Whether you’re a teacher or administrator in a career and technical education (CTE) program, chances are you’re constantly looking for ways to improve your instruction and provide the best possible learning experience for your students. Often, this involves finding ways to customize your instructional materials to meet the needs of specific programs, classrooms, and learners.
As a comprehensive CTE solution, iCEV includes a wide range of customization options designed to streamline your program and enhance learning.
In this article, we’ll consider just a few of the most popular customization options available to iCEV users. Specifically, we’ll look at:
- Aligning with Your Standards
- Rearranging Pre-Built Courses
- Creating Custom Courses
- Using Lesson Visibility Settings
- Crafting Custom Assessments
- Customizing iCEV for Special Populations
After reading this post, you should be aware of the range of customization options available to iCEV users and how implementing them can make a difference in your CTE program.
1. Aligning with Your Standards
Every educator wants to ensure they’re meeting their instructional standards. Satisfying standards is key to setting students up for success in the classroom. It’s also a necessary step in following state and federal regulations to ensure continued program funding.
Thankfully, iCEV correlates directly with many state and national standards ensuring teachers can seamlessly satisfy their requirements in the classroom.
Users have access to a wide range of correlation documents. Each document often lists multiple lessons for each standard, and educators can search within the iCEV platform for additional lessons to further satisfy their course requirements.
When teachers can build courses directly from the correlation documents, they’ll be confident that iCEV will help them meet their standards throughout the academic year.
2. Rearranging Pre-Built Courses
iCEV allows you to customize any existing course by rearranging the lessons in an order that makes sense for you.
One of the advantages of using iCEV is access to an entire library of pre-built CTE courses designed around your standards. However, there are times when it might be better to teach topics in a different order based on your students’ needs. You can even add other iCEV lessons that you think are relevant or remove topics you won’t be covering entirely.
Customizing courses from state standards ensures every lesson is aligned with instructional requirements, and automatically built into your lesson plans.
With iCEV, you remain in control of your students’ digital curriculum experience.
3. Creating Custom Courses
While it’s always important to have a CTE course that meets your standards, sometimes this may require building a custom course to meet your students' needs.
Teachers may find that while their curriculum includes the right content to teach a specific subject, the course they may want to use material from several different topic areas. In these scenarios, teachers often wish to create courses to fulfill their exact requirements.
Thankfully, iCEV allows for the creation of custom courses that uniquely satisfy the requirements of CTE programs. You can rearrange and turn activities on and off within the iCEV platform so you can create the course that best conveys the information your learners should know.
Just as importantly, you can continue to modify custom courses as your needs change, ensuring that your curriculum is always able to meet your demands in the classroom.
4. Using Lesson Visibility Settings
After the semester has started, teachers often find that there are some students who are keen to work ahead of the class, even if they have yet to learn the knowledge and skills they need to complete future lessons.
To keep students from getting too far ahead of the rest of the class, iCEV gives instructors access to lesson visibility settings which allow them to control which lessons students are able to see at any given time.
For example, a teacher might only want to have the first few lessons open at the beginning of the school year, and then gradually open additional lessons as the term progresses. Or a teacher might allow students to see the content, but not access formative and summative assessments until the right time.
Instructors can also use visibility settings to disable activities or lessons they won’t be using at all, and to control the number of attempts for an assessment. These features give teachers full control over the instructional experience to keep learners on pace.
5. Crafting Custom Assessments
While iCEV includes pre-built assessments as part of every course in our curriculum, teachers often appreciate the ability to modify exams or create assessments entirely from scratch.
The Assessment Generator tool allows you to craft custom assessments based on your needs.
Using the Assessment Generator, you can search through the iCEV curriculum library for lessons relevant to your course. You’re able to pick which lessons to include in your assessment. This allows you to create your own unit tests, midterms, or other assessments that include only the lessons you choose to include.
Finally, teachers can choose individual exam questions within each lesson to include in the exam. You’ll be able to choose from different question types to create a balanced exam. When you use the Assessment Generator feature in connection with custom courses, you’re also able to provide separate, tailored assessments for special populations learners.
Ultimately, customizing exams allows you to assess your students in the way that best reflects your instruction and course requirements, providing for a more optimal experience for you and your students.
6. Customizing iCEV for Special Populations
Finally, iCEV allows customization to provide the best experience for learners in special populations.
iCEV’s customization features take the stress out of providing accommodations, adaptions, and modifications so you can meet individual student needs while still providing an immersive learning experience for everyone.
It’s easy to use customization strategies to adjust course settings, change lesson visibility, and even create a custom course built around a learner’s Individualized Education Program (IEP).
To learn more about how iCEV meets the needs of every learner, download your free guide to Teaching Strategies in Special Populations. It’s full of tips you can use to help every student in your classroom succeed!
Enhance Your Students’ Learning Experience with iCEV
Now that you’ve learned about just some of iCEV’s customization options, you should have a better idea of how they can make a difference in your CTE program.
When you customize iCEV to meet the needs of your CTE students, you’re able to provide a tailored solution that prepares learners for success in the classroom, with industry certifications, and in their future careers.
Ready to see if iCEV can make a difference for your CTE program? Sign up for a free trial today!
In your 15-day free trial, you’ll have full access to the iCEV platform, curriculum, and certification prep materials. You can try the curriculum and custom features with your students so you can decide if it’s the right fit for your CTE program.
