The Edcite Service
The Edcite Service is a free online platform for teachers, parents and students. It allows teachers to create or use tailored, interactive assignments for their students. Students are more engaged when working on technology-enabled assignments and the built-in scoring and reports provide feedback early and as often as needed.
Edcite's goal is to make it easy for teachers and parents to find, assemble or create, practice or assignments, for their students. With a growing, crowd-contributed library of educational content, the Edcite framework can help students learn on their own, while allowing teachers to design and guide practice as they deem fit.
The following slides provide a brief overview of Edcite.
Edcite's instant assessment helps inform teachers, parents and students of their progress on learning activities, their strengths and their weaknesses. The intent is to challenge and engross the student visually and mentally while reinforcing concepts learned, as well as to free up teachers' and parents' time that is usually spent on routine checking and grading of student work.
Edcite Assignments
The Edcite online assignments are freely available to teachers and parents to use as well as to create new content of their own.
Teachers and parents can create interactive questions that incorporate content from great online resources such as Khan Academy, MIT Open Courseware, etc. Multimedia in the form of images, video, audio and web links can help capture the student's attention while delivering concepts in a manner that the student can relate to - this can serve to make learning fun and practice effective.
Assignments
Teachers can create assignments with one or more questions. These assignments can be assigned online to students, and teachers can monitor submissions and score reports for each student and for each question.
The automated grading feature for all questions that do not call for a free response ensures that students receive quick feedback. Timely feedback is essential for directing students' learning while reducing the risk of them losing interest - to inform them where they need to focus their efforts, with the added benefit of saving the teacher's time through automation.
Exercise Items
Edcite has , which can range from simple quiz questions, to interactive games. The items in an exercise provide the visual and interactive learning elements that are a major goal of the Edcite framework. These items may include true/false questions, multiple choice questions, questions with visual and interactive elements, simple educational games with integrated assessment, interactive visualizations to teach and assess understanding, and other ways to engage, educate, and assess learning progress.
Teachers and others create exercises with items in two ways:
- find and use items from existing content
- create new items for the exercise.
These exercise items are then made available for other exercises, as well as for other teachers and parents. Similarly the new exercises are available
Exercise items are created by content creators, teachers, and sometimes by parents and other subject experts. To enable teachers and others to create interactive content without any knowledge of programming, the Edcite exercise framework uses specialized content editors for each type of item. Furthermore, each different type of item uses a specialized viewer to display the item of that type.
Each item is created by an Item Type Editor and saved in the database. When an exercise with the item is opened, the Item Type Viewer is used to display the item in the exercise.
Item Types
The Edcite framework is designed to enable a growing range of rich interactive item types, and provide the best visualization and learning tools possible. New item types can be added at any time, and are being added on an ongoing basis by the Edcite team and other contributors.
The framework allows third-party developers to add new item types via online tools integrated with the framework. Developers can build, test and publish new item types that can be made available for use by teachers and other users of the framework.
The following illustrates the relationship between an assignment and question types.