Offering the experience of secure exams for teachers and students in the cloud can be a daunting task. There is a reason that standardized exams are so simplistic in nature. It is a lot easier to standardize procedures if every student takes the same exam at the same time and the scores can be tabulated by a machine that counts black and white circles.
What if you want your secure examinations to be learning experiences and opportunities for learners to express their creativity, and to demonstrate a wide spectrum of their understanding and capabilities? Add the challenge of using Google Apps, and web content. Then what?
A team at Buffalo Trails Public Schools, between Edmonton and Saskatoon, Canada, has knitted together a solution to do exactly what we would all want; create an exam experience that gives learners the freedom to use the tools they have been trained to use when they are called to task.
Vonglaxay Saysana, a Hapara Champion and technology innovator at BTPS, has been generous enough to share with us (and with you!) some of the documentation his team used to support their secure examination experience using Google Suite, Chromebooks and Hapara.
Google Admin Settings for Testing Days
Some very clever uses of these combined tools for offering secure exams are detailed in the above:
- Blacklisting the entire internet during exams and whitelisting only sites and drive resources needed for examination
- Step by step instructions for Exam Proctors that allow students to simply log in, do their work, and submit their documents in Hapara Workspace
- Pushing managed bookmarks to all accounts, including the testing Workspace, to facilitate simple navigation to allowed resources
It is important to note that separate Google user accounts were specifically created for this purpose, and classes were created in Hapara to support examinations.
