MasteryConnect's State Core Apps Make It Easy to Identify Standards

Disclosure: MasteryConnect is an advertiser on this blog.

A couple of years ago MasteryConnect released a free iOS and Android app that made it easy for teachers to quickly identify and access Common Core standards. That app has been downloaded by more than one million people. But if you work in a state that hasn't adopted Common Core standards or is phasing them in slowly, MasteryConnect's Common Core app didn't do much for you. That has changed with the latest release from MasteryConnect.

This fall MasteryConnect launched State Core Reference Apps for every state. These apps are designed to help teachers identify the standards (and the language of the standards) for the grades and subjects that they teach. Each app is different for each of the 50 states. For example, if you work in a state that doesn't use Common Core standards, your states' standards are featured in the app. MasteryConnect's State Core Reference Apps are available for Android and iOS. Find your state on this map and you will be taken to the app that you need.

Applications for Education
MasteryConnect's State Core Reference Apps probably won't change the way that you teach, but they could save you time and frustration of looking up standards on a poorly-designed state website or booklet.

A Complete Guide to Using Socrative 2.0

Disclosure: MasteryConnect, Socrative's new parent company, is an advertiser on Free Technology for Teachers. 

Last month Socrative was acquired by MasteryConnect. MasteryConnect's CEO has already said that Socrative will continue to be offered as a free service to teachers. To that end, Socrative has released an updated user guide for teachers. The updated 33 page guide walks you through everything you need to know to start using Socrative 2.0 in your classroom.

Some of the highlights of the Socrative User Guide (link opens a PDF)  include using your Google Apps account to log-in, creating and managing quizzes, aligning quizzes to Common Core standards, and running whole-class and individual response reports.

Socrative is one of a handful of back-channel and informal assessment tools that I often share with teachers. You can find a comparison of those tools in this handy chart.

Applications for Education
One of my favorite ways to use Socrative is to host a team "space race." A space race is a competitive format for quizzes. Space race can be played as a team or individual activity. Each correct answer moves a rocket ship across the screen. The first person or team to get their rocket across the screen wins. Your space race questions can be pulled from a quiz that you have stored in your Socrative account.

The most basic, yet powerful use of Socrative is found in the single response activities. These activities allow students to reply to your prompt or question without entering their names. In a single response activity you verbally pose a question or prompt to your students and they respond with a word, sentence, or multiple choice selection. The anonymous reply format is useful for surveying students when you’re asking them to submit responses to questions or prompts that they might be reluctant to share in an open format.

Socrative Was Acquired by MasteryConnect - Here's What You Need to Know

Disclosure: MasteryConnect has been an advertiser on this blog for three years. 

Last week the popular student response service, Socrative, was acquired by MasteryConnect. This afternoon MasteryConnect sent out a message about the acquisition.

Prior to the announcement I asked MasteryConnect's CEO, Cory Reid, if the they planned to keep Socrative running. His answer was an unequivocal "yes." I also asked Cory if they planned to keep Socrative as a stand-alone service or roll it into the MasteryConnect platform. This was his response,

It will stand alone, for the foreseeable future with easy click access to MasteryConnect, and vice-versa. Eventually, it will merge into MasteryConnect as a product available on the platform.

The biggest question whenever a beloved web tool like Socrative is acquired by another company is "will it keep running?" The answer here is yes. The second biggest question is, "will it stay free?" The answer here is yes.

If you haven't tried Socrative in the past or you haven't tried the latest version, take a look at the video below to learn all about it.

MasteryConnect Adds Support for Google Drive and Dropbox Import

One of the many tools that MasteryConnect offers to teachers is a curriculum mapping tool that allows you to easily connect your current lessons and curriculum to Common Core and or state standards. Previously, you had to upload your assignments from your computer. You can now import assignments from your Google Drive and or Dropbox account. You can see the MasteryConnect curriculum mapping tool in the video found here.

The primary service that MasteryConnect offers to teachers is an assessment tracking tool to keep track of students' progress toward mastery of Common Core standards. MasteryConnect also offers a community in which teachers can share assessments.

Disclosure: MasteryConnect has been an advertiser on Free Technology for Teachers since 2011.

Pin to Win an iPad Mini from MasteryConnect

Last month MasteryConnect launched a new Pinterest-like feature called Resource Boards. This is a free feature that teachers can use to create collections of resources that are aligned to Common Core standards. You can add materials to your MasteryConnect Resource Boards through the MasteryConnect browser bookmarklet available here.

At the end of this month MasteryConnect is going to give away an iPad mini to the teacher who has pinned the most resources. Resources must include alignment to Common Core standards. Second prize and third prizes are $100 and $50 Amazon gift cards. You can learn more about the contest here.

Disclosure: MasteryConnect has been an advertiser on Free Technology for Teachers since 2011.

MasteryConnect Releases a New Science Standards App and Resource Pins

MasteryConnect, a popular Common Core standards assessment tracking service, recently released a couple of helpful new tools. First, the new science standards app (available for iOS and Android) puts all of the new National Science Teachers Association standards on your mobile device. You can search through the standards by topic and or keyword. The app will also provide correlations to Common Core standards. You can get the app on MasteryConnect's resource goodies page.

Resource Pins is a new browser bookmarklet from MasteryConnect. The bookmarklet allows you to pin things to your MasteryConnect account. From there you can quickly add Common Core standards alignments to your pinned resources. You can get the Resource Pins bookmarklet on the MasteryConnect resource goodies page.

Disclosure: MasteyConnect is an advertiser on Free Technology for Teachers.

How Free Education Services Stay in Business

Image Credit: loop_oh

One of the questions that I am asked on a fairly regular basis goes something like this, "how do these free services stay in business?" That question is often followed up with a question like this, "how do I know that the service will keep running?" Here are my answers to those questions.

How do these free services stay in business?
There are three basic ways that web-based companies fund their free services. The first two are fairly obvious, advertising and selling premium upgrades from a basic level of free service.

The third way is through venture capital investments. The idea there is a venture capital firm invests in the service in the hopes of turning a profit down the road. The investor sees a profit when the company sells out to a larger company (see Posterous selling out to Twitter for a recent example), the company starts turning a profit through premium service sales, the company starts turning a profit through ad revenue, the company offers an IPO (rare in education market) or a combination of all four options. See companies like MasteryConnect and Edmodo for examples of companies offering free services that have received large investments from venture capital firms. Click here for the MasteryConnect story and click here for the Edmodo investment story.

How do I know that the service will keep running?
The short answer is, I don't. But I do feel comfortable hazarding a guess based on the business model that a start-up is using. My feeling is that companies like MasteryConnect and Edmodo who have received millions in venture capital probably aren't going to squander it so quickly that they will be shutting down quickly. The concern there is selling out to a larger company that does or doesn't keep the service running.

Companies relying purely on ad revenue need to have a massive number of pageviews to be profitable. That's not to say that it cannot be done, it's just hard for a start-up to make it that way unless they experience viral growth.

Disclosure: MasteryConnect does advertise on this blog.

Win an iPad Mini from MasteryConnect

Do you use MasteryConnect to plan lessons and keep track of your students' progress toward meeting Common Core standards? If so MasteryConnect would like to hear from you. Create a short about how you use MasteryConnect and submit it to the MasteryConnect video contest. The person submitting the winning video will receive an iPad Mini. Click here for more information from MasteryConnect.

Learn more about MasteryConnect in the video below.

Disclosure: MasteryConnect helps feed me and my dogs every month through their advertising payments.

MasteryConnect Helps You Map Curriculum to Common Core Standards

MasteryConnect is a service that offers a few products that I think teachers in U.S. public schools should know about. First, they offer a good system for tracking your students' mastery of Common Core standards. Second, they provide a great community of educators who are connecting and sharing lesson ideas. And third, MasteryConnect now offers a curriculum mapping tool that allows you to easily connect your current lessons and curriculum to Common Core and or state standards. You can see the MasteryConnect curriculum mapping tool in the video found here.

Disclosure: MasteryConnect helps feed me and my dog every month through their advertising payments.

Creating Awesome Assessments - Free Webinar

Disclosure: Mastery Connect is an advertiser on Free Technology for Teachers.

Last month Mastery Connect offered a free webinar about creating assessments aligned to Common Core standards. The webinar was so popular that they have decided to offer it again in November. Creating Awesome Assessments will be held on November 13 at 6pm MST. The focus of this webinar will be on the Language Arts standards. 

Mastery Connect is also offering webinars for school administrators in October, November, December, and January. You can find the full schedule of webinars here.

MasteryConnect Partners With Solution Tree

Full Disclosure: Mastery Connect is an advertiser on Free Technology for Teachers.

Mastery Connect provides a free community for educators to share and discuss their plans around Common Core standards. As a member of the community you can browse and download the materials shared by other educators. There are currently more than one hundred pages of shared materials. Of course, as a member of the community you can share your own materials. You can also follow and have threaded Twitter-style discussions with other members of the community. All materials found in Mastery Connect are tied to specific standards in the Common Core. Click here to join the community today.

This summer MasteryConnect partnered with Solution Tree and presented at Solution Tree's Professional Learning Communities at Work institutes. Solution Tree's Rick Dufour endorsed MasteryConnect's community in this video.

Creating Awesome Assessments - Free Webinar

Disclosure: Mastery Connect is an advertiser on Free Technology for Teachers.

Next week on September 18 at 6pm Mountain Time Mastery Connect is hosting a free webinar titled Creating Awesome Assessments Aligned to Common Core Standards. The webinar will be facilitated in part by Cindi Dunford a grade 6 teacher and peer reviewer in the Mastery Connect community. Click here to register for the event.

Mastery Connect offers a variety services related to Common Core. Mastery Connect offers a free Android and iOS app that allows you to access the Common Core standards at any time. Use the app to have the standards for your grade and content area at your fingertips whenever you need them. The same features found in the Android and iOS apps are also available online whenever you need them at MasteryConnect.com.

Mastery Connect provides a free community for educators to share and discuss their plans around Common Core standards. As a member of the community you can browse and download the materials shared by other educators. There are currently more than one hundred pages of shared materials. Of course, as a member of the community you can share your own materials. You can also follow and have threaded Twitter-style discussions with other members of the community. All materials found in Mastery Connect are tied to specific standards in the Common Core.

The Mastery Tracker is a free service for individual teachers for tracking students’ progress. Mastery Connect also offers Bubble Score which is a fee-based service that schools can use for grading and analyzing the assessments your students take.

A Few Good Minutes With MasteryConnect

This afternoon after my presentation at The Literacy Promise conference here in Salt Lake City I stopped in at the offices of Mastery Connect who has helped to pay my bills for the last seven months. After accidentally crashing a meeting, I sat down with some of the team to talk about what they've been up to.

First some numbers about MasteryConnect, their free mobile app has been used by educators 5.6 million times to look up the Common Core standards for the grades and topics that they teach. You can get the app for iOS here and for Android here. MasteryConnect's web-based products are now used in more than 4,000 U.S. school districts.

I was able to get a hands-on demonstration of the parent view of MasteryConnect. One of the cool things about the parent view is that parents can see how their students have done on specific assessments tied to specific standards. Not only do parents see the assessment title, they can see the actual assessment activity itself (provided that the teacher has uploaded it). For math standards Khan Academy and Learn Zillion videos are linked to each standard so that parents and students can watch the videos that are connected to the standards the student needs to work toward meeting.

Here are a few posts that I've previously published about MasteryConnect:
Khan Academy Videos Mapped to Common Core Standards
Put Common Core Standards on Your Blog or Website
Try Mastery Connect for Lesson Materials Tied to Common Core Standards

Disclosure: MasteryConnect is an advertiser on Free Technology for Teachers.