Tutorial

Using the Assessing Projects Application

Ms. Sohni, a third-grade teacher, is planning a unit on simple machines. She wants her students to collaborate with a partner classroom in another state to investigate simple machines in their environments and share simple machines they have designed. They plan to create a wiki for publishing student work on the Internet. During this unit, she is going to focus on the 21st century skills of self-direction and collaboration. Ms. Sohni uses the Assessing Projects Application to create her assessments as follows:

• While brainstorming ideas for her unit, she browses the Assessment Library to see what kinds of assessments are available that relate to what she wants students to learn in the unit.
• She then searches the Assessment Library for assessments on self-direction, collaboration, and simple machines.
• She finds a self-direction rubric and a collaboration checklist that she would like to use in her unit, but first she needs to modify them to fit the specific project.
• In the past, Ms. Sohni has had success with a rubric she uses to assess student publishing using wikis. She would like to save it to her Teacher Workspace, so she uses the application to create this assessment from scratch.
• Ms. Sohni wants her assessment to address 21st century skills. She uses the Quick Search feature to copy traits from other assessments and add them to her wiki rubric.

After Ms. Sohni creates a few assessments, she organizes them by managing her Personal Library.

To add graphics and other design features, and to share her assessments with her colleague in the partner classroom, Ms. Sohni exports her assessments to her desktop and uses the e-mail feature to share her resources.