More Fun with Plato: Deeper Secrets of the PLE
In this session, we’ll learn more about how to use Plato to meet the specific needs of students and teachers. We’ll see how to tweak class settings, create custom courses, incorporate your own materials and links into a custom course, and access additional reporting features in Sensei and the Admin Center.
- Tweaking Class Settings
Login and go to Plato Courseware. From the Courses tab, select “My Classes.”
Click the class you want to make changes for.
Under “Quick Actions” click the magnifying glass icon to view the class summary.
Click Class Curriculum. Here you can:
a) Hide all pre-tests and/or post-tests
b) Limit attempts to unlock Mastery Tests
c) View the curriculum materials
Click Enrolled Learners
Here you can:
a) Enroll and un-enroll learners from the class
b) Transfer learners to other classes
c) Adjust the curriculum status for individual learners: you can hide and lock materials, and exempt learners from specific materials. - Custom Courses
A “course” in Plato’s terms is a curriculum. Plato has a wide variety of courses available to you, but you may want to create a custom course that delivers specific materials. Perhaps you want to align Plato’s content to your in-class curriculum, or combine Language Arts and Reading materials into one course. Perhaps you want to incorporate links to other websites, some documents of your own creation, or create an assignment where students need to upload a document. In short, you want to make Plato your own. This is what custom courses are for.
Note that custom courses, once published, become part of our Course Catalog and are available for teachers throughout MN ABE to use.
Login and go to Plato Courseware. From the Courses tab, select “Custom Course Builder.”
From the Actions button, choose Create Custom Course. (Or, if you are returning to work on a draft you started earlier, click the edit button for that course.)
Note the blue “Save” button at the top of the page. Click “Save & Continue Working” periodically to avoid losing your work.
When your course is ready to go, and you want to make it available in the Course Catalog, click “Save & Publish.”
At the top of the page, choose what type of content you want to work with. This will populate the lower left side of the page with folders of content for you to choose from.
Open folders by clicking the small triangles. Drag and drop files into your course folder on the right.
Click the blue drop-down menu on the right to see the following options:
This is where you can organize materials into folders, add links to websites, upload your own documents, create discussion forums, and add activities where students complete a document and upload it for you to grade (Dropbox Activities). You can also give your course a name. Please be descriptive! This course name will be seen by all of MN ABE once you publish the course!
Susan Wetenkamp-BrandtMinnesota Literacy CouncilABE Summer Institute 2017