Current Site and App of the Week - eSchool News July 30, 2014

Current Site of the Week 

"A new free solution directly addresses the Common Core implementation challenges looming ahead for K-12 schools and districts around the country." writes eSchool News.

Edulastic is a web-based formative assessment platform that helps teachers prepare and deliver effective Common Core curricula by simultaneously improving the assessment creation, assignment, and grading processes.

Edulastic helps educators achieve their Common Core curriculum objectives in several ways:

• Provides meaningful homework solutions and daily assessments for evaluating and supporting student mastery of Common Core standards.
• Enables teachers to craft standards-aligned formative assessments with highly interactive, freeform questions defined by Smarter Balanced & PARCC.
• Offers free curated content that includes thousands of standards-aligned questions crafted by other teachers.
• Provides insights into student proficiency at an aggregate and individual level, enabling teachers to identify areas where a student needs personalized instruction, intervention or remediation.
• Facilitates the adoption of benchmarked standardized assessments through a collaborative evaluation process that can be applied across districts and within broader learning communities.

Edulastic allows teachers to use day-to-day assessment insights to shape learning outcomes. By giving teachers a new level of pedagogical ownership, Edulastic uses homework and in-class assignments as the basis for continuous and comprehensive evaluations.

“We’ve placed an emphasis on making it easy for teachers to create, share and adopt proven assessment strategies,” said Madhu Narasa, CEO of Edulastic. “We want to accelerate student learning—and help relieve stress associated with assessments and the Common Core implementation process—while delivering timely and useful information for students, educators, parents, and policymakers.”

Read more... 

Apps of the Week

Name: Global Shark Tracker

What is it? An app for tracking and observing navigational patterns of sharks

Best for: Students and teachers

Price: Free

Requirements: iOS 5.1 or later; Android 2.2 and up

Features: OCEARCH’s Global Shark Tracker lets you observe the navigational pattern of sharks that have been tagged with satellite tracking technology all for the purpose of shark conservation. OCEARCH facilitates unprecedented research by supporting leading researchers and institutions seeking to attain groundbreaking data on the biology and health of sharks, in conjunction with basic research on shark life history and migration.

Related links
Visit iTunes to buy and download apps 
Google play

Source: eSchool News