Hey WISE users,
We had our graduation ceremonies a couple weeks ago on campus and our students have gone on summer break. Some of the grade schools we work with are starting to end their school year now too. This is when we have them work on End of Year assessments for our units so that we can collect more data to help us measure the effectiveness of our curriculum activities on student learning. We’re also having a teacher workshop on June 8, 2023 that can be attended in person or virtually. Teachers will be reflecting on their experiences teaching with WISE over the past year, discussing teaching strategies, reviewing student data, and helping us plan future customizations and modifications to the units to better support their needs and those of their students.
Match with choice reuse
In the Match activity, we’ve added the ability for students to put a given choice into multiple buckets. Previously, students could only put a choice into a single bucket. This was a request from one of our researchers. In this example below, the student moved the “Apple” choice to “Fruit” and “Grows on Trees” buckets.
To enable this functionality, all you need to do is check the “Students can put each choice in multiple buckets” option.
Authoring Tool improvements
We’ve been continually working on improving the usability of the Authoring Tool. We’ve moved around some buttons to make it easier to perform actions such as deleting a component. We’ll have more improvements to come throughout the summer.
Usability studies
We’re planning to have some usability studies during the summer to give us some feedback on our user interfaces in WISE. If you’re interested in testing out WISE to help us improve it, please let us know in the comments below!
AI tools
We’ve begun looking at open source Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tools to improve the automated feedback we currently give to students. This will hopefully improve the interaction between students and our Dialog Guidance activity where they chat with a computer thought buddy to help them develop more coherent explanations.
Thanks for reading! If you have any questions or comments feel free to comment below.
WISE Technology Team