Measure student understanding and create interactive learning experiences with the brand new class activity feature for LaunchPacks.
We are happy to announce that the ability to create classrooms and activities is now live for all current and trialing LaunchPacks customers—for both Social Studies and Science!
It’s been an ambitious year for Britannica Digital Learning, which included the rollout of literacy building, classroom management, and student assessment tools in LaunchPacks.
Before we introduce the latest features, here’s a quick recap of LaunchPacks milestones so far:
- October 2016 — The LaunchPacks Beta Release brought over 1,600 social studies content sets to classrooms. Content sets included articles with differentiated reading levels, images, primary sources, videos, and more.
- January 2017 — Along with over 200 new curriculum-aligned content sets, the LaunchPacks: Social Studies Official Release included the ability to digitally annotate every Pack article with six annotation categories and made it easy for teachers to schedule content for future dates.
- May 2017 —- The LaunchPacks: Science Official Release brought over 1,700 curriculum-focused science topics to K-12 classrooms, along with annotation tools and scheduling.
And now in November 2017, with the goal of adding measurement tools to assess student comprehension and progress, Britannica unleashes the LaunchPacks Class Activity Release.
With a team of internal and external educators and stakeholders, we developed the ability to create a classroom in LaunchPacks, to assign activities that measure understanding, and to build literacy skills with new annotation functionality.
The Development Process and UX Design
Development for the Class Activity Release began this past winter, when we began asking educators what problems they were trying to solve in their classrooms. Class and activity creation within LaunchPacks was fueled by a desire to measure student understanding and encourage active engagement with different types of content. Throughout the development and design process we partnered with curriculum experts and educators across grade levels to ensure that the user experience was intuitive and easy.
So, what’s new? Now teachers can:
- Create classes and manage a class roster.
- Create activities and assign them to students.
- Schedule assignments for immediate or future use.
- Monitor student progress at-a-glance.
- View individual student responses in real time.
- Annotate primary source documents.
Plus, stay tuned for new updates coming in early 2018:
- Sign-on with Google and import your Google classroom roster.
- Add Packs content to your Google Classroom.
- View student engagement through one classroom dashboard.
- Find standards correlated to every curriculum-aligned content Pack.
Thanks to our customers and educator team!
As we get ready to bring 2017 to a close, I want to thank our customers and partners who play a pivotal role in helping us design learning experiences that are meaningful, engaging, and fun. Your ideas, questions, and product suggestions enable us to build interesting solutions that inspire curiosity and that make learning joyful. We are excited to see how that inspiration continues to transform classrooms in 2018.