The ASSISTments Beta Journey - Initial Thoughts from Teachers

At ASSISTments, we are constantly seeking to improve and enhance your experience and in turn improve the academic impact that results from using our platform. This Spring we released a  fresh new look and new features in beta - which means you get to try them out early and share your feedback!. 

In order to help you understand the effect of teaching with ASSISTments in real classrooms; we’ve asked a couple of teachers to share their journey as they try out ASSISTments’ Fresh New Look. First this is what is new with the Fresh New Look: 

Along with the updated look and feel to the platform there are  new features and views:

• Search by Standard: find individual problems by Common Core standard or keyword.
• Mix and Match: create customized assignments from your choice of ASSISTments content.
• Assign-Time Options: set custom problem order for your assignments.
• My Assignments: view all your previous assignments and access reports.
• My Problem Sets: save, organize and assign from your custom problem sets.
  

For a more in depth look at what’s available at present, refer to our user resources for Features in Beta.

‍Overall Thoughts from Ms. Nehila: Going in, I expected it to be completely different in every way.  While things look different there are a lot of functions that behave the same way, which was nice. I feel like assigning work to Google Classroom in advance is a whole lot easier!  I also really appreciate being able to go into Assistments directly to see the students progress!  Overall, my first impression is that this is a cleaner, easier to use experience.

Overall Thoughts from Ms. Ramadass: After 3 weeks of using the beta, I am getting comfortable with pretty much all of the features. Overall, I’m happy with what I have seen so far with the ASSISTments beta. I started by creating customized problem sets and after, was able to assign them successfully. I also tried the option of students choosing the order of problems to solve, and it received a positive and cheerful response from my students. I enjoy having all my assignments in one place, it’s more convenient to access; instead of going through an LMS. This is what I think about the new features:  

‘My Assignments’ is super helpful. It’s easy to access all in one place and sort them by class, status and release date.

‘My Problem Sets’ makes it easy to create custom problem sets and manipulate them. It is a big list that can be viewed either in descending or ascending order.

‘Search by Standard’ both thrills and overwhelms me with the vast amount of problems available. The first couple of times I did not notice that there was a filter I could use to narrow down the list. I found this out by watching the user resource video. I really want to emphasize how great this is. It’s a crucial functionality that any ed-tech digital tool must have to assure that teachers  meet the quality standards for their lessons and most importantly, the needs of their learners.

As we, at ASSISTments continue to enhance our product with teacher feedback. We will continue to share real accounts from educators like you who are putting the product into practice in your own classrooms. The journey continues and we’d love for you to give the beta a try (and let us know what you think!)