Exact Path Back-to-School Planning Guide

Learning will most definitely look different this year, and whether you’re kickstarting a new implementation or reigniting an existing program for the new school year, we want to make sure that you have what you need to effectively implement your online learning program no matter the quick pivots that COVID-19 may require. We’ve assembled our top resources to help you set up things for the new school year, explore all of the features your program has to offer, and learn best practices from successful implementations that continued to thrive during COVID-19 school closures.

Prepare Your Account for the New Year

There are a few initial steps you should follow to get your implementation off the ground. Our wonderful consultants and on-call support representatives can guide you through this process, but with the help of some how-to resources, you can also do it yourself. Start by taking the following actions using the short videos available on the Exact Path Getting Started Resources page.

1. Update your teachers, classes, and users: Each new school year ushers in new educators, new students, and of course, new classes. While admins can adjust teachers and students in the system from the Administration Center, individual teachers have the ability to create their classes.
2. Set your academic year: Before you can get your students into Exact Path, you first need to make sure that you have your academic years defined. This helps guide the testing window structure, and it is important for reporting. Administrators can make these decisions in just a few clicks from the Settings area.
3. Define your diagnostic testing windows: Determining test frequency and test windows are important decisions to help map out your Exact Path expectations for all teachers using the program. As such, this is an important next step. You can also auto-schedule the diagnostic at the same time or choose to take that step separately, one assessment at a time.

Gather Implementation Best Practices

Our in-house research scientists, subject-matter experts, and consultants have gathered lots of great insights throughout their tenure here at Edmentum. Here are a few of our favorite nuggets of information to help guide your program implementation.

• 5 Tips for Administering the Exact Path Assessment: After your account is set up, it’s time to administer the assessment. Check out these quick tips to increase the validity of the assessment results.
• K-12 Teachers Share Their Secrets to Becoming Exact Path Champions: Hear from educators at two different schools discuss how they motivate their students in Exact Path.
• Your Exact Path Data: What It Means and How to Use It: Make meaning of your Exact Path data to send your teaching practices in the right direction. This OnDemand webinar will help you unpack assessment and learning path reports.

Explore Our Favorite Features

Last year, you might have administered the assessment a few times and even been able to get students using their learning paths regularly, but did you make the most out of ALL of the other neat features Exact Path has to offer? With such diverse features as assignments, Trophies, Challenges, and grouping, Exact Path is more than meets the eye. Turn your implementation up a notch by checking out one of our feature focus blog posts for an in-depth look and quick tips to success.

• Individualized Learning Paths: This resource will help you unpack the ins and outs of our automated learning paths, including what lesson components your students can expect to find, what automatic remediation is in place, and what level of insight you can expect to get as an educator.
• Trophies and Challenges: Exact Path offers meaningful engagement features that can help crank up student motivation. Make sure that you know how they work to support skill mastery and time-on-task—then download some of our free student and class trackers!
• Assignments: The individualized learning paths are a critical component of the program, but assignments also provide an important means by which to remediate, accelerate, or simply focus on a specific standard exactly when you need to. Learn more about how they can be used in Exact Path.
• Knowledge Map & Current Activities Data Views: Monitoring progress in the learning path is critical to implementation success. Check out this video to make sense of your reporting options and capture ideas to take advantage of each report for more targeted instruction.

Learn from Others’ Success During School Closures

We frequently have the honor of hearing from our terrific customers across the United States, and this spring and summer have been no different. Learn from educators have that been able to successfully use Exact Path to support continuous learning in the wake of COVID-19.

• “Teachers have a new appreciation for Edmentum and the functions available to them to meet the needs of all students…Because we’ve had 12 weeks of COVID-19 outage, and then we also have a regular summer break, we want to make sure that we’re filling in gaps and decreasing the typical summer loss, which has been exacerbated by COVID-19.”

  — Dr. Lavonne McClain, Director of Student Information and Accountability in Halifax County Schools, North Carolina

• “With our Title I program, [Exact Path] just seemed like a no-brainer…That was two years ago, and we’ve had great results with it. The ability to provide them with those activities—let’s say if it’s a 5th grader who’s on 3rd grade standards—to put them on a path to remediate those 3rd grade standards. We really were never able to do that in an efficient manner.”

  — Michael Ballone, Director of Curriculum and Instruction at Marlboro Township Public Schools, New Jersey

Stay on Top of What’s New

We’re constantly improving our programs based on your feedback. This summer was no different—in fact, program enhancements are designed to make learning in virtual, hybrid, and brick-and-mortar environments more successful.

• What’s New Page: Here, you’ll always find details about what has just been just released, and you can also preview what features are on deck to drop next.

This post was originally published June 2019 and has been updated.