If you’re anything like us, you’re spending your first few weeks of the school year soaking up any and all new ideas and tools you can use. We hope that one of those tools will be Edcite, an incredibly flexible tool that you can use to improve your efficacy as a teacher. You can give it a try for:
1. Whole Group Instruction: Create an assignment you can do as a whole class on the smart board or projected on the white board. Great for modeling how to do a new skill or question type. Check out how these teachers do whole group instruction with Edcite.
2. Free Writes: Use free response questions to push students to explain and demonstrate their understanding. Edcite facilitates faster grading by allowing question-by-question grading and commenting. You can also use the free response or essay questions to facilitate more open writing prompts to get students’ creative juices flowing!
3. Exploration of a new skill: Give students an Edcite assignment designed to help them master a new skill by allowing students multiple attempts to answer a question. You can add hints with videos or written instructions and provide solutions with explanations. Students will be able to see whether they are correct immediately and fix their answer.
4. Group Work: Have students work on content in pairs or small groups and collaboratively work through an assignment. You can have students work together in a variety of ways, ranging from answering together to reading to each other and answering questions. Read about how one teacher used Edcite to facilitate dialogue between students.
5. Exit Tickets (Formative): Create an exit ticket for the day’s objective on Edcite and use the automated grading to quickly score it and analyze the data to know what to review the next day in class. Some teachers also like to give a weekly exit ticket to adjust any of their RTI (Response to Intervention) groups; you can easily differentiate your exit tickets to assess various groups at the appropriate level.
6. In-Class Checks for Understanding (Formative): Prepare a set of questions covering the lecture material and guide students to complete each question at strategic “checkpoints” during a lecture or other instructional time to get instant feedback on how well students understand the new concepts. Check out how one teacher, Meghan Gieg, incorporated these questions into her lesson plan as checks for understanding!
7. Summative Assessments: Use Edcite to make a quiz or test for your students. The questions can be randomized and the assignment can be timed. Plus, you can easily export the data from Edcite and import it into your grade book! Check out these tips on how to set up a great summative assessment.
Outside of Class
8. Homework Assignments: Many teachers create weekly homework “packets” or send home homework daily on Edcite. You’re able to see how much time a student spent on the assignment and get the data before they walk into the classroom. Save the time that you would usually spend checking homework and instead go over the common misunderstandings or target specific students with remediation. Our Edcite Teacher of the Month last September, Mrs. Pallitto, would send one math and one reading assignment home each week for her 4th graders.
9. Flipping Your Classroom: Upload videos explaining new concepts for students to watch at home, and create questions to correspond to the video. This allows students to learn and practice a skill independently, and frees more class time for reinforcing skills, broadening application, and deepening understanding. Read more about flipping your classroom here.
10. Student survey questions: Add a “fun” student survey question at the end of assessments or homework assignments to gather information about the type of music your students like, their favorite celebrities, etc. and use this information to make examples and future assignments more engaging. Maybe you could then use the data from the survey for a class project?
Add to this list! Take an existing assignment or unique activity that you do in your classroom and create it on Edcite! See the benefits that come from quick grading and share it with other teachers!
If you’d like to share how you are using Edcite or are interested in learning about how some schools have begun using the site as a department, school, or district, reach out to email@example.com.