How to Supercharge your LMS with Mastery Connect
Alright. We're gonna go ahead and get started. Welcome to how to supercharge your LMS with Mastery Connect. We're so glad that you joined us today on our webinar. We're gonna start by going through today's agenda. For our webinar and we'll introduce ourselves throughout the webinar, but we have four faces that you're looking at today.
You'll see me. I'm Tiffany. You'll see Tamara, and then you'll also see Stacey and Courtney that are joining us from Hall County Schools in Georgia. So we are going to start today's webinar with introducing you to some new features that are live in Mastery Connect. They actually went out live yesterday.
We're super excited that they're here. So we'll see some new things along the lines of assessment creation. And how we can migrate items from Canvas. So as we go through those that demo piece, I'll take you through that live walk through. Then we'll turn the time over to Tamra to help facilitate a discussion with Hall County Schools.
We're excited to have them with us. After our discussion, we will conclude our time together with answering some questions. So go ahead and put those questions in the chat as you go through. Or you can save them until after we have our discussion with Hall County Schools. And any unanswered questions will go through from the chat as well.
So my name is Tiffany Hardinger, and I am a senior solutions engineer with Instructure. My background is in K-twelve. I was teacher. I actually use Mastery Connect in my classroom. And now, I have the opportunity to help support districts across the United States.
Learning about the different tools that we offer at instructure. We're gonna get started first by kind of orienting you to the Instructure learning platform. Many times people know us for Canvas and we are the creators or the makers of Canvas. That is our learning management system. But as a part of the structured learning platform, we have a variety of different pieces.
Today, we are going to be focusing on our assessment piece. So that is our mastery connect portion of the platform. And we're also going to dive a little bit into the content that's available. So, we have the Mastery item bank that's available. Pre created items that are aligned to the standards that you're utilizing in your state.
So today's focus as we jump in to the live webinar is really on three specific things. One, we're going to look at how easy it is to migrate classic canvas quizzes to eliminate eliminate all of that duplication of efforts that teachers may have done in their Canvas courses. So we're gonna be able to bring those over, align them to standards, and be able to utilize them in our courses, as well as see really awesome data aligned with those. The other piece that we're gonna focus on with some of the new features is just the ability for educators to streamline their workflows. One of the things that we always look for when we're creating or generating new things inside of any of our products is we know how crucial it is to save educators time.
And then finally, we are going to look at some of the flexibility that's available with the new updated assessment creation process. Alright. Remember, if you have any questions as I go through the live demo, feel free to put them in the chat and we will go through those. We'll answer. We have a bunch of people on that can help answer any questions while I'm doing the demonstration.
And then if we don't get to it during the chat, we'll look at it and the q and a later on law on. In the webinar. Alright. So without much ado, we're going to jump into a live demo. And I'm going to move first into the teacher perspective.
Now, we're going to do everything today from inside of the Canvas course because we're talking about how you can supercharge your LMS with Mastery Connect. So we're gonna be looking at sixth grade math in our course today, and all of the mass features are available inside of the Canvas course. It's my preferred way to get into Mastery if I'm already a Canvas user and I'm used to pushing out assessments and, you know, content to my students. It's a perfect way to bring that all together. So we're gonna go over here in our course navigation, and we're gonna click on the Mastery tracker.
What you're gonna see here is our mastery tracker. Let me click on to the right tab first. So, what I'm seeing is we always have students on the left, and across the top are going to be the standards that we are assessing as it applies to this course. One thing to know about the standards inside of mass Connect is they are already preloaded for you. As states adopt new standards or they update standards, we update those as well.
So, you have the ability to pull in those standards that have already been pre created for you, but you also have the ability to put in custom standards whether that's from a district level or you as a teacher have some specific standards that you want to align content to and assess on. So across the top, you're seeing my standards, and I'm just using some basic sixth grade math standards today, but really in the heart of the tracker is going to be the mass colors. So, you're seeing a three point of mastery. We also have a four point scale, so you would see an additional color. And the verbiage that we're using today is kind of our default language.
We have mastery, near mastery and remediation, and that's all customizable by the district. So, Your trucker may look a little bit different if you're already using MasteryConnect than what you see here on my screen. The purpose of the tracker is for teachers to quickly be able to identify levels of understanding as it applies to the standards that they're assessing. The other piece is to quickly with the data be able to target individuals, standards or groups of students that may need additional support. And then most importantly, be able to have the data at your fingertips to do some self evaluation on the teaching and learning that's taking place in your classroom.
One of the things I love about the tracker is I'm able to actually see my formative assessments that I may be creating standalone or that my team is collaborating on, as well as the ability to see benchmark or interim type assessments that have been pushed out to me from my district. So, I'm doing all of that in the same place and I'm able to see the data as it compares to one another. One of the features that is great about the tracker and kind of takes it to the next level is the ability to add some filtering to the data, so I can look at specific subgroups or special groups of students that may need additional support. The other piece that I love is the ability two one, hover over a standard and actually recall what it is. Right? Sometimes it's that nitty gritty language that we don't have totally memorized.
But it makes it quick and easy for me to just get a reminder of what that standard is covering. And then my favorite piece is this longitudinal view. I can click into an a standard and I can see every assessment that we've given that ties to the standard. Now, these assessments may be an assessment that's taken online, more of like a technology enhanced type of assessment, where students may be dragging and dropping, maybe doing some formula questions. This could also be more of a performance based task where we're using a rubric.
Or teachers are working in a small group setting and putting in something like a reteach or, you know, a one on one type assessment for the students. So all of this is in the same place, and I'm able to see that longitudinal view. As I deliver any assessment in the system, I'm able to see reports on that assessment. So, I get an item analysis which has clickable pieces, so I'm able to see how those students are doing who those students are that may have scored incorrectly. If I'm using multiple sections inside of Canvas, I can see this data by section, so one group at a time.
If this is a common assessment that we're all utilizing in our grade level, I'm also able to see those common that common data for all students who delivered this assessment. So, that's a little bit about the tracker and kind of the basics of the tracker. I'm going to go back to the main page view because you may have noticed something that was clicked on when I first started, and that is our new assessments view. So as part of the new reveal, the new features. We have a separate tab now that is going to compile all the assessments that you have inside of the tracker.
I can see a list. I can identify ones that are benchmarks with this little corner and something that's awesome and brand new is we also have a draft assessment. So you can start building something and you can save it in a draft. It's amazing. It makes me so happy.
And I can come back to it. I can see this list of pieces. I can jump right to reporting. I can look at all of the different views here. I can also look at items that I need to grade.
So if there's any items in the assessment that are asked me to grade. I can do that right from this view. I also can change this view to group it by standards. And now I can get a really clear view for each of those standards, which assessments are, you know, tied to that. Same thing.
I still get those different options for being able to preview all of these items. And I also have my drafts organized by itself. So the first thing that I want to really focus on is you may have noticed a beautiful button up in the top right, and that is our import Canvas quizzes. We need some clapping on the back end because this is an awesome new feature. Our product team, our engineering team has worked really hard on.
So, now with the new assessment features, I can click to import my Canvas classic quizzes. So, I actually just click there. I see which quizzes are available. I actually have a lot inside of this course. So I can go through, find the ones I need.
I can also import more than one at a time. So I'm just gonna take bring in this quick check. So it's super exciting. I can see some sharing happening in the chat. I love it.
And I'm just gonna convert this as a new mastery connect assessment. And it's gonna give me this little update that says, hey, your quiz is being migrated and then once it's complete, kinda depends on how long it takes. Right? Like how many items are actually on that quiz. I'm just gonna refresh my tracker list, and tada, that quick check that I just had in Canvas is now in match reconnect. It's fabulous.
Obviously, it makes us very excited. So what I can do from here is I can actually edit this draft. And I'm gonna go ahead and click edit on there. And look at this. Here's all of the items that were previously in classic quizzes.
And now I can make changes to them. I can check it out, make sure it's working the way we want it to, but the best piece is now I can align standard to it, and I can get that standard data associated with these quizzes that I love that I've been using inside of my Canvas course. So a couple ways that you can align the assessment questions is one, you can just select each one by itself. And do that quick alignment and choose which items it is. But my favorite is you actually can select the whole list if it's for one standard.
And you can align it that quick. So all of those different standards that are already in your tracker are available for you to connect from. So it makes it really quick and easy. I'm just gonna align this to six r p a two, and you'll see that quick. All of those are aligned, and they've turned a different color, so they were orange, meaning they needed an alignment and you'll see that alignment is there.
Alright. I'm gonna go and guess what if I just go back to my tracker it's gonna save my work which is awesome and I see that draft and it can come back and edit at any time. Another piece that I wanted to mention with the new assessment view is the quick and easy way to create assessments, whether you're going to author new items or you also want to bring in items from our item bank. So, this is a draft assessment and only has one question in it so far. And this is actually a question that I created.
So I'm actually able to see that question, the passages that I've added. And right within the assessment creation pane, I can edit the item. Like, this shouldn't be getting a ton of chairs as well. It's very exciting. So all of the editing, that creation of the item, I can do it inside of the assessment.
I can also build items from the very beginning. So as I add things, I added a ruler here. I have a passage. I can view that passage. All within the same view, and I can create that item, put in the question, you know, this one is a specific label image with drag and drop.
I can do all of that creation that I'm used to over here on the left, and then I can always test it out over here on the right to make sure it's working the way I intended. And you'll notice that I'm saving it as a draft. It won't publish until I actually create this assessment and publish this assessment. So I have a lot of time to, you know, make any changes. If I see an issue, I can make those changes right within my assessment creation piece now.
Alright. I'm gonna push this little plus button here, and it's also going to give me the option to add items from an item bank. This is what I used earlier when I authored this new item, but I'm gonna add an item from the item bank. One of my favorite things about the new item bank feature is it is going to pull in every item that's inside of the bank. So I have a lot of items to choose from.
And we have a new filter pane that's gonna pop over here on the right. And this is where I can say, okay, there's a specific standard that I'm looking for or maybe there's multiple standards that I'm looking for. And I can choose not just one standard, but two or three whatever I want, and I can see those results. I can choose which item bank I want to look at or can search all the item banks that I have access to. That is a game changer.
You don't have to go back and forth to your item banks anymore. Search them all at the same time for that standard that you're looking for. Now, we have some additional filters added. I can look at item type which we're used to that. Our items have been a little bit simplified into the different types of items, which I love.
So if I'm looking for a classified or a written type question, I can simplify that filter. I can look for items with passages or without passages. This is awesome especially for our ELA or even our science. Teachers who may want a passage that students are referencing. And then you'll see now I can filter by difficulty.
So let's look here. I wanna do a medium difficulty. I'm gonna close these ones, and I'm gonna do d o k two So now, I can filter by two different types of levels. Right? So I have a difficulty medium, a d o k of two, and I can even say, the blooms, I actually want this to be an application type question. And you'll see that there's five hundred and ninety six items found.
So now, I'm just gonna close my filters, and this is where I can start going through the banks. I can look at all of the results. And I can really quickly easily view them. You'll see the over on the right. But now all I have to do is do a little check mark, and I can just go through quite a few of these.
And I can add five items that quick. So now I have those items that I'm authoring in the same pane. Pain, the items that I'm grabbing from the item bank in the same pane. And you'll notice I have the ability to move them. I can really simplify simplify that kind of movement or the organization of the assessment and do that really quickly.
Such a huge addition to MasteryConnect. I'm in love. A few other things that I'll mention up here in the top right hand corner that make me happy. Is you get some Oh, I'll start over here first and then come back here. So you get automatic scoring.
So cup scores are going to defaulted. You don't have to figure out the math anymore if you're used to doing that for your assessment. It's going to default district leaders, you're gonna love this. You can actually set those defaults at a district level, so it just makes it easy for the teachers. To just have those mastery cut score set.
I can make any changes to the title or the description right up here in the settings tab. And then we're getting some hero metrics up here in the top left. We can see it's six questions, it's worth six points, and it's covering one standard in this particular pace. So just like before, this can be saved in a draft mode or if I'm ready, I can click create that assessment. And it's gonna create it.
It'll populate it into the standard that I was looking for. So you'll see that it's right here this little draft assessment. And the best thing is with that Canvas integration, it's going to populate for me in my assignments tab. So that assignment is gonna be pre created, maybe, if my computer loads. Oh, there we go.
So there's my draft assessment right there. I can push it out, I can organize it, I can change the due dates, whatever I need to to organize that for my LMS. And then ultimately, you can place it into a module, so it's a part of that learning progression for the student. So you'll notice here in my module, I have a little mastery icon. Very similar to the quizzes rocketship, if you're used to that.
But you see that right inside of the module. So everything that we just did, the assessment creation, all of that is able to be pushed right into Canvas, we have that ease of use to be able to connect it, you know, with third party tools that we're utilizing, maybe different content and put it in that learning progression for the student. Now I'm gonna jump over to the student really quick because I think this is fabulous. Is the student inside of Canvas, and the observer inside of Canvas also has access to the Mastery tracker in the course navigation. Whether they're using the mobile app or they're using the web interface.
They're able to see their individual progress for the standards that have been assessed. So, now, it's not a secret, which the standard what the standards are that we're utilizing in our courses. Teachers can change the privacy settings and they're able to push out information about the assessment. Maybe if I'm doing a reteach or we're looking at this assessment together as a class, I can release it for the students. I can even release their answers so they could see how they did.
And we have that ability to have a conversation around these standards and the assessments that are applicable to these standards. Alright. Hopefully, you enjoyed looking at some of these new migration alignment creation features inside of there. If you haven't logged in to MasteryConnect today, if you do, you will get some new pop ups that will actually walk you through the new features. So you'll have some guided help.
And there's some great new features in our community videos, help center documents that may support you as you start learning the new features. But I hope you're excited I know I'm excited and it's just opening, you know, more functionality inside of the mastery tracker within campus. Alright. I'll turn it back over to I'll turn it over to Tamara. Thank you, Tiffany, for that amazing demo.
As you can all see, we are just as excited as you are. This has been something in the work for a long time. So we actually had Hall County from Georgia participate in the beta for the last month to kinda get a fill of the new features and then also to provide some feedback. I'm Tamara and I am one of the customer success managers on the MasteryConnect team. And here with us today from Paul is doctor Stacy Wagner and doctor Courtney Peck, and I'm gonna just turn it over to them real to introduce themselves and their role at the district.
Hey, friends. I'll go first. My name is Stacy Wagner. I am the director of assessment in Hall County Schools. My just needs my twenty second year in teaching, go up in the classroom, find as a building admin, and then five now in this role at the district.
I handle all of the administration and distribution of state assessments and level assessments. Yeah. And I'm Courtney Poke. I spent ten years as a middle school ELA teacher, and then this is now my third year of and your full time as our district's ELA content specialist. So, I'm kind of the in between between Dr.
Wagner's role, as well as our teachers. So, I kind of see how the district is able to create the goals for assessments and then see how it actually processes through and trickles down to our teachers. And Courtney and her team have have been integral in using Master Connect having conversations, about the assessments that we're giving, about what students are learning, what they can do, what they can't do, and how we need to adjust instruction. To meet those needs. So she's she's been a game changer.
And thank you, and we really appreciate them joining us today and being willing to be the faces today for this webinar and our new release so we appreciate them. So our very first question for you Dr. Peck and Dr. Wagner is what instructure products are you currently using? Yes, so we use both Canvas and Ministry Connect. We have been a Canvas customer since twenty fourteen.
We were well prepared going into the pandemic with a learning management system. Thanks to that fourth thought. And and we joined shortly actually thereafter with Mastery Connect in, like, twenty sixteen or seventeen. They were separate entities. At the time, I mean, we joined on with both companies and both products.
Because we really saw -- we really saw from both of those separate entities the rationale behind it, there are philosophies aligned a lot with our philosophies as a district, Master Connect, and the emphasis on formative assessment, making sure that you know what students can do, align to specific standards, and then instructure Canvas, and the ability to kind of put everything in one place. So when the two products teamed up when master connect was acquired by instructor and going that instructor family, we were super excited about how that merge and that partnership was gonna really level up the use of assessment. Because assessment is the bridge, between teaching and learning. It's how we know whether or not the teaching that has happened has actually led to the learning. And we've seen lots of great upgrades to to the product, to an already fabulous product with mastery.
We actually pushed our teachers to go to that integration between the two products last year. We didn't give anyone instructions on creating trackers unless it was connected with their Canvas course. We routed everyone through Canvas and we have loved the seamlessness of that, sending kids to one location, to their course, and having their assessments and their assignments and all of that stuff built into that one course. We had a beautiful integration with our SIS And because of that, we got automatic rostering and our teams in elearning worked very closely with instructor to make sure that grade passed back. We're even back into our SIS student information system for reporting grades to parents in addition to them showing in the Canvas course.
So, All of those updates that you guys showed just earlier are only going to make that an even better and more seamless integration between the two and we are super stoked for it just like everybody that I saw in the chat. They're like, this is fire, you are right. It's gonna be it's gonna be fabulous. Yeah. We're really excited just to be able to see everything kind of honing and tighten what was already available.
And it funny to see throughout the last ten years of how teachers have kind of seen Canvas and Mastering may be in different buckets, but being able to see them come together. And then also on the flip side being able to have new teachers and just already, that's all they know for it. And so to have those conversations in building, of, it's not I have to use this and this, but look how they work together. And I got to work with our ELA team two weeks ago, specifically on this. They got to have some teacher leaders from all the different schools in our districts.
We got together. We got to go through and they got to look at. The beta and the update, and we were able to create our assessments through mastery and really hone in and redo our benchmarks so that we can vertically align. And in just two days, we were able to actually create twelve assessments, brand new, vertically aligned, vetted from the Mastery item banks, to which our teachers left feeling tired, but not burned out how they normally would by having to have that mental load of having to create everything from scratch. But we're shifting from that conversation of, are we giving formatives, are we giving, you know, our benchmark assessments to then what are we doing with it? So, not only could we have that conversation, but it very naturally went into looking at how the stoplight system of the tracker works.
What does this mean for students? Trying to get that student led conversation. Teachers being able to. So it's not just here's the assessment. Here's how you did on it. It's okay, click on your tracker, what do you see, what do you notice, and really being able to quickly pivot when needed to really meet the needs for So we are really, really excited about all these new updates.
Thank you. And I love that your vision was the same as in structure. When they did acquire us, that was their vision. To make, and as you know, they have acquired many other products, but to make it a one stop shop because they want everything to be like you said honed in on one place and they available all accessible in the LMS. And I love that you're now getting your students more involved too with their own learning because I think that's probably one of the outcomes you were hoping for into making sure that your students are checking their own learning and being able to watch and evaluate for themselves what they need to progress on.
I love that. So we also, you kind of already touched a little bit on this, but with the new recent and being a part of that beta, Courtney, you did mention this a little bit on how you were able to save some time and able to create so many assessments within that two day period, but What are some other features that you know are gonna save your teachers some time? So for for my perspective, I've kind of seen the both sides, I've seen the district side of things of how much Stacy's had to go through and create assessments, and then how it goes into the classroom and how they've been able to import it. And so for it just to be automatically pushed out has been huge for our teachers, But then for me to go in, and then having our teams be able to build these assessments, it used to be okay, we're gonna kind of build something, come up with something, piece it together on like a Google Doc. And then we had to format it to save it as a PDF and nothing happens. So then I had to go through and type individually.
And there was not a draft feature, and there was lots of words that I won't say on here that was used because it would drive us crazy. And so, it was funny because you would know when it was a mastery week because you would just hear in different offices people just being like, oh my gosh, because it's all gone, and we would we would frustrate with our with our cells, and we would kinda have to pause. But, I mean, if if you would have told me last year that we would have been able to have twelve assessments completely vetted done in two days, I would have laughed a lot. But, so that has saved so much time, the teachers see value in it. And so what was kind of cool too is even though we have like our district lens, These are gonna be our district benchmarks for Eat Unit.
They were already naturally having those conversations of, oh, this is how I'm gonna use it in my classroom. Oh, I'm gonna create a pre assessment for our school. Oh, well, what are you doing at your school? We have similar demographics in ours. Let's talk about some common formatives. And it was very organic conversation, which was exciting.
That's what we would dream about being able to do, but it was huge because they could just see how easily it sensible that all of this was and how it would just be something that you can go through and leverage in your classroom without even thinking. I can't overemphasize how laborious the process was for us previously, but she she mentioned they had done all of their week's worth of work and building in the Google Doc, then then our content specialist would have to actually author it into our district item bank, and then they would send it to me, and then I would have to create the benchmark, and sometimes we would be aligned to a wrong standard, or we find a typo, then we went to cloned the stinking item from the item bay. You can remember to go back and delete the other one. Right? And it was just such a mess. So she, yeah, we can't overemphasize the time say that it's been for the building of the district benchmarks.
And we haven't been able to put our teams of teachers into the creating of those item banks in the past. But by the way that we're by the way that the the updates have been, we I had, like she said, those actual content builders in the platform and creating those benchmarks in real time. So they got hands on experience to see how easy it's going to be to transfer back into making the short formatives, which is where I'm gonna really get the movement. Right? Not those benchmarks. Not those big summative assessments, but those formative pieces along the way.
It's where you get the real movement in student learning. So, super excited to see how that expands back out and the use of Master Connect to its more full potential than we've been using it in the past. We'll be there. Yes, it's super exciting that that item creation is right there inside the assessment. You don't have to have like two separate things going on to gather those items.
And then, like you said, the draft is gonna be a big one because it is the worst thing if you accidentally click out of it and then it's gone. Like -- Mhmm. -- we definitely have had some customers, you know, emailing and say, oh, I accidentally picked out of it. It was fifty questions. Can you recover it? Like, no.
You never push save. Like, it's there's no recovering. And so that is super exciting to have that draft ability. Something else I do wanna ask you about is what do you guys think about that new scoring and that automated scoring of the cut scores? I'm an e l a teacher, so thank you for that not wanting to do the math. Because I used to have we had a shared spreadsheet that we used when I was like this many questions.
This is the number from Mastery, this is the number from Nearmans Street, like I, we had to keep referring back to it, so that just makes it so much easier as well. And another thing I mentioned mentioned in invariably every year, we would have the tutorial teachers to be able to just find their benchmark. That they would have to they would get into their tracker and have to try and scroll and look at them and they go, it's not bigger and then we teach them again to scroll and try and find it. So extra little assessments tab that she shared that's within. You can toggle back and forth between the student view and the assessment.
View where all of your assessments are listed right there. That's gonna be amazing for our teachers as well, just to be able to find that their assessments are actually there and to get to them quickly and efficiently to publish them to kids and such. And I know we've we've said a lot of things about how it in the past, it wasn't so great, and it was very frustrating. But I think that really is such a huge estimate to mastery and instructure because even though those were huge frustrations and stuff, we still loved and were fully bought into mastery because mastery offers. So now it's just really that honey hole of perfection that we really are excited about.
Mean, my goodness. The power of that data and how quickly it comes in to be able to see item analysis, not only for your class, but to be able to filter back and forth between each of your different sections of your class, as well as to see how any kid who took that assessment in your school is doing, conversations across classrooms about about collective work and practices, classroom, instructional practices, and that kind of thing. I mean, that's just good. We're stronger together. Than we are separately, and to be able to have that data at your fingertips, yes, Courtney.
That is a testament to the power of this product. And just to kind of talk on, historically, what we've done with the data is that throughout the years, we run those data reports and so the district will meet together with these district leadership principles, assistant principals, instructional coaches, and we'll take our benchmark assessments, and we'll say, okay, Here's the different ranges of the different mastery levels of how each school did. The school's leadership would then have conversation. Okay. You guys blew it out of the water, we did it.
What did y'all do that was different? And then what was needed is that then the content specialist will go and lead these same conversations individually with certain grade levels in the schools and really hone in and look at the different classrooms, what are you guys doing and what's different. And so, that has become such like a best practice, and it's just our data is just what we do as a district now. We look at the different way that you can run the different reports and pull it by items, you know, if we're looking at a ninth grade ELA assessment. Okay? Well, is that ninth grade high school with all the kids in it? Or is that an eighth grade advanced ninth grade course because those are, you know, apples and oranges for that. So, now being able to really hone in on the formative data for this, and we've been such max at looking at this summative data, I think that it's going to just drive that conversation of our endgame that much more because we're gonna be able to have these conversations more than just necessarily every nine weeks, but be able to pull that same different data and saying, what are we doing across the district? How can we help best support each other? It's just what we do.
That's what you said. And we work really hard to build a culture where it's not punitive in nature. And it's also not about taking ourselves as a teacher out of the picture and having conversations about practice and conversations about student learning. Right? And so we've worked really hard to get there and so excited to see it continue to to grow. Thank you.
I'm so glad you guys kinda shared your story because I think that sometimes, you know, we do get frustrated at a district level and teacher level and sometimes we we don't know how to move forward, but I love that you showed the history because it is not something that happens overnight. For sure it's not it's a ongoing process of getting, you know, your benchmarks in place and now focusing more on formatives, but then training and teaching your teachers how to actually use that data and that is awesome. And yes, it's a working progress, but then that just means that everything is getting better. And hopefully with our new releases and that Enter a connection between master connect and Canvas that can help you grow even more, which leads to the next question of how has the use of master and we kind of touched on this a lot. So but if there's anything else you'd like to add of how master connect with Canvas together have helped you be more efficient and effective.
And there is a there was a question from Kristen in our Q and A. It said you earlier mentioned routing your teachers through Canvas, and maybe you can speak to that like what does that mean? You route teachers through Canvas, And I think that goes along with, like, the working efficiently question as well. Absolutely. It does. So, yeah, we you two have, we have a kind of a landing page called launch point that we use for single sign on in our district and we used to have separate tile for Canvas and another one for MasteryConnect, where it took them straight to the -- if they click the Master Connect, when it took them straight to the MasteryConnect, website URL, where it was still single sign on them, but it took them to MasteryConnect.
And we took that tile off of launch point and just left our Canvas tile on there. So, they have to click on the Canvas tile and that would be how they get into Master Connect. And we didn't teach them how to make trackers last year through native Mastery Connect. We only taught them how to do it through the integration of after having created their Canvas course through teacher tools, which is how do we align Canvas to our SIS through automatic clustering. Then after they did that to create their Mastery Connect trackers right there within their Canvas course.
You can hide it from Global NAV in Canvas, so there still is that option for them to sort of around the course by clicking on it in the global NAV, but we constantly model, model, model, doing it through the Canvas course, so that's how we route them that way. We just took away their ability to quickly single sign on, to master connect directly. Yeah. And so when we're able to really streamline the functionality piece of that, it helps teachers work at it more efficiently, because it's not thinking, I've got to use mastery only for benchmarks. I got to use Canvas for everything else.
I see now it's really streamlined. And with that said, the ability for teachers to then sync in their Canvas quizzes that they've already created now through the mastery tracker is huge. And I'm a little bit jealous because I'm not in the classroom anymore because a lot of times too is, you know, they'll be like, okay, well, cool. This is all Mastering has to offer, but I have spent so much time creating my own stuff or it really works, and then you can't see how the tracker, you know, applies. And so being able to streamline that and having to associate a standard with that because those conversations like it it might seem silly or duh, but you know, are you actually assessing what the standard is asking? And those are really important, especially, you know, here in Georgia, we have our new mass standards, and our new ELA standards are coming.
They're rolling out in the next two years. It's really important to kind of get back to the basics of that. And I think that's a very natural conversation now that Mastery and Canvas are able to to work together for it. Yes. For sure.
And to add on that, like everything should be single sign on from Canvas. The teacher can access that Mastery tracker, but as Tiffany showed in that demo too so can observers and students so they can actually check their progress in that mastery tracker right from their single sign on. And in just another tip like Stacy said that we do have that global nav, so if they click on that, they do, like divert to the native mastery connect page, but even if they do that, if students do that, they can't access in there because the assignments will actually be living in the master tracker inside their assignments tab or modules teachers moved it. So the students are accessing those mastery connect assignments, while assessments that become assignments right there in that course if that tracker's linked. And Tiffany was super helpful and added a guide there for anybody who wants to follow-up more on how to make sure that you're trackers are connecting to your courses, there's a guide that she just threw in the chat to help you out.
Well, thank you so much for sharing your experience and providing us with so much insight and giving us ideas on how to make MasteryConnect and Canvas work better together and we're now gonna turn the time over to some questions. So if anybody has any questions, please feel free to I'm not sure I think I'm gonna turn it back to STILL and he will facilitate this part. So you can put questions in the chat or you can also use the q and a feature that's also in your Zoom settings. Let's see. Can you show the assessment workflow if teachers want to use a PDF? Yes, we can do that.
Tiffany is on it. Tiffany is the demo lady of all people. We'll see if I have a PDF. I might have a random PDF in my account or on my computer. All right.
So, your same thing, whether you want to create an assessment right from the students' piece, over here. Right? You have your add assessment. Or if you were in the assessments view, same thing, you're just gonna click to add. So if you're gonna create a new one, I'll just do this as PDF example, and you're going to go through the alignment. You'll see the alignments already set for you that it's this is sixth grade math.
And instead of doing an item based assessment as your source, you can do a document based. Again, you can change your privacy. I'm gonna change your private to me because this is a practice. And as I click next, it's gonna look almost exactly the same, but in of clicking to add items, you're going to click to upload a document first. So you still get your same places where you're uploading from.
Most likely it's probably from your computer. Right? So wherever you need to, I'll let's let's find a random a random one. So that's gonna upload for me and I can always come back and view it. And then this is where you add your question. So before you used to say, you know, I want two multiple choice.
It's the same type of thing. It's just in a new kind of pop up. So I actually know this is three multiple choice or true false or whatever type of question you're looking for. Select that standard and now you can add three that are aligned to one standard at a time. So you don't have to do the standard alignment.
I love that. It just makes it kinda quick and easy. And then, same thing, you're gonna set your correct answers. And then, if you need to continue to add more, you can. I can also leave this view.
And it's going to save it as a draft, which is right, celebration every time and I can come back and edit it. Those scoring is still gonna be applicable to those document based assessments as well. So I hope that helps. It doesn't look like we've gotten any other questions, so we'd like to once again bank Call County for joining us and being willing to be the testers of the beta but then also be able to present and share what they've learned and what they're excited for, and then also their experience. And thank you for joining us We appreciate you coming, go out and spread the joy and get everybody involved and get on and start using MasteryConnect and Canvas together. Awesome. Thank you, everyone.
You'll see me. I'm Tiffany. You'll see Tamara, and then you'll also see Stacey and Courtney that are joining us from Hall County Schools in Georgia. So we are going to start today's webinar with introducing you to some new features that are live in Mastery Connect. They actually went out live yesterday.
We're super excited that they're here. So we'll see some new things along the lines of assessment creation. And how we can migrate items from Canvas. So as we go through those that demo piece, I'll take you through that live walk through. Then we'll turn the time over to Tamra to help facilitate a discussion with Hall County Schools.
We're excited to have them with us. After our discussion, we will conclude our time together with answering some questions. So go ahead and put those questions in the chat as you go through. Or you can save them until after we have our discussion with Hall County Schools. And any unanswered questions will go through from the chat as well.
So my name is Tiffany Hardinger, and I am a senior solutions engineer with Instructure. My background is in K-twelve. I was teacher. I actually use Mastery Connect in my classroom. And now, I have the opportunity to help support districts across the United States.
Learning about the different tools that we offer at instructure. We're gonna get started first by kind of orienting you to the Instructure learning platform. Many times people know us for Canvas and we are the creators or the makers of Canvas. That is our learning management system. But as a part of the structured learning platform, we have a variety of different pieces.
Today, we are going to be focusing on our assessment piece. So that is our mastery connect portion of the platform. And we're also going to dive a little bit into the content that's available. So, we have the Mastery item bank that's available. Pre created items that are aligned to the standards that you're utilizing in your state.
So today's focus as we jump in to the live webinar is really on three specific things. One, we're going to look at how easy it is to migrate classic canvas quizzes to eliminate eliminate all of that duplication of efforts that teachers may have done in their Canvas courses. So we're gonna be able to bring those over, align them to standards, and be able to utilize them in our courses, as well as see really awesome data aligned with those. The other piece that we're gonna focus on with some of the new features is just the ability for educators to streamline their workflows. One of the things that we always look for when we're creating or generating new things inside of any of our products is we know how crucial it is to save educators time.
And then finally, we are going to look at some of the flexibility that's available with the new updated assessment creation process. Alright. Remember, if you have any questions as I go through the live demo, feel free to put them in the chat and we will go through those. We'll answer. We have a bunch of people on that can help answer any questions while I'm doing the demonstration.
And then if we don't get to it during the chat, we'll look at it and the q and a later on law on. In the webinar. Alright. So without much ado, we're going to jump into a live demo. And I'm going to move first into the teacher perspective.
Now, we're going to do everything today from inside of the Canvas course because we're talking about how you can supercharge your LMS with Mastery Connect. So we're gonna be looking at sixth grade math in our course today, and all of the mass features are available inside of the Canvas course. It's my preferred way to get into Mastery if I'm already a Canvas user and I'm used to pushing out assessments and, you know, content to my students. It's a perfect way to bring that all together. So we're gonna go over here in our course navigation, and we're gonna click on the Mastery tracker.
What you're gonna see here is our mastery tracker. Let me click on to the right tab first. So, what I'm seeing is we always have students on the left, and across the top are going to be the standards that we are assessing as it applies to this course. One thing to know about the standards inside of mass Connect is they are already preloaded for you. As states adopt new standards or they update standards, we update those as well.
So, you have the ability to pull in those standards that have already been pre created for you, but you also have the ability to put in custom standards whether that's from a district level or you as a teacher have some specific standards that you want to align content to and assess on. So across the top, you're seeing my standards, and I'm just using some basic sixth grade math standards today, but really in the heart of the tracker is going to be the mass colors. So, you're seeing a three point of mastery. We also have a four point scale, so you would see an additional color. And the verbiage that we're using today is kind of our default language.
We have mastery, near mastery and remediation, and that's all customizable by the district. So, Your trucker may look a little bit different if you're already using MasteryConnect than what you see here on my screen. The purpose of the tracker is for teachers to quickly be able to identify levels of understanding as it applies to the standards that they're assessing. The other piece is to quickly with the data be able to target individuals, standards or groups of students that may need additional support. And then most importantly, be able to have the data at your fingertips to do some self evaluation on the teaching and learning that's taking place in your classroom.
One of the things I love about the tracker is I'm able to actually see my formative assessments that I may be creating standalone or that my team is collaborating on, as well as the ability to see benchmark or interim type assessments that have been pushed out to me from my district. So, I'm doing all of that in the same place and I'm able to see the data as it compares to one another. One of the features that is great about the tracker and kind of takes it to the next level is the ability to add some filtering to the data, so I can look at specific subgroups or special groups of students that may need additional support. The other piece that I love is the ability two one, hover over a standard and actually recall what it is. Right? Sometimes it's that nitty gritty language that we don't have totally memorized.
But it makes it quick and easy for me to just get a reminder of what that standard is covering. And then my favorite piece is this longitudinal view. I can click into an a standard and I can see every assessment that we've given that ties to the standard. Now, these assessments may be an assessment that's taken online, more of like a technology enhanced type of assessment, where students may be dragging and dropping, maybe doing some formula questions. This could also be more of a performance based task where we're using a rubric.
Or teachers are working in a small group setting and putting in something like a reteach or, you know, a one on one type assessment for the students. So all of this is in the same place, and I'm able to see that longitudinal view. As I deliver any assessment in the system, I'm able to see reports on that assessment. So, I get an item analysis which has clickable pieces, so I'm able to see how those students are doing who those students are that may have scored incorrectly. If I'm using multiple sections inside of Canvas, I can see this data by section, so one group at a time.
If this is a common assessment that we're all utilizing in our grade level, I'm also able to see those common that common data for all students who delivered this assessment. So, that's a little bit about the tracker and kind of the basics of the tracker. I'm going to go back to the main page view because you may have noticed something that was clicked on when I first started, and that is our new assessments view. So as part of the new reveal, the new features. We have a separate tab now that is going to compile all the assessments that you have inside of the tracker.
I can see a list. I can identify ones that are benchmarks with this little corner and something that's awesome and brand new is we also have a draft assessment. So you can start building something and you can save it in a draft. It's amazing. It makes me so happy.
And I can come back to it. I can see this list of pieces. I can jump right to reporting. I can look at all of the different views here. I can also look at items that I need to grade.
So if there's any items in the assessment that are asked me to grade. I can do that right from this view. I also can change this view to group it by standards. And now I can get a really clear view for each of those standards, which assessments are, you know, tied to that. Same thing.
I still get those different options for being able to preview all of these items. And I also have my drafts organized by itself. So the first thing that I want to really focus on is you may have noticed a beautiful button up in the top right, and that is our import Canvas quizzes. We need some clapping on the back end because this is an awesome new feature. Our product team, our engineering team has worked really hard on.
So, now with the new assessment features, I can click to import my Canvas classic quizzes. So, I actually just click there. I see which quizzes are available. I actually have a lot inside of this course. So I can go through, find the ones I need.
I can also import more than one at a time. So I'm just gonna take bring in this quick check. So it's super exciting. I can see some sharing happening in the chat. I love it.
And I'm just gonna convert this as a new mastery connect assessment. And it's gonna give me this little update that says, hey, your quiz is being migrated and then once it's complete, kinda depends on how long it takes. Right? Like how many items are actually on that quiz. I'm just gonna refresh my tracker list, and tada, that quick check that I just had in Canvas is now in match reconnect. It's fabulous.
Obviously, it makes us very excited. So what I can do from here is I can actually edit this draft. And I'm gonna go ahead and click edit on there. And look at this. Here's all of the items that were previously in classic quizzes.
And now I can make changes to them. I can check it out, make sure it's working the way we want it to, but the best piece is now I can align standard to it, and I can get that standard data associated with these quizzes that I love that I've been using inside of my Canvas course. So a couple ways that you can align the assessment questions is one, you can just select each one by itself. And do that quick alignment and choose which items it is. But my favorite is you actually can select the whole list if it's for one standard.
And you can align it that quick. So all of those different standards that are already in your tracker are available for you to connect from. So it makes it really quick and easy. I'm just gonna align this to six r p a two, and you'll see that quick. All of those are aligned, and they've turned a different color, so they were orange, meaning they needed an alignment and you'll see that alignment is there.
Alright. I'm gonna go and guess what if I just go back to my tracker it's gonna save my work which is awesome and I see that draft and it can come back and edit at any time. Another piece that I wanted to mention with the new assessment view is the quick and easy way to create assessments, whether you're going to author new items or you also want to bring in items from our item bank. So, this is a draft assessment and only has one question in it so far. And this is actually a question that I created.
So I'm actually able to see that question, the passages that I've added. And right within the assessment creation pane, I can edit the item. Like, this shouldn't be getting a ton of chairs as well. It's very exciting. So all of the editing, that creation of the item, I can do it inside of the assessment.
I can also build items from the very beginning. So as I add things, I added a ruler here. I have a passage. I can view that passage. All within the same view, and I can create that item, put in the question, you know, this one is a specific label image with drag and drop.
I can do all of that creation that I'm used to over here on the left, and then I can always test it out over here on the right to make sure it's working the way I intended. And you'll notice that I'm saving it as a draft. It won't publish until I actually create this assessment and publish this assessment. So I have a lot of time to, you know, make any changes. If I see an issue, I can make those changes right within my assessment creation piece now.
Alright. I'm gonna push this little plus button here, and it's also going to give me the option to add items from an item bank. This is what I used earlier when I authored this new item, but I'm gonna add an item from the item bank. One of my favorite things about the new item bank feature is it is going to pull in every item that's inside of the bank. So I have a lot of items to choose from.
And we have a new filter pane that's gonna pop over here on the right. And this is where I can say, okay, there's a specific standard that I'm looking for or maybe there's multiple standards that I'm looking for. And I can choose not just one standard, but two or three whatever I want, and I can see those results. I can choose which item bank I want to look at or can search all the item banks that I have access to. That is a game changer.
You don't have to go back and forth to your item banks anymore. Search them all at the same time for that standard that you're looking for. Now, we have some additional filters added. I can look at item type which we're used to that. Our items have been a little bit simplified into the different types of items, which I love.
So if I'm looking for a classified or a written type question, I can simplify that filter. I can look for items with passages or without passages. This is awesome especially for our ELA or even our science. Teachers who may want a passage that students are referencing. And then you'll see now I can filter by difficulty.
So let's look here. I wanna do a medium difficulty. I'm gonna close these ones, and I'm gonna do d o k two So now, I can filter by two different types of levels. Right? So I have a difficulty medium, a d o k of two, and I can even say, the blooms, I actually want this to be an application type question. And you'll see that there's five hundred and ninety six items found.
So now, I'm just gonna close my filters, and this is where I can start going through the banks. I can look at all of the results. And I can really quickly easily view them. You'll see the over on the right. But now all I have to do is do a little check mark, and I can just go through quite a few of these.
And I can add five items that quick. So now I have those items that I'm authoring in the same pane. Pain, the items that I'm grabbing from the item bank in the same pane. And you'll notice I have the ability to move them. I can really simplify simplify that kind of movement or the organization of the assessment and do that really quickly.
Such a huge addition to MasteryConnect. I'm in love. A few other things that I'll mention up here in the top right hand corner that make me happy. Is you get some Oh, I'll start over here first and then come back here. So you get automatic scoring.
So cup scores are going to defaulted. You don't have to figure out the math anymore if you're used to doing that for your assessment. It's going to default district leaders, you're gonna love this. You can actually set those defaults at a district level, so it just makes it easy for the teachers. To just have those mastery cut score set.
I can make any changes to the title or the description right up here in the settings tab. And then we're getting some hero metrics up here in the top left. We can see it's six questions, it's worth six points, and it's covering one standard in this particular pace. So just like before, this can be saved in a draft mode or if I'm ready, I can click create that assessment. And it's gonna create it.
It'll populate it into the standard that I was looking for. So you'll see that it's right here this little draft assessment. And the best thing is with that Canvas integration, it's going to populate for me in my assignments tab. So that assignment is gonna be pre created, maybe, if my computer loads. Oh, there we go.
So there's my draft assessment right there. I can push it out, I can organize it, I can change the due dates, whatever I need to to organize that for my LMS. And then ultimately, you can place it into a module, so it's a part of that learning progression for the student. So you'll notice here in my module, I have a little mastery icon. Very similar to the quizzes rocketship, if you're used to that.
But you see that right inside of the module. So everything that we just did, the assessment creation, all of that is able to be pushed right into Canvas, we have that ease of use to be able to connect it, you know, with third party tools that we're utilizing, maybe different content and put it in that learning progression for the student. Now I'm gonna jump over to the student really quick because I think this is fabulous. Is the student inside of Canvas, and the observer inside of Canvas also has access to the Mastery tracker in the course navigation. Whether they're using the mobile app or they're using the web interface.
They're able to see their individual progress for the standards that have been assessed. So, now, it's not a secret, which the standard what the standards are that we're utilizing in our courses. Teachers can change the privacy settings and they're able to push out information about the assessment. Maybe if I'm doing a reteach or we're looking at this assessment together as a class, I can release it for the students. I can even release their answers so they could see how they did.
And we have that ability to have a conversation around these standards and the assessments that are applicable to these standards. Alright. Hopefully, you enjoyed looking at some of these new migration alignment creation features inside of there. If you haven't logged in to MasteryConnect today, if you do, you will get some new pop ups that will actually walk you through the new features. So you'll have some guided help.
And there's some great new features in our community videos, help center documents that may support you as you start learning the new features. But I hope you're excited I know I'm excited and it's just opening, you know, more functionality inside of the mastery tracker within campus. Alright. I'll turn it back over to I'll turn it over to Tamara. Thank you, Tiffany, for that amazing demo.
As you can all see, we are just as excited as you are. This has been something in the work for a long time. So we actually had Hall County from Georgia participate in the beta for the last month to kinda get a fill of the new features and then also to provide some feedback. I'm Tamara and I am one of the customer success managers on the MasteryConnect team. And here with us today from Paul is doctor Stacy Wagner and doctor Courtney Peck, and I'm gonna just turn it over to them real to introduce themselves and their role at the district.
Hey, friends. I'll go first. My name is Stacy Wagner. I am the director of assessment in Hall County Schools. My just needs my twenty second year in teaching, go up in the classroom, find as a building admin, and then five now in this role at the district.
I handle all of the administration and distribution of state assessments and level assessments. Yeah. And I'm Courtney Poke. I spent ten years as a middle school ELA teacher, and then this is now my third year of and your full time as our district's ELA content specialist. So, I'm kind of the in between between Dr.
Wagner's role, as well as our teachers. So, I kind of see how the district is able to create the goals for assessments and then see how it actually processes through and trickles down to our teachers. And Courtney and her team have have been integral in using Master Connect having conversations, about the assessments that we're giving, about what students are learning, what they can do, what they can't do, and how we need to adjust instruction. To meet those needs. So she's she's been a game changer.
And thank you, and we really appreciate them joining us today and being willing to be the faces today for this webinar and our new release so we appreciate them. So our very first question for you Dr. Peck and Dr. Wagner is what instructure products are you currently using? Yes, so we use both Canvas and Ministry Connect. We have been a Canvas customer since twenty fourteen.
We were well prepared going into the pandemic with a learning management system. Thanks to that fourth thought. And and we joined shortly actually thereafter with Mastery Connect in, like, twenty sixteen or seventeen. They were separate entities. At the time, I mean, we joined on with both companies and both products.
Because we really saw -- we really saw from both of those separate entities the rationale behind it, there are philosophies aligned a lot with our philosophies as a district, Master Connect, and the emphasis on formative assessment, making sure that you know what students can do, align to specific standards, and then instructure Canvas, and the ability to kind of put everything in one place. So when the two products teamed up when master connect was acquired by instructor and going that instructor family, we were super excited about how that merge and that partnership was gonna really level up the use of assessment. Because assessment is the bridge, between teaching and learning. It's how we know whether or not the teaching that has happened has actually led to the learning. And we've seen lots of great upgrades to to the product, to an already fabulous product with mastery.
We actually pushed our teachers to go to that integration between the two products last year. We didn't give anyone instructions on creating trackers unless it was connected with their Canvas course. We routed everyone through Canvas and we have loved the seamlessness of that, sending kids to one location, to their course, and having their assessments and their assignments and all of that stuff built into that one course. We had a beautiful integration with our SIS And because of that, we got automatic rostering and our teams in elearning worked very closely with instructor to make sure that grade passed back. We're even back into our SIS student information system for reporting grades to parents in addition to them showing in the Canvas course.
So, All of those updates that you guys showed just earlier are only going to make that an even better and more seamless integration between the two and we are super stoked for it just like everybody that I saw in the chat. They're like, this is fire, you are right. It's gonna be it's gonna be fabulous. Yeah. We're really excited just to be able to see everything kind of honing and tighten what was already available.
And it funny to see throughout the last ten years of how teachers have kind of seen Canvas and Mastering may be in different buckets, but being able to see them come together. And then also on the flip side being able to have new teachers and just already, that's all they know for it. And so to have those conversations in building, of, it's not I have to use this and this, but look how they work together. And I got to work with our ELA team two weeks ago, specifically on this. They got to have some teacher leaders from all the different schools in our districts.
We got together. We got to go through and they got to look at. The beta and the update, and we were able to create our assessments through mastery and really hone in and redo our benchmarks so that we can vertically align. And in just two days, we were able to actually create twelve assessments, brand new, vertically aligned, vetted from the Mastery item banks, to which our teachers left feeling tired, but not burned out how they normally would by having to have that mental load of having to create everything from scratch. But we're shifting from that conversation of, are we giving formatives, are we giving, you know, our benchmark assessments to then what are we doing with it? So, not only could we have that conversation, but it very naturally went into looking at how the stoplight system of the tracker works.
What does this mean for students? Trying to get that student led conversation. Teachers being able to. So it's not just here's the assessment. Here's how you did on it. It's okay, click on your tracker, what do you see, what do you notice, and really being able to quickly pivot when needed to really meet the needs for So we are really, really excited about all these new updates.
Thank you. And I love that your vision was the same as in structure. When they did acquire us, that was their vision. To make, and as you know, they have acquired many other products, but to make it a one stop shop because they want everything to be like you said honed in on one place and they available all accessible in the LMS. And I love that you're now getting your students more involved too with their own learning because I think that's probably one of the outcomes you were hoping for into making sure that your students are checking their own learning and being able to watch and evaluate for themselves what they need to progress on.
I love that. So we also, you kind of already touched a little bit on this, but with the new recent and being a part of that beta, Courtney, you did mention this a little bit on how you were able to save some time and able to create so many assessments within that two day period, but What are some other features that you know are gonna save your teachers some time? So for for my perspective, I've kind of seen the both sides, I've seen the district side of things of how much Stacy's had to go through and create assessments, and then how it goes into the classroom and how they've been able to import it. And so for it just to be automatically pushed out has been huge for our teachers, But then for me to go in, and then having our teams be able to build these assessments, it used to be okay, we're gonna kind of build something, come up with something, piece it together on like a Google Doc. And then we had to format it to save it as a PDF and nothing happens. So then I had to go through and type individually.
And there was not a draft feature, and there was lots of words that I won't say on here that was used because it would drive us crazy. And so, it was funny because you would know when it was a mastery week because you would just hear in different offices people just being like, oh my gosh, because it's all gone, and we would we would frustrate with our with our cells, and we would kinda have to pause. But, I mean, if if you would have told me last year that we would have been able to have twelve assessments completely vetted done in two days, I would have laughed a lot. But, so that has saved so much time, the teachers see value in it. And so what was kind of cool too is even though we have like our district lens, These are gonna be our district benchmarks for Eat Unit.
They were already naturally having those conversations of, oh, this is how I'm gonna use it in my classroom. Oh, I'm gonna create a pre assessment for our school. Oh, well, what are you doing at your school? We have similar demographics in ours. Let's talk about some common formatives. And it was very organic conversation, which was exciting.
That's what we would dream about being able to do, but it was huge because they could just see how easily it sensible that all of this was and how it would just be something that you can go through and leverage in your classroom without even thinking. I can't overemphasize how laborious the process was for us previously, but she she mentioned they had done all of their week's worth of work and building in the Google Doc, then then our content specialist would have to actually author it into our district item bank, and then they would send it to me, and then I would have to create the benchmark, and sometimes we would be aligned to a wrong standard, or we find a typo, then we went to cloned the stinking item from the item bay. You can remember to go back and delete the other one. Right? And it was just such a mess. So she, yeah, we can't overemphasize the time say that it's been for the building of the district benchmarks.
And we haven't been able to put our teams of teachers into the creating of those item banks in the past. But by the way that we're by the way that the the updates have been, we I had, like she said, those actual content builders in the platform and creating those benchmarks in real time. So they got hands on experience to see how easy it's going to be to transfer back into making the short formatives, which is where I'm gonna really get the movement. Right? Not those benchmarks. Not those big summative assessments, but those formative pieces along the way.
It's where you get the real movement in student learning. So, super excited to see how that expands back out and the use of Master Connect to its more full potential than we've been using it in the past. We'll be there. Yes, it's super exciting that that item creation is right there inside the assessment. You don't have to have like two separate things going on to gather those items.
And then, like you said, the draft is gonna be a big one because it is the worst thing if you accidentally click out of it and then it's gone. Like -- Mhmm. -- we definitely have had some customers, you know, emailing and say, oh, I accidentally picked out of it. It was fifty questions. Can you recover it? Like, no.
You never push save. Like, it's there's no recovering. And so that is super exciting to have that draft ability. Something else I do wanna ask you about is what do you guys think about that new scoring and that automated scoring of the cut scores? I'm an e l a teacher, so thank you for that not wanting to do the math. Because I used to have we had a shared spreadsheet that we used when I was like this many questions.
This is the number from Mastery, this is the number from Nearmans Street, like I, we had to keep referring back to it, so that just makes it so much easier as well. And another thing I mentioned mentioned in invariably every year, we would have the tutorial teachers to be able to just find their benchmark. That they would have to they would get into their tracker and have to try and scroll and look at them and they go, it's not bigger and then we teach them again to scroll and try and find it. So extra little assessments tab that she shared that's within. You can toggle back and forth between the student view and the assessment.
View where all of your assessments are listed right there. That's gonna be amazing for our teachers as well, just to be able to find that their assessments are actually there and to get to them quickly and efficiently to publish them to kids and such. And I know we've we've said a lot of things about how it in the past, it wasn't so great, and it was very frustrating. But I think that really is such a huge estimate to mastery and instructure because even though those were huge frustrations and stuff, we still loved and were fully bought into mastery because mastery offers. So now it's just really that honey hole of perfection that we really are excited about.
Mean, my goodness. The power of that data and how quickly it comes in to be able to see item analysis, not only for your class, but to be able to filter back and forth between each of your different sections of your class, as well as to see how any kid who took that assessment in your school is doing, conversations across classrooms about about collective work and practices, classroom, instructional practices, and that kind of thing. I mean, that's just good. We're stronger together. Than we are separately, and to be able to have that data at your fingertips, yes, Courtney.
That is a testament to the power of this product. And just to kind of talk on, historically, what we've done with the data is that throughout the years, we run those data reports and so the district will meet together with these district leadership principles, assistant principals, instructional coaches, and we'll take our benchmark assessments, and we'll say, okay, Here's the different ranges of the different mastery levels of how each school did. The school's leadership would then have conversation. Okay. You guys blew it out of the water, we did it.
What did y'all do that was different? And then what was needed is that then the content specialist will go and lead these same conversations individually with certain grade levels in the schools and really hone in and look at the different classrooms, what are you guys doing and what's different. And so, that has become such like a best practice, and it's just our data is just what we do as a district now. We look at the different way that you can run the different reports and pull it by items, you know, if we're looking at a ninth grade ELA assessment. Okay? Well, is that ninth grade high school with all the kids in it? Or is that an eighth grade advanced ninth grade course because those are, you know, apples and oranges for that. So, now being able to really hone in on the formative data for this, and we've been such max at looking at this summative data, I think that it's going to just drive that conversation of our endgame that much more because we're gonna be able to have these conversations more than just necessarily every nine weeks, but be able to pull that same different data and saying, what are we doing across the district? How can we help best support each other? It's just what we do.
That's what you said. And we work really hard to build a culture where it's not punitive in nature. And it's also not about taking ourselves as a teacher out of the picture and having conversations about practice and conversations about student learning. Right? And so we've worked really hard to get there and so excited to see it continue to to grow. Thank you.
I'm so glad you guys kinda shared your story because I think that sometimes, you know, we do get frustrated at a district level and teacher level and sometimes we we don't know how to move forward, but I love that you showed the history because it is not something that happens overnight. For sure it's not it's a ongoing process of getting, you know, your benchmarks in place and now focusing more on formatives, but then training and teaching your teachers how to actually use that data and that is awesome. And yes, it's a working progress, but then that just means that everything is getting better. And hopefully with our new releases and that Enter a connection between master connect and Canvas that can help you grow even more, which leads to the next question of how has the use of master and we kind of touched on this a lot. So but if there's anything else you'd like to add of how master connect with Canvas together have helped you be more efficient and effective.
And there is a there was a question from Kristen in our Q and A. It said you earlier mentioned routing your teachers through Canvas, and maybe you can speak to that like what does that mean? You route teachers through Canvas, And I think that goes along with, like, the working efficiently question as well. Absolutely. It does. So, yeah, we you two have, we have a kind of a landing page called launch point that we use for single sign on in our district and we used to have separate tile for Canvas and another one for MasteryConnect, where it took them straight to the -- if they click the Master Connect, when it took them straight to the MasteryConnect, website URL, where it was still single sign on them, but it took them to MasteryConnect.
And we took that tile off of launch point and just left our Canvas tile on there. So, they have to click on the Canvas tile and that would be how they get into Master Connect. And we didn't teach them how to make trackers last year through native Mastery Connect. We only taught them how to do it through the integration of after having created their Canvas course through teacher tools, which is how do we align Canvas to our SIS through automatic clustering. Then after they did that to create their Mastery Connect trackers right there within their Canvas course.
You can hide it from Global NAV in Canvas, so there still is that option for them to sort of around the course by clicking on it in the global NAV, but we constantly model, model, model, doing it through the Canvas course, so that's how we route them that way. We just took away their ability to quickly single sign on, to master connect directly. Yeah. And so when we're able to really streamline the functionality piece of that, it helps teachers work at it more efficiently, because it's not thinking, I've got to use mastery only for benchmarks. I got to use Canvas for everything else.
I see now it's really streamlined. And with that said, the ability for teachers to then sync in their Canvas quizzes that they've already created now through the mastery tracker is huge. And I'm a little bit jealous because I'm not in the classroom anymore because a lot of times too is, you know, they'll be like, okay, well, cool. This is all Mastering has to offer, but I have spent so much time creating my own stuff or it really works, and then you can't see how the tracker, you know, applies. And so being able to streamline that and having to associate a standard with that because those conversations like it it might seem silly or duh, but you know, are you actually assessing what the standard is asking? And those are really important, especially, you know, here in Georgia, we have our new mass standards, and our new ELA standards are coming.
They're rolling out in the next two years. It's really important to kind of get back to the basics of that. And I think that's a very natural conversation now that Mastery and Canvas are able to to work together for it. Yes. For sure.
And to add on that, like everything should be single sign on from Canvas. The teacher can access that Mastery tracker, but as Tiffany showed in that demo too so can observers and students so they can actually check their progress in that mastery tracker right from their single sign on. And in just another tip like Stacy said that we do have that global nav, so if they click on that, they do, like divert to the native mastery connect page, but even if they do that, if students do that, they can't access in there because the assignments will actually be living in the master tracker inside their assignments tab or modules teachers moved it. So the students are accessing those mastery connect assignments, while assessments that become assignments right there in that course if that tracker's linked. And Tiffany was super helpful and added a guide there for anybody who wants to follow-up more on how to make sure that you're trackers are connecting to your courses, there's a guide that she just threw in the chat to help you out.
Well, thank you so much for sharing your experience and providing us with so much insight and giving us ideas on how to make MasteryConnect and Canvas work better together and we're now gonna turn the time over to some questions. So if anybody has any questions, please feel free to I'm not sure I think I'm gonna turn it back to STILL and he will facilitate this part. So you can put questions in the chat or you can also use the q and a feature that's also in your Zoom settings. Let's see. Can you show the assessment workflow if teachers want to use a PDF? Yes, we can do that.
Tiffany is on it. Tiffany is the demo lady of all people. We'll see if I have a PDF. I might have a random PDF in my account or on my computer. All right.
So, your same thing, whether you want to create an assessment right from the students' piece, over here. Right? You have your add assessment. Or if you were in the assessments view, same thing, you're just gonna click to add. So if you're gonna create a new one, I'll just do this as PDF example, and you're going to go through the alignment. You'll see the alignments already set for you that it's this is sixth grade math.
And instead of doing an item based assessment as your source, you can do a document based. Again, you can change your privacy. I'm gonna change your private to me because this is a practice. And as I click next, it's gonna look almost exactly the same, but in of clicking to add items, you're going to click to upload a document first. So you still get your same places where you're uploading from.
Most likely it's probably from your computer. Right? So wherever you need to, I'll let's let's find a random a random one. So that's gonna upload for me and I can always come back and view it. And then this is where you add your question. So before you used to say, you know, I want two multiple choice.
It's the same type of thing. It's just in a new kind of pop up. So I actually know this is three multiple choice or true false or whatever type of question you're looking for. Select that standard and now you can add three that are aligned to one standard at a time. So you don't have to do the standard alignment.
I love that. It just makes it kinda quick and easy. And then, same thing, you're gonna set your correct answers. And then, if you need to continue to add more, you can. I can also leave this view.
And it's going to save it as a draft, which is right, celebration every time and I can come back and edit it. Those scoring is still gonna be applicable to those document based assessments as well. So I hope that helps. It doesn't look like we've gotten any other questions, so we'd like to once again bank Call County for joining us and being willing to be the testers of the beta but then also be able to present and share what they've learned and what they're excited for, and then also their experience. And thank you for joining us We appreciate you coming, go out and spread the joy and get everybody involved and get on and start using MasteryConnect and Canvas together. Awesome. Thank you, everyone.