Recently I have been trying out Juno, a free online assessment and assignment program (still in beta) in an effort to take my 1:1 class completely online and move away from giving paper-based assessments. Last year, during my first year of 1:1, I struggled with how to administer assessments online for many reasons--test security, ease of grading, and how to give students effective feedback without spending hours and hours typing away comments. Nothing I tried last year seemed to work that well, and I always ended up reverting back to paper-based assessments so I wouldn't drive myself and my students completely over the edge with frustration.
However, Juno has exceeded my expectations. In fact, it keeps surprising me by the things it can do. (Reading the very helpful Help files resulted in many "Really? It can do THAT? No way; I'm going to try that!" moments.) I think my surprise lies mainly in the fact that I was expecting this to be a huge pain in the you-know-what to use in order to make it fit with my standards-based scoring system (because every other one I've tried has been that way), but it wasn't. It was easy to setup my assessments and have them scored in a way that aligned itself to my scoring system, and have those results reported to students in an easy-to-understand manner. This is probably because it is from the makers of Jupiter Grades--formerly known as SnapGrades--which is a gradebook that can be customized for standards-based grading.
Well, exactly what can it do? Well, the answer to that is, "A heckuvalot." In the interest of brevity, I have listed what I feel are the most useful features of Juno below, with relevant screenshots as needed. (Click on the screenshots for a larger picture.)
Student signup is a snap. Once you put in your students and their ID numbers (time consuming if you do this one-by-one; I would suggest copying/pasting this information from a spreadsheet), Juno assigns each of them a unique code. You can then print out these codes and give them to students for signup, which takes no time at all. An e-mail is not required for signup, but I made all of my students put in their school Gmails.
Easily create online assessments, assignments, lessons, or textbooks. Entering questions for assignments and assessments is very easy with the user interface Juno has in place. You can even import existing tests or assignments you have from a text document (ExamView users will have to export tests as RTF files first), and print blank copies of your test from Juno. It offers a variety of test questions (multiple choice, short answer, matching, sorting, long answer, etc.), and will even score short answers for you. Juno also allows you to create lessons in the form of slideshows for students to view. This could be extremely useful for anyone using the flipped classroom model, or for teachers who want to put lessons for remediation or review for students online. Juno also allows you to assign homework or practice assignments that repeat until students get 100% and that you can let students redo at any time. But what excites me the most about Juno is that it will let you create your own textbooks that include questions for immediate feedback. While this is aimed at publishers, this feature has huge potential for anyone seeking to flip their classroom. As an additional bonus, Juno allows you to insert pictures, audio files, and video files into whatever you are creating in Juno.
- The fact that it only breaks down scores by points. I wish I could just assign a 0-5 score to answer choices or to questions without it being linked to the concept of points. I also wish that it wouldn't show students overall scores based on total points. I don't care if I have to enter in the values as points, but an option of displaying an overall score or not would be nice. Even though I tell my students that what we do is not based on points, students are still programmed to be hung up on the numbers.
- Browser compatibility issues. Before I used this for the first time, I had students try and set up their accounts a few days in advance. Boy, was I glad I did--turns out all the browsers we had on my netbooks were incompatible with Juno. Since student netbooks run Linux, I had to beg the tech guys to download the latest version of Chrome on my fleet of netbooks, which they did in about a day--allowing me enough time to have students to create their accounts before I gave the assessment. Not a huge issue for us, but just an FYI for anyone else out there that may encounter this issue.
- If your video or other media takes too long to upload, it will log you out before it finishes. I understand why Juno has an automatic logout after a set time period, but when it logs you out while your video is uploading to your assignment, that can get a little frustrating. While you can paste a link from YouTube or other video service instead of uploading the media file, this won't help if that service is blocked at school while the students are taking any assessment or assignment.
For more information, you can check out the links below:
Juno Help
Juno Information for Teachers
Juno Demo