Welcome to Mastery Connect Updates. I am Cat Shoun, an EdTech Liaison with the district. In this session, I will demonstrate the procedure to connect a Mastery tracker to a Canvas course, guide you through the enhanced user experience for creating assessments, and discuss the latest updates to the platform. 

Mastery Connect is an educational technology platform designed to help educators identify student learning levels, target students' learning needs, and enhance their learning through formative and benchmark assessments. It allows teachers to track students' mastery of state standards in real time, enabling more personalized and effective instruction. The key features of Mastery Connect are the Mastery Tracker, which allows teachers to monitor student progress on state standards and enables quick identification of learning gaps and areas for improvement. Another key feature is the formative assessments. Teachers can create and share assessments to gauge student understanding immediately after instruction. Mastery Connect also offers the Mastery Review Predictive Assessment, also referred to as MVPA or benchmark assessments, given twice a year. These assessments, provided by Mastery Connect, are pushed out from the district and provide insight into student progress. Mastery Connect offers a wealth of reports and analytics. The reports and analytics provide insights on data and student performance and help teachers and administrators make informed instructional decisions. Finally, Mastery Connect integrates with Canvas, allowing a seamless connection between the platforms and facilitating easier management of courses and assessments. 

Mastery Connect is used by teachers and schools to enhance the learning experience, adapt instruction based on student needs, and improve educational outcomes by focusing on mastery of standards rather than solely on grades or test scores. The following presentation can be found at this bit.ly link. Make sure to copy this down so that you can access all of the videos and links within this presentation. Trackers must be linked through Canvas to ensure efficiency in student access and transparency in reporting. Teachers who cross-list their courses must cross-list before adding Mastery trackers to their Canvas courses. It is imperative that teachers select the correct standard when setting up their Mastery trackers to ensure proper delivery of the Mastery Review Predictive Assessment, and of course tests, and to be sure that all formative assessments are accurately aligned. 

Here is a video that explains how to cross-list. As I mentioned, classes that are going to be cross-listed in Canvas need to be cross-listed prior to adding a Mastery tracker. From within the teacher's Canvas course, they need to select Mastery Tracker within their course navigation menu. If they don't see this as an option, they need to go to Settings and Navigation to enable the Mastery Tracker. You've probably noticed that the Mastery Connect icon is no longer on the global navigation menu. This was intentionally removed to promote the accurate linking of trackers within Canvas courses. Teachers will then select Link Mastery Tracker. If they see this screen, please put in an Incident IQ ticket or email edtechliaisons@knoxschools.org. This typically means that there's an issue with their account or the way that they are set up as the teacher of record in Aspen.

Next, they need to create a new tracker from a standard set. Type their last name after the title that auto populates from Aspen, select their subject. If they teach anything other than the core four of math, science, language arts, and social studies, they need to select other subjects. Then, they need to select their standard set. The standards listed to the right are the standard sets that need to be selected for the Mastery Review Predictive Assessments to be pushed out accurately. Please be sure that you are careful in selecting the standard set. Notice the highlighted standards are the new math standards. Teachers need to select these standards to ensure alignment. Also notice for social studies, grades three and five teachers need to select parts one and two. When selecting their class, teachers will select link to link their tracker. For teachers who teach SDC American History, they will select custom Knox County for standards and then select SDC American History. These are the most up-to-date standards for SDC American History. Directions and a video for linking SDC trackers are listed on this page. 

You'll notice a few new additions to the Mastery Tracker. The first is the inclusion of this Canvas icon. The Canvas icon will allow users to import any of their existing Classic quizzes into Mastery Connect assessments. The Assessments tab is a new tab within the tracker that I'll talk about a little bit later in this presentation. Here is a video that walks you through the steps that we just worked on to link a Mastery tracker in Canvas. 

Next, you'll learn more about creating assessments using the new user experience in Mastery Connect. Teachers will always want to start creating their assessment by going to their Mastery tracker within their Canvas course and clicking on "Add Assessment." The types of assessments that can be given in Mastery Connect are Benchmark, which are the Mastery Review Predictive Assessment and End of Course assessments. Those will be pushed out by the district. Teachers will not have to do anything other than publish the assessment for it to be accessible to students. The assessment teachers can create in Mastery Connect are the formative assessments. These can be made using community resources, item bank assessment resources, document upload assessments, and teacher-authored items. The Benchmark assessments of the MVPA and EOC are automatically pushed to Mastery trackers as long as the teacher has selected the correct standard set and the correct class. All teachers will need to do is publish the assignment in Canvas for students to have access. No access code is needed when students go through Canvas to access these assessments. Reports for these assessments will be found directly in the tracker three days after the window closes for the MVPA benchmark assessment. 

Formative assessments in Mastery Connect. Let's take a look at community resources first. Community resources are a place where teachers can share common assessments. They can use pre-created assessments and they can clone assessments to make edits or changes. Let's take a look. To access the community resources, teachers will select "Add Assessment" from their Mastery tracker and select "Search Community." In the community, they will find any assessments that are linked to the same standard set as the tracker that they're adding an assessment to. We recommend filtering to at least "Teacher Created" by teachers in my district to pull up resources that were created by teachers who have had the same professional development opportunities as you. Keep in mind that these resources were created by teachers and are not vetted by Knox County. You may find some fantastic resources here, but you may also find some assessments that teachers made when they were just trying to learn how to use the platform. So use your professional opinion when grabbing resources from the community. Always be sure to preview the resources. From here, you can add assessments to your tracker, which adds them to the assignments in your Canvas course, or you can clone an assessment to preview and make changes to the assessment. Cloning the assessment is a great idea because it allows you to add or remove questions from the assessment and gives you the opportunity to adjust the Mastery level. Another type of formative assessment teachers can create in Mastery Connect is item-based assessments. Let's go over the item bank descriptions, the enhancements to creating an item-based assessment, and the filters when creating an item-based assessment. I'll be sure to select "Item" when I click "Add Assessment" from my Mastery tracker within my Canvas course. One feature you'll notice is that now I am in a draft mode. In the past, Mastery Connect assessments did not have a save option. 

Now all assessments are in draft mode unless you delete them or finish creating them as an assessment. That means if you have an assessment you want to give several weeks from now, you could go ahead and start working on that assessment and leave it in draft mode and continue to work on it over time. Another new feature is scoring. You might remember in the past you had to choose your own Mastery level for every standard assessed. Now there's a set district default. You can customize the Mastery levels, but you won't have to create your assessment. To add questions from the item banks, I'm going to click on the plus. From here, I can either create a new item or add an item from the item bank. I'm going to add an item from the item bank. Then I'm going to filter these items. So the filters that you have start with the item bank. The Knox County item bank is any questions that district-wide Mastery Connect admins have added to the bank. The Knox County teacher bank is any question that a Knox County teacher has created. This bank is not vetted and may have great resources, but again, may have resources that a well-meaning teacher created while practicing using the platform. Mastery Admin bank and Mastery Admin Bank Supplemental are two admin banks that are standards-aligned with vetted questions directly from the Mastery Connect platform. You'll also see your own item bank, so any items that you create will fall into that bank. You can select as many item banks as you want in your filters. 

Next, I can filter by standard or I can give a multi-standard assessment. I can filter by question type, and if I'm in ELA, I can choose items with passages or items without passages. One thing to note, if you're using items with passages, you may want to select one or two passages to use. Otherwise, you might select to give students a five-question assessment that's aligned to five different passages, and you may not be trying to assess that day whether or not students can have the stamina to get through five passages. So just be aware of that when you're creating an ELA assessment with passages. You can determine the difficulty level, the DOK level, and the Bloom's level. Make sure to select English as the language, and you can choose to make the assessment printable. If you make the assessment printable, you have the opportunity to download bubble sheets from masteryconnect.com that are pre-slugged with your students' ID numbers in them. And if you select printable and you want to give the assessment on paper, I would also select Grade Cam. Grade Cam will allow you to hold those bubble sheets up to your computer's camera to quickly score those assessments and put the scores in the correct categories within your Mastery tracker. By selecting printable and Grade Cam, you will not receive any items on your assessment that are called tech-enhanced items like drag and drop or matching. So be sure you know the difference between the types of questions that you'll get if you select printable and the types of questions that you cannot print. 

The preview for the question will be on the right of the screen, and my question choices are on the left of the screen. So if I select a couple of questions, I can then add the items to my assessment. I see a preview of my assessment on the right side of the screen. I can then add more items or if I didn't find an item that I liked or I need to ask a question in a different way, I can author a new item directly from here. Now I'm ready to create my assessment. Once I select "Create Assessment," this assessment will go to my Mastery tracker, and if I've created my tracker through Canvas, it will go to assignments in Canvas. So all I will need to do is publish the assignment for students to have access.

Another type of assessment that I can use in Mastery Connect is document-based assessments. Document-based assessments are teacher-created in Mastery Connect, but they may not necessarily be teacher-created. You could use any PDF assessment that you have access to. Let's take a look at how to create document-based assessments in Mastery Connect. To create a document-based assessment, I'll go to my tracker and click "Add Assessment" and "Create New." I'll be sure I select "Document-Based Assessment," and from here, I can upload a document. So this is where I would upload the assessment. Be sure if you're uploading a PDF that the answer key isn't attached to your PDF. Then I add the questions, so I let Mastery know how many questions I have, what type of questions they are. So if I have two multiple choice questions, I'll put that here, and if they're both aligned to this standard, I'll select this standard and select "Add." And then I let Mastery know which answer choices are the correct answers. When I'm ready for students to see this assessment, I'll just click "Create Assessment" to add this assessment to my Mastery tracker. 

Teachers can also author items within Mastery Connect. These items will go into the Knox County Teacher Bank and your personal bank. And there are several question types to choose from. You can create items directly within your assessment or you can create items from masteryconnect.com. The tracker assessment list is a new feature in Mastery Connect. From teachers' Mastery tracker, they will select the tab that says "Assessment." This page is grouped by standards. You can also switch to list view for a little bit of a cleaner view of this page. Let's look at list view. So from within my Mastery tracker, I'm going to click on "Assessments," and now I see a list of all of the assessments that are attached to this tracker. I can see how many students have completed the assessment. I can see whether it's in draft form or if it's a created assessment. I can click on the reporting icon to quickly view reports. And after three days after the MVPA benchmark window opens, I can also access the reports for it here too. I can click the check icon to grade the assessment or open the performance grader. I can click on the tracker students view to get the mini tracker to pull out so that I can see how students have done on multiple assessments of the same standard, and I can delete assessments from here. This assessment list is great because if there are assessments that students don't have access to, you can always check this assessment list to make sure that those assessments were correctly added to the students' tracker. 

Tools and accommodations. Directions for adding tools and accommodations to individual students in Mastery trackers are listed here. Accommodations can be made for students in Mastery trackers by clicking on the tools and accommodations icon and selecting manually set for each student. Then the teacher will hover over the student who needs the text-to-speech, select "Edit," and allow that student to have text-to-speech on their assessments. Again, the directions are listed here. 

Using previously created assessments. Teachers may have noticed that assessments that they created last year are no longer accessible to their current students. So if teachers copied their course from last year into this year's course and they had Mastery Connect assessments, they need to go ahead and delete those assessments from their Canvas course because they are linked to their old students. This does not delete the assessments forever, it just deletes the instance that it's connected to the old tracker. So teachers will then go to the Mastery tracker, click "Add Assessment," "My Assessments," and add any of the old assessments to the new tracker. This way, the new students have access to these assessments. Directions for that process are linked here. 

You have several levels of support for Mastery Connect. Your building-level Mastery Connect admin will be your first line of defense. That's usually the coaches and administrators in the building. Also, your EdTech connectors will get information in real-time about Mastery Connect. If we have any information on something that's not working or a new update to the platform, we let our EdTech connectors know in the Mastery Connect channel, and they are responsible for sharing that out with other teachers in their building. We also have our Knowledge Base and Tech Tips website. Let's take a look at that real quick. 

Every staff member in Knox County has a new course on their dashboard called KC's EdTech Resources. Within that course, you have information on every platform purchased by Knox County that the EdTech department serves. So, for example, if you click on Mastery Connect, you'll get more information about getting started with Mastery Connect, how to log in, updates, system help guides, how to get support, and our YouTube playlist. Additionally, you can request training on Mastery Connect or any other platform by selecting the "Request Training" button. Look for upcoming PD and access Tech Systems Tips. The Tech Systems Tips website will also give you information about PD for all of our KC's EdTech platforms as well as troubleshooting guides. So for example, if I click on Mastery Connect, I get the most commonly asked questions about Mastery Connect, and if you drop down the menu, it gives you some possible solutions to that question. This is a great resource if you're having a small problem in Mastery Connect. Check here first and you may find your answer. 

You're also welcome to submit an Incident IQ ticket and make sure it is routed to the EdTech Liaisons so that we can support with any Mastery Connect troubleshooting issues. Once the assessment is loaded into Mastery and your students access the assessment and they take the test, it's then in the hands of your building-level coaches, admin, and your regional content support to help you determine what your next steps are. So when you go to think about reporting and looking at your data, consider including those support persons in your discussions. If you have any questions, you're welcome to email me at cat.shoun@knoxschools.org or our team at edtechliaisons@knoxschools.org. We are happy to help you get started using Mastery Connect in your classroom. Also, notice that the Bit.ly for this presentation is listed here. Make sure you copy this down so that you can access the videos and links that were shared in this presentation. Thank you.