Study Island Feature Focus: Custom Material How-To Guide
Study Island Feature Focus: Custom Material How-To Guide
For today’s Feature Focus, we’re going to break down how you can make use of the Custom Material within Edmentum’s Study Island. Maybe this is your first year using our solution, or maybe you’ve already taken advantage of Custom Material for years and are looking to expand your use. Whatever your level of experience, this feature was designed to give you the flexibility to provide customized content and practice for your students.
Custom Material helps you individualize instruction based on each student’s needs, offer remediation and acceleration activities, and make Study Island work within your unique classroom curriculum. So, what kind of situations would you use Custom Material in? If you want to assess your students on a very specific topic which is not covered in Study Island, you could upload your own lesson content and questions through Custom Material. Custom Material can also be leveraged to create summative assessments for the end of specific unit studies, or to prepare students for high-stakes testing using released questions from your state’s assessments. Custom Material flash cards are another great option to be used as a practice tool for lessons, or for physical education assessments.
Ready to create your own Custom Material in Study Island? This step-by-step how-to guide will help you get started!
1. Navigate to Custom Material
Custom Material is located on the Study Island home screen under the Main Menu tab.
2. Enter general information
Click on ‘Create New Topic’ you will be taken to the page where all of the general information around your lesson will live. Start by giving your new piece a title, providing a short description of the lesson, and setting a grade level. From here you can set your preferences, including: the minimum number of questions students must answer, minimum passing percentage, the option to hide the topic from other users, allow for draggable rulers and protractors, whether you want questions displayed in a random order, and if you want to have flash cards.
3. Upload content
Once you have entered all general information, you will be moved along to the ‘Lessons’ tab, where you will upload and create customized, individualized content for your students. You can add your own lesson explanations, reading passages, and more within your materials. You can also view and borrow from any existing lessons you may have previously created in Custom Material, or upload external URL’s.
4. Create assessment questions
At this point, you’ve set your preferences and added your lessons—now it’s time to write your questions! When creating assessments in Custom Material, you can include the following question types:
- Multiple choice, where you can set the number of answer choices (3-5) depending on your preference or your students’ needs;
- True/false; or,
- Short answer, where the information around the question is provided by you.
Where to enter correct and incorrect answers are clearly indicated for your convenience. Reading passages and custom explanations can be included with your questions, but are not required, allowing for the exact type of individualization each student needs.
5. Preview and launch
Once you have created your customized lesson and questions, you can preview the material to easily see how it will look for your students. Then, simply save your topic and it’s ready to go! Your students will be able to login to the program and access your Custom Material lesson and questions in the same way they would any other Study island topic.
Looking for a little more guidance to get up and running with Custom Material? Edmentum’s Study Island Power User Program is a great resource to utilize when familiarizing yourself with Custom Material or any other major feature in the program. Within each topic you’ll have access to video lessons, PDF guides, and a brief mastery quiz – all designed to help you get the most out of your Study Island subscription.
