What are student choice folders and how do I use them?

Echo allows teachers to add student choice to their projects. Using choice folders, a teacher can provide a variety of activities for students to choose from. These types of activities could be either graded or non-graded. If student choice activities are associated with a grade, only the activity or activities chosen by the student will appear in their gradebook.

Some examples for using student choice folders within Echo would be:

Graded:

• For the final exam, Mr. Santos created a choice folder with three options. Students could take a multiple choice exam due at the end of class, take an essay exam that was due by midnight, or take an oral exam during lunch or after school. Students only had to pick one and their chosen activity was the only one that appeared in the gradebook.
• In her poetry unit, Ms. Peterson created a choice folder with five poem. Students were asked to pick two of the five and write a short analysis of each. The assignments were marked complete when the student submitted two responses in Echo.  

Non-Graded:

• Ms. Wood wanted her students to complete a jigsaw activity in her earth science class that required the students to compile a list of challenges that communities faced due to climat change. She created a choice folder that contained four articles. Each student in the group picked one article to read and then compared notes. Later, each group submitted a single group task summarizing their findings.
• In order to allow for different learning styles, Mr. Dawson created a choice folder that had both a text-based resource and a video-based resource. Echo marked the task complete when the student either read the article or watched the video.

To create a choice folder in your course, navigate to the course syllabus by clicking the edit icon located on a course card that needs student choice activities added.

Locate the project, or folder within a project that needs student choice activities.

Click the editor icon the next to the selected project.

Select the settings tab.

1. Select the box next to the words that say, enable student choice for this folder.

2. Enter the number of required choice activities for students to complete.

3. Next steps:

• Select allow extra choices if you would like students to be able to complete more than the required amount of choice activities.
• Select allow choices from any folder within the project activities students are to complete can be a within any folder in your project.
• Select allow choices from Digital Library if there is content in the library students will have a choice from.

4. When finished adjusting the settings, click save.

When the project folder, is open a choice activities folder will now appear. This is where you will add the activities for students to choose from.

1. Click to open the choice activities folder.
2. Click the +Add to.... link to begin adding choice activities to this project.

Related articles:

• How do I grade student choice activities? 

Echo is constantly being improved based on the feedback from users and we strive to keep our documentation up to date.  If this document doesn’t match what you are seeing in Echo, please let us know.