Using Filters to Browse Content

Classroom provides educators a common set of filtering options and tasks to locate questions, assignments and standards they are interested in using or viewing. 

Filtering Standards

For educators, browsing through the standards on which their students will be evaluated is often the best way to learn about them. From the Classroom Home screen, select Standards from the directory tree on the left, or from the link under Browse.

You will be presented with a list of standard banks which have been added to your district's Classroom account. You will see common banks like the CCSS, the NGSS, and the EARLs & GLEs, but you may also see district-specific standards, like those used for report cards. Select the bank you would like to search.

The filter options include locating standards by grade level, subject, and/or by a keyword search. You can also significantly narrow the results by selecting a category, for instance ELA or Math. If you select multiple filtering options you will narrow the resulting list accordingly. However, if you use too many options, you may end up with no results.

SDS recommends filtering by a single grade level, single subject, or by keyword. You can even search by a standard's unique code, as in the example below.

Often, using the grade level, subject and keyword will give you the best result set.

Once you have located the standards you are interested in, roll over the standard to see a pop up of the full standard text. SDS recommends keeping a list of the standard codes you will use throughout Classroom. You can highlight the text and use your browser's copy and paste feature to create your own list. Please note: SDS is developing a My Standards Bank to help you with this. Stay tuned.

Finally, to clear any filters chosen, you can select the "X" next to the keyword search, select the Select None or Reset buttons, or deselect the actual filter option.

Filtering Questions or Assignments

Browsing through the shared question or assignment banks will give you a good idea of what content is already available to help you populate a curriculum. Questions and assignments in a shared bank can be used as is or modified to suit your class requirements.

From the Classroom Home screen select any of the My Question Templates, My Assignment Templates, Shared Question Templates, or Shared Assignment Templates from the directory tree on the left, or from the links under Browse.

If you select a Shared Question or Assignment Template link, you will see a list of banks created by your district and populated with questions and assignments created by other educators in your district. These questions and assignments are reviewed for quality and content by your district bank managers before being added.

If your district purchased it, you may also see the NWEA question bank, which has over 79,000 questions aligned to the CCSS.

Select a shared bank or your My Question or My Assignment Templates.

The list of questions or assignments can be very long. The main filter options include keyword searches and standards. If you select the More button, you can also search by grade level, subject, and/or other options. There is one more option for Assignment Templates and that is the Assignment Question Types.

You can significantly narrow the results by selecting one or more options. However, if you use too many options, you may end up with no results. Also, some questions and assignment templates may not have any standards attached to them, so using the standards filter option may reduce the results. 

 Once you select an option from the More button, it becomes a part of your standard filter set, as seen below.

You can then use it to help you narrow the results to only content you are interested in. Also, using a keyword in the search option can be extremely helpful, especially when searching the NWEA question bank.

Once you locate the content you are interested in, you can see details about the question or assignment by selecting the Info button to the right.

You will see any images or math symbols attached to the question.

Finally, to clear any filters chosen, you can select the "X" next to the keyword search, select the Select None or Reset buttons, or deselect the actual filter option.

[Updated: 12/30/14, prh]