Advantages and Strategies for Working with Sirius in Your Learning Management System (LMS)

Advantages and Strategies for Working with Sirius in Your Learning Management System (LMS)

District IT may have integrated Sirius into your LMS when they first set up your Sirius programs for use by students and teachers. What are the advantages? Which strategies can we use to optimize use of Sirius programs within your LMSs?

Your ideas and comments are welcome below!

Advantages and Benefits

   Integrations Supported by Sirius 


 

  1. Rostering: Rather than use Self-Registration or another third party rostering service, you can now roster your Sirius programs by class, teachers, and students. This helps to ensure that students can start learning on Day One when when your classes are set and you’re ready to begin teaching. Any updates or changes to classes are sync-ed overnight.
  2. Single Sign On: If teachers and students are accustomed to logging into their school or district to access their materials, classes and work, then they can be set to go with Sirius by logging into your learning management system.
  3. Assignments. Teachers access content they want to assign to students against differing parameters (date, time, special instructions); Students access assignments from their main dashboard or via the assignments tab when they access Sirius from their LMS.
  4. Gradebook. Teachers manage auto-scored and open response work in the Sirius Gradebook. Teachers review auto-scored and score open response items, and decide when to close assignments from use. Teachers control when they share scores and access to work with students for their review as well as to receive feedback from the teacher.
  5. Reports. Teachers receive rich and visually compelling standards and course reports from within the Reports dashboard. Students can access their work as well once all items have been scored and the teacher releases scores or exports CSVs from the Gradebook for further evaluation.

Strategies for Using Sirius in Your LMS

  1. Work with your IT Group if you have any questions about access and optimizing the user experience of all your online programs.
  2. Teachers can take a general referential approach to assignments (Your assignment is now ready in Sirius), or they can add specific references in their LMS’s assignments to students (Please review Lesson 1 and then do Lesson 1 Practice with the following tips…).
  3. Teachers can provide light or elaborate feedback to students based on their performance on items within Sirius through the use of sticky notes, highlights, and annotations.
  4. The continuity of the Sirius experience of content helps teachers and students get into the flow of instruction with simple to use STAAR tools that they can use to practice the testing experience.
For more on the advantages of using rostering and SSO over Self-Registration, please visit this link.

For best practices and strategies for successful rostering, SSO, and Sirius Programs, please see this link.