Mastery Connect Release Notes (2023-01-13)

[#1]

In this Mastery Connect release (January 13), teachers can create a Spanish language Mastery Connect item or passage. Additionally, Teachers can enable dictionary tools in Enhanced Accommodation (EA) assessments for individual students.

New Features

Spanish Text-to-Speech

Teachers can create a Spanish language Mastery Connect item or passage. When an item or passage is Spanish, the text-to-speech tool reads text with correct Spanish pronunciation. This update includes support for over 20,000 existing items that are pronounced correctly in the Mastery Item Bank. 

With this update, Spanish language learners will be better able to demonstrate mastery of curriculum content without language limitations. Students can hear authentic Spanish when using the Text-to-Speech feature, allowing them to easily gain familiarity with language tools available on state assessments.

When creating an item, teachers can select Spanish as a language option.

Items marked in their corresponding language will be filterable in the assessment creation experience and the item bank index.

Additionally, when creating a new passage, teachers can select Spanish as a language option.

To tag text as Spanish, select the text, click the Language icon, and then select the Spanish option. When the passage is closed, the text can be viewed as it would display to a student.

Dictionary and Picture Dictionary

Teachers can enable dictionary tools in Enhanced Accommodation (EA) assessments for individual students. Dictionary tools can also be enabled at the tracker level.

Teachers can enable these tools individually via the Edit Student modal, or for the whole class via the tracker settings tray. Dictionaries can be enabled for benchmarks or formative assessments.

Once enabled, students can highlight text in the student assessment experience and receive either a definition or image representing the word.

Note: When changes are made to individual student dictionary options, the tracker-level language and speech tools  option becomes set to "Manually set for each student."