Changing a Student's Password to the Online Testing Portal in Illuminate

If you're having students test online using the Illuminate Student Portal and the student is having trouble logging in, you may need to change the student's password. First off, make sure that the student is entering in the correct username, this will be the students UIC, or state ID number, which can be found in the Illuminate roster; it will be the ID column to the left of the name.

If the username is correct, but it's still not letting the student log in, the next step would be to change the password. There are two ways to do this: the first way would be through the student search function, either through the search bar at the top of the website, or through the Students tab in the toolbar. The second way would be from the online test roster.

Using Google Doc's Voice Typing Tool

Recently I had a teacher come and ask me if I had a way of helping support a student that needed another method for getting his thoughts down on paper. I immediately thought of using Google's text to speech tool. I thought I’d do a little more research on it and discovered that it is an extremely easy tool to use, all you need is the microphone that is built into your device, or if you'd prefer something different, you can purchase an external microphone.

Using Advanced Printing Options From Google Docs

When printing from Google Docs, the only options that are immediately available are which pages you’d like to print, how many copies you’d like, and the ability to print two sided (assuming you’re using a printer that is able to do two sided copies). If you want advanced features, you have to choose Print using system dialog… (Ctrl + Shift + P) from the Print page. Choosing this option will take you to the print options that you see when you print from word processing programs such as Microsoft Word.

How to Change the Language on a Chromebook

We've recently had some issues with students going into the language settings and switching the language to something else. This video will show you how to go into the Chromebook settings and change it back to english.

How to Create a Rubric in Illuminate - Basic

Hey everyone, I've been receiving a lot of questions about creating rubrics in Illuminate, so I thought I'd go ahead and make this tutorial. Making rubrics is a fairly simply process, if you can make an assessment in Illuminate, you can make a rubric.

Creating an assessment: 

The first thing that you need to do is to create an assessment. You do this by clicking on Assessment on the black toolbar. From the dropdown menu, choose Create a New Assessment. On the next screen, you'll want to choose Manual Assessment. Before clicking Okay, you need to supply the number of questions that you want on your assessment, or in this case, the number of sections in your rubric. 

At this point, you're going to need to add the New Assessment Information. While you are only required to add a title to your assessment, there are a few other pieces of information that you will find useful, later on, if you include them now.

Illuminate Tips & Tricks

I'm excited to see more and more teachers utilizing Illuminate to record and analyze student data, and not necessarily because of the directive to put in CUAs or final exams, but for formative assessments or tickets out of class. Illuminate is a powerful tool, and with a little training, actually fairly easy to navigate.

I've recently started putting together step-by-step directions, called Illuminate FAQ, on how to get around in Illuminate in order to help teachers that just want a quick tutorial. So far, I've created an introduction that walks you through the basics of the Illuminate work area (tool bars, control panel, etc.), how to set up your grade-cam, how to filter student results to look at subgroups, and how to remove individual scores.

The link to these tutorials can be found on the District Staff webpage on the left side of the screen. I'm always looking for more information to help teachers out, so if you'd like to see something added to the Illuminate FAQ, please shoot me an email and I'll get right to work on the write-up.

For those of you who feel that you need one-on-one help rather than trying to use these tutorials, I would be happy to meet with you during any time that you are available. I can come visit during your PLC time, planning time, or before and after school to help get you up and running.