Illuminate's New Lightning Grader

As some of you may have noticed, Illuminate has updated the gradecam function this year. For those of you who were happy scanning the bubble sheets in with your computer's camera, there won't be much of a change, but for those of you wanted a faster way, you're in for some good news - you can scan all of the sheets into the copy machine and upload the entire file for Illuminate to input.

In addition to the different way to input the tests, there are also some changes made in types of questions that you can put on the bubble sheet. Along with multiple choice and true/false questions, you can also print lines for short answer and essay questions and they will be visible when you look at the answer sheets in Illuminate.

Check out the CISD's overview video here. A quick and easy reference guide is also available.

Scanning Bubble Sheets into Illuminate

It's been awhile since I've talked about Illuminate, so I thought I'd share what many of you might find a time-saving tip. For those of you who are not using the hybrid online assessment where students log into the student portal, and see the test and the question bubbles side-by-side, but are having students fill out the bubble sheet printed on paper, you can actually take your stack of bubble sheets to one of the copy machines and scan the sheets that way.

Scanning Documents into the Copy Machine

Step 1: Place the stack of bubble sheets in the copy tray at the top as you would for making general copies.

Step 2: On the copy machine, push the Scanner button in the lower left-hand corner.

You Asked For It, We Answered!

Since we started using Illuminate and Schoology as a district, teachers have been lamenting the fact that students are able to open other windows or tabs in their browser while taking online tests. While there are programs that can lock down the browsers, those have a cost associated with them.

I'm happy to announce that I've developed kiosk logins that can be used with the Chromebooks that are similar to what we used with the M-Step assessment last year. Now, you can have students log into one of two kiosks before they log into the Chromebook and they will be taken either to either the Illuminate student portal, or to Schoology.

Before students login to their Chromebooks, they should click on Apps which can be found in the lower left hand corner, right next to where they click to shut the Chromebook down. Once they click there, a window will pop up with the different Kiosks that we have loaded into the machines. Have students choose the app associated with the program in which they are testing.

If they're using the Illuminate Kiosk, they will go to the Student Portal and will be asked to input their username and password as usual. If they are logging into Schoology, they will be asked to enter their email and password.

When logged into any of these kiosks, students are unable to leave the window that they're logged into, making it impossible to tab over to different websites to look up answers. When students are done with the assessment, they will need to power down the device in order to freely move around the web.

Tip of the Week 4/15/16

I've decided that, in addition to blogging about educational technology in general, I'm going to start writing weekly tips for programs that we commonly use in our district, mostly centered around Illuminate, Skyward, and various Google programs that we have available to us. If you'd like to learn about something specific, feel free to send me requests and I'll add them to future Tip of the Week posts. 

Now, without further ado, here is this week's Tip of the Week...

Using the Tab Key to Quickly Enter Data

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.

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.

Finding Previous Trimesters' Students in Illuminate

For those of you who have new students this trimester, it can be be confusing trying to pull Illuminate data from for your students from last trimester.  I've had a number of teachers come to me saying that, when they go to the test in Illuminate, all, or some, of their students are gone.  If this is the case, it is most likely because you now have different students rostered to you.

Once you've logged into Illuminate, go to your Control Panel and choose any date from the trimester from which you are trying to see the data; this can be from any previous trimester that you have entered student data.