggles. Unlike any other solution, we let you keep your student data on ScootPad (safe and secure) so teachers get to gain invaluable historical mastery insight for their new students.

Student Data Management Improvements

roster

 

Managing student rosters on ScootPad got a lot easier for both teachers and administrators. We’ve added new features such as bulk upload, bulk enroll, move students between schools, search and enroll students and more.

Free weekly webinars to learn more!

Whether you need an introduction, want to get tips on prepping for the new school year, learn more about our new features, or just want to hear our lovely voices, you’re invited to join in on our free weekly webinars.

RVSP now at http://scootpad.com/training

For everything else, we’re always here to help! Feel free to start a live chat with us or shoot us an email at support@scootpad.com or call us at 1-800-994-0706.

Cheers!
ScootPad Team

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Get Ready for Back-To-School on ScootPad!

Hey ScootPad Squad! Thanks for making the 2014-2015 school year such an awesome experience. As the new year approaches, here are some helpful action items for admins and teachers to get their new classrooms started on ScootPad.  We’ve compiled a checklist for each of you to consider as you transition to new school year.

In addition to these new features, we have scheduled FREE weekly webinars to help both admins and teachers get ready for Back-to-School.  Here is our schedule:
Teachers: Every Wednesday @ 1 PM PST and Thursday @ 3 PM PST
Admins: Every Wednesday @ 10 AM PST

Admins:
We’ve made some dramatic improvements to student data management this summer to help you take care of the yearly changes.  We understand that a new school year means new classrooms, new students, old students, new teachers, and etc. To help you prepare for these changes, we have created features that will archive all data, De-Dup (delete duplicate accounts), and improve bulk student upload.

Here are a few suggested steps you can take to prep for the new school year:

  1. Un-Enroll All Students – Student Historical Mastery Report data will remain.
  2. Delete All Classrooms – This will un-enroll students and delete classrooms. Historical Mastery Report data will remain.
  3. Create New Classrooms
  4. Delete Unwanted student accounts – Admins can view all students at a school and delete accounts that have never logged in or students that are not at your school/district this year
  5. De-Dup Students – This feature allows you to identify student accounts that may be duplicates (either through the bulk upload process or created by teachers)
  6. Bulk-Enroll students – into new classrooms or Print Class Codes and distribute to teachers for self enroll

Following these steps from your admin account will ensure your school rosters are cleaned up and prepared for the 2015-2016 school year.  Don’t forget to register for some free webinars, view step-by-step instructions, or start a Live Chat with us!

Teachers:
Teachers have two options when preparing for next school year and essentially can follow the same steps as admins, but on a smaller scale.  Teachers can now conveniently clean out and use their existing classroom, or start fresh with a new classroom and new students with less mouse clicks.

Clean out existing classroom and use it next year:

  1. Un-enroll students – This will remove your old students from your classroom so you can enroll your new class
  2. Change the name of your classroom
  3. Enroll new students using: Existing Student Accounts, New Student Accounts, Google Accounts, Schoology, LMS/SIS
  4. Change the Learning Path (grade level) of your classroom

Clean Slate – Delete your old classrooms and start fresh:

  1. Un-enroll students
  2. Delete classroom
  3. Create new classroom
  4. Enroll new students using: Existing Student Accounts, New Student Accounts, Google Accounts, Schoology, LMS/SIS

Following one of these options will ensure your classroom is ready to go for the 2015-2016 school year. Don’t forget to register for some free webinars, view step-by-step instructions,  or start a Live Chat with us!

Cheers!
ScootPad Team

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Administrator Resources, Features & Changes, General, Parent Resources, Teacher Resources, Using ScootPad

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