Welcome To Testing Season!
Echo's assessment activity type has great features for helping you get students ready for state tests. Here are some helpful tips for getting the most out them.
To see a quick (10 min) demonstration of the kinds of questions that teachers can create using Echo's Assessment activity type, follow theses steps:
- Log IntoEcho.
- Under your profile menu, select Enroll in Course.
- Enter "42w3kw" as the enrollment code, then click Verify.
- Click Enroll to enroll in the course.
- Click View to open the course (or find it later in the Student App).
- With the course open, click on the Assessment Demo link.
For more information on creating Assessments, see, "What is an Assessment and how do I add one to my course?"
Tip #1: Enable Assessment Tools For Students
Echo has cool features that allow students to develop test taking strategies. When enabled, students can
- Eliminate incorrect answers to narrow their choices
- Highlight important text in the question or the passage
- Take notes while reading a passage
- View the question next the passage (rather than having to scroll to the passage)
- Bookmark questions to come back to later
To learn more about the assessment tools for students or to enable it for an Assessment, see "How can students use assessment tools?" in the Echo Help Desk.
Tip #2: Exclude Practice Tests From Gradebook
Echo allows teachers to create activities that are scored but do not impact the student's grade. Test preparation activities are a perfect opportunity to use excluded tasks. See, "How can I assign activities that don't get counted in the final course grade?"
Tip #3: Use Practice Questions Activity Instead
Echo's Practice Questions activity type is almost the same as an assessment except that students get immediate feedback as they answer each question. They can even change their answers. While this type of activity isn't good for assessing student knowledge, it's perfect for helping kids hone their knowledge and test taking skills. To learn more about the Practice Question activity type, see, "What are Practice Questions and how do I add them to my course?"
Tip #4: Flash Cards
If you haven't explored Echo's Flashcard activity type, it might be worth looking at for test prep. It works just as the paper versions do. Teachers create stacks of digital "cards" with a question side and and answer side. Students can then use the cards to test their knowledge or understanding of a topic. To learn more about the Flashcards activity type, see, "How do I create Flashcard activity types in my course?"
Tip #5 Team Up
Creating test prep materials is time intensive. Consider lightening the tasks by teaming up with other teachers in your school, find other teachers in your state using Echo's Community Tool, or connect with other teachers in the NTN Community on Slack. If you need a shared course to collaborate in, let the Echo Team know and we'll get it set up for you.
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.
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