Three Ring is the best tool for digitizing student work. It will allow you to create a beautiful stream of student work that can be sorted, searched, organized and reorganized enabling you to engage in authentic assessment like never before.
Three Ring is not data heavy, it is not an overcrowded (frankly, ugly) spreadsheet. We focus on getting you behind the data, helping you (whether you are a teacher, a student, a parent, or an administrator) understand exactly what ideas, misconceptions, strengths and weaknesses a student has, and thus how to help him or her improve.
Three Ring is free for teachers!
We are currently developing Parent, Student, and Administrator accounts. If your school is interested in adopting Three Ring for all stakeholders, please contact us.
Three Ring has built a simple, user friendly mobile app for uploading student work directly to your stream. If you have a smartphone, you will be able to use and enjoy this app. It is fast, easy to use, and works for any Android or iOS device. You can also upload student work directly from your hard drive.
Three Ring is incredibly flexible. There is no “right” or mandated amount of work that you must put into the stream. We hope that you will see how easy it is, how useful it is, how engaging it is and choose to upload regularly. The truth is, as you put more up, you will have more access and be able to dive in deeper with your students. Every teacher can choose how much work is helpful for the teacher and students, which is, of course, how it should be.
As we said, Three Ring is about getting behind the data. Use it when helping a student, planning a lesson, communicating with colleagues, displaying exemplars to the class, leading or participating in PD, providing evidence for your evaluations, attending a parent/teacher conference or IEP meeting, and in any place where looking at what your students really think, write, and construct is important.
If you like, have students use Three Ring to self and peer assess. Use our notes feature to offer descriptive feedback. Have students choose their favorite work, or a series of work that shows their improvement, have them use Three Ring to lead their own parent conference. Try giving comments only on the hard copy of an assignment, knowing that you can always use Three ring to go back and assign a grade. Try portfolio based mastery grading by looking at progress on the standards over the course of a semester or year. Play around. Sort, Search, and Share in any combination--this is the power of digitizing student work. This is Authentic Assessment. Assessment for Learning. We believe that teachers, empowered and supported with this simple, flexible, and powerful tool, will do amazing things. We hope you will tell us about them.
There is no predetermined “right” way to use Three Ring. It is built to be flexible and to fit naturally into your routines. Some teachers have digitized work in class, some have had students upload their work from a class iPad, some have taken pictures of work at home during their normal grading process. All of these are great times to use Three Ring to start building portfolios of student work.
We have seen teachers pull up photos of exemplary work and project them for students to see. We have seen teachers use Three Ring to document classroom behavior and provide immediate feedback on what appropriate and inappropriate habits look like. We have seen a teacher upload prompts, hints, and other help to Three Ring and let students access it for scaffolding. There are really so many ways to use Three Ring during instruction and we can’t wait to see what you do.
We always talk about the importance of adjusting plans to students’ prior knowledge and actual progress. Three Ring is a great way to efficiently research what your students have been struggling with, what they have really connected with, what types of mistakes are getting repeated, what groups might be appropriate, etc. Put some thought into how you tag student work, and planning will become a lot easier as you will be able to pull up exactly the information you want—your students actual work and activity.
Three Ring is a great way to make assessment more meaningful. It can allow you to focus more on giving comments, and know that you can save a digital copy for grading later. You can use Three Ring to make peer and self assessment more manageable for students. Three Ring is also a great way to get parents and colleagues involved in the conversation around student progress. Use Three Ring to show them specific evidence. In fact, consider letting the students lead their conferences using their work on Three Ring to show what they struggled with, what they did well, and how they have grown. And, please, let us know other ideas you have about how to use Three Ring.
Yes. All of these can be edited and reorganized in the setup section.
We are constantly working to develop and improve Three Ring. We have heard a lot of ideas and I think you will like our new features over the next few months. But, if you have an idea, a feature, or a change that you would like to see on Three Ring, please let us know. Write us from the feedback form, email us at info@threering.com or get in touch on facebook or twitter (@teamthreering). We really want to hear from you.