Take 5 for Tech

Magic School still has a bunch of amazing tools on its dashboard, but consider using one of the filtering tools to make the offering a little less over whelming. As always, favorites can still be starred. The numerous tools can also be paired down by choosing from one of the pre-designed categories in the "Categories" button:

• Instructional Materials
• Planning
• Student Support
• Feedback and Assessment
• Communication
• Student Engagement
• Admin

In fact, you can still make your own custom collections of tools. These are helpful tips, but aren't new to Magic School.

What is new is their latest productivity tool called "Studio Mode." In the past, materials and work iterations lived in the chat. Now, with Studio Mode teachers can create the actual materials to be more quickly edited, tweaked and exported. It even allows for images to be inserted into the products. This new feature is designed to skip restarting or avoid the re-prompting process. Rather it allows teachers to start editing and tweaking what has already been started. This is a real time saver!

Magic School's Multiple Choice Quiz/ Assessment generator has always been pretty impressive. The more information you give it to draw on, the better results it produces. So when you'd give it a copy of your classroom notes or a link to a website you trust, it will do a great job reflecting that material. (As always, the final product is something that should be checked by the teacher.)

But now we have something new called Magic Quizzes. This takes the original quizzes further! Magic Quizzes integrates standards, and more importantly draws insights about student performance. This is ideal for pre- and post- assessments.

• Did most of the students miss the same question?
• What concepts are most students familiar with before starting and what concepts do they find most challenging?
• Where did most of the class growth occur?

When creating a Quiz in the new tool, you can toggle on and off specific student supports like:

• a translation tool
• a wording simplification tool

In Quizzes, it not only tracks student and class performance, but it suggests actionable next steps given the data.

While the old Multiple Choice Quiz / Assessment tool is found under Magic Tools> Teacher Tools, the new Beta Quizzes are found under MagicStudent> Quizzes.

Teachers and student have always been able to get writing feedback, but with the new teacher tool, Writing Feedback, it's easier than ever to give writing feedback to students. With this tool teachers can give feedback to multiple students at the same time who are exhibiting the same issue, control and tweak the writing suggestions and personalize comments before sharing feedback with students. It also incorporates a rubric creator and rubric library. It also allows teachers to include a rubric that has already been created.

The Writing Feedback Tool is found under Magic Tools> Class Writing Feedback.