Assessments Made Easy with Kids Discover Online

Last month I was so excited to share a new favorite with all of you....Kids Discover Online!

You can read my post here: A Whole World Of Discovery In Science and Social Studies With Kids Discover.

Now I have something from Kids Discover that will make you want to dive in today!  

They have created a new feature called Assessments within their amazing platform.  This is going to change the way you use Kids Discover with your students and as an educator.  

As Kids Discover states on their site, Assessments makes it easy to build, distribute, assess and track customizable quizzes, tests and homework assignments directly within Kids Discover Online.  

Assessments contains more than 5,000 pre-made questions which cover more than 1,2000 social studies and science topics.  

Each topic has between 3-5 questions, with a variety of question types including True/False, Short Answer, Discussion and Multiple Choice.  

If you don't find the question you are looking for, the tool lets you create your own custom questions and save them to a personal question bank for future use.  

I really like how we, as educators, can lock or unlock content while an assessment is in process. This will restrict what students can view.

It is perfect with locked content for formal tests and quizzes.....and equally perfect with unlocked content for homework and group assignments.

As in all assessments, it is very important to understand student performance.  It is also important to keep teachers accountable and on task when assigning work to our students.  

With assessments, it is easy to analyze how students performed on a certain question with easy-to-read stats and graphs.  We will know if the questions are too easy or too difficult for our students.  

Last, but certainly not least, is the gradebook within the assessments tool.  

You can keep track of each student’s performance across multiple assessments and even your class as a whole.  

With standards based grading so important now, you will love the way students have the ability to review their past results or drill into a specific assessment to see their progress throughout the year.

After I saw all of the awesome features the assessments tool included, I had to give it a test drive myself!  

In my first post, I told about how my nephews Cameron and Carson loved what they found about Jackie Robinson in Kids Discover Online.  

I went back into the content about Jackie Robinson to create an assessment about him, too.

It is easy to create a new assessment.  You do it within one of your Classrooms.  When you go to a Classroom, you will see the Content, Students and Assessments tabs at the top.  

Just click on Assessments to start a....

New Assessment.

When you create a new assessment, you have the option to keep the content private from the classroom until students submit their assessment.

At the bottom of the window you can add all questions from topics in your classroom or select specific questions from topics in your classroom.

I decided to add questions from topics in my classroom.  Since my classroom contains articles about Jackie Robinson, it brought up 12 pre-made questions I could choose from.

You just select the questions you want and add them to the assessment.  

I also decided to create a custom question by typing in the question and choosing the question type.

You can also select the point value and add to the library.  

Once I saved the question I created, I went back into the questions library and added it to my assessment.  

This one is now located at the top of my assessment.  

When you are finished, the assessment can be published online or created as different PDF's.

As the assessments are published,  students will be notified when they have an assessment to take when they login to their classroom.  

This will make it very helpful when you are preparing, using and administering the assessments.

Not only is Kids Discover exciting and engaging for students as they discover new knowledge and topics they are passionate about, now it is a place that will bring that same feeling as we see what they know through assessments.  

You can learn all about Kids Discover Assessments here.     

And they have created several video tutorials for all of us as we learn more about assessments too!