OpenEd is a free service that has created a huge catalog of educational videos and games that you can browse by topic, grade level, or Common Core standard. The service launched last fall and has steadily added new features since then. The latest addition to OpenEd is an assessment creation tool.

OpenEd’s assessment creation tool is designed to help teachers create Common Core-aligned assessments. To get started you have to create an accountant on OpenEd.io. Click the “assessments” tab then the “create” button to start building your standards-aligned resources. After titling your assessment you can choose the standards that your assessment will address. You can choose as many standards as you like. With your standards identified you can move on to adding questions to your assessment. Assessment questions can be created from scratch you can choose some of the questions that OpenEd recommends based on your standards choices. You can also search for questions on OpenEd and add them to your assessments.

The best feature of the OpenEd assessment creation tool is the option to associate images and videos with specific questions. This option not only allows you to use media in your questions, but it also allows your students to see suggested review resources when they don’t reach a standard on your assessment.

Applications for Education
In my testing of the new OpenEd assessment creation tool I had the best experience when I created questions from scratch. The first set of standards that I selected, high school geography, did not yield any question suggestions. When I tested it again with elementary school language arts standards I did find suggested questions.

OpenEd encourages teachers to publish their assessments publicly on OpenEd so that other teachers can incorporate their questions into new assessments. Remember, these are practice assessments.