TBASE  /  How to Use

How to Use TBASE

Simple steps for teachers and students.

Choosing student identifiersHow to bulk uploadHow to bulk upload essaysTeachersEssay ExpertGames and decksAdministratorsCampus dashboardDistrict reportBulk uploadOne code for all threeStudentsSamples and free try

Teachers

Get started

  1. Open Register. Enter your name, school email, a password, and the access code from your school.
  2. After sign in, choose Teacher dashboard on the landing page, or go straight to your Teacher dashboard. It shows your license and your tools.
  3. Forgot your password? Ask your school admin or Teach BIG to reset it, then choose a new one with Change my password.

Make a class

  1. Under My classes, type a class name and select Create class.
  2. Give each student the class code, your last name, and a student identifier such as Student 4 or Dolphin. Real student names never go into TBASE. See Choosing student identifiers for themed lists and a printable roster. Each student who joins uses one student seat.
  3. Select Open to see the students, assign work, and see results. Use Add students from a list to paste join names or upload a CSV before students arrive. See How to bulk upload.

Assign a passage (optional)

Students choose freely on their own: any level, passage, and prompt. If you want them to write about one passage, open the class, check one student or several students (or Select all), choose the level, passage, and prompt, and save. Those students then see only your choice. Select Remove on a student to give that student free choice again.

When an assignment is saved, select Print or download passage to open a clean printable page for the passage and prompt. Print it or save it as a PDF for students who need a paper copy.

Spanish side by side

Spanish side by side puts English and Spanish next to each other for emergent bilingual students. In the class, the Spanish side by side column has one check box per student, so you can turn it on for the students who need it. It shows the directions, the prompt, and the feedback in both languages. A student can also turn it on for themselves with the Spanish side by side (Español al lado) check box on their essay page. The choice is saved, so a student does not have to set it again on the same device.

Score a whole class set of essays

  1. Select Essay scoring: upload a class set.
  2. Make a new essay assignment: a title, the class, the grade, and the passage and prompt (from the library or your own).
  3. Upload the essays. Choose many files at once: .txt, .docx, or .pdf, with one essay in each file. The student identifier comes from a first line such as Identifier: Student 4 or from the file name, such as Student_4.docx. Use identifiers, not real names. You can also type or paste one essay in the box, or upload a spreadsheet as described in the next section.
  4. Check the identifiers and match each one to a class student if you like. Then select Score all essays. Each essay takes one to three minutes. Keep the page open.
  5. Select View on any student to see the full report. Print it, save it as a PDF, or download it.
  6. Select Build or refresh the class report to see the class's next best step, small groups for mini lessons, the level spread, and each student's next step.
The first five sentences rule. TBASE checks first whether the essay answers the prompt within its first five sentences. If it does not, the whole paper scores 0, including conventions. The report and the class report show this clearly.

Every report is saved. Come back any time to view, print, or download it. Only you (and Teach BIG administrators) can see your reports.

Import a spreadsheet of essays

A whole class set can arrive as one spreadsheet instead of many files. This is the fastest way to score papers that were written on paper.

  1. Open Essay scoring and open your assignment, or create a new one first.
  2. On the drop area in step 1. Add essays, drop the spreadsheet, or select it with the file button. Accepted formats are .xlsx, .xls, and .csv. Every sheet in the workbook is read, so you can keep one sheet per class.
  3. Use two columns: a Student identifier column and an Essay column, one essay per row. Column names are matched loosely, so Student, Name, ID, and Identifier all work in the first column, and Essay, Response, and Text all work in the second.
  4. Start from the template: Download the spreadsheet template. It has the two column headers and two example rows.
  5. Each row lands in the essay list with the file name and the row number as its source. If a row has no identifier, it shows as Row plus the row number, so you can type the right one.
  6. Check the identifiers, match each one to a class student if you like, then select Score all essays.
Spreadsheet rules. Keep one essay in one cell, and keep the whole essay in a single row. Line breaks inside a cell are fine. Rows with no essay text are skipped. Spreadsheets are never sent anywhere except to score the essays you chose, and the reports are saved to your classes exactly like uploaded files.

For a whole campus set, use Bulk upload essays. That page takes an Excel file or CSV with student name, class code, grade, prompt, and essay text, or a ZIP of essay files plus a matching spreadsheet. See How to bulk upload essays to TBASE.

Revise and rescore

After a paper is scored, TBASE flags the sentences that need another look. A student fixes any flagged sentence on the essay page and selects Rescore. Each essay allows up to three rescores. TBASE scores the revision, keeps it next to the original, and never overwrites the first score.

  1. On the essay scoring page, select View on a student in the Reports table.
  2. Above the report you see the original score, then the full revision history: one line per revision with the date and time, the level it moved to, the STAAR score, and how many sentences changed.
  3. Under each revision, every change is listed as the sentence before and the sentence after, so you can see the editing a student did.
  4. Select View revision n to read that draft in full. The same page shows Growth, August to May, a chart of every scored essay for that student.

Students see their own revision chain on the essay page, from the first level through each new level, with the number of rescores they have left. When they use all three, the page says so. Teachers see the whole history, so a revision is never a mystery.

Export scores as CSV

Open an assignment on Essay scoring and use the Export area below the reports table. Choose a format, then select Download CSV:

Before you upload an export. TBASE never stores real student IDs, so fill in the local student ID column for each student identifier first. Your district maps or adds the extra TBASE columns, such as TBASE Student Identifier, Assignment, TEKS, ECR Development and Organization, and ECR Conventions, as extension fields, or deletes them. For Aware, Raw Score is the STAAR extended constructed response total from 0 to 5, and Percent Score is that total out of 5. Every export uses each paper's first scored draft. Revisions stay in TBASE and are not exported.

See student results

Open a class. Student results shows each student's latest activity results and their essay reports. Select an essay to open the full report.

Essay Expert

Essay Expert is a guided essay builder for students. It lives under Writing Tools and works on its own or alongside TBASE essay scoring.

Passage picker

Essay Expert opens with eight passages, each with a WHY or HOW prompt. Every tile has Copy link so you can share one passage with a student, and Print passage for a paper copy.

Essay Progress Tracker

As students write, the Essay Progress Tracker shows ten pencils. Green, yellow, and pink show which parts of the essay are strong, need another look, or are not started yet.

Built in supports

Teachers can open Conferencing Companion inside Essay Expert to guide a writing conference. See pricing for the Essay Expert Conferencing Companion add on.

Games, decks, and Teach by TEKS

Thesis Time!

On the Writing Tools page, the Thesis Time! card opens the Check MATE thesis game. A student writes a thesis and gets a thinking level with the next best move.

The WHY or HOW game is its own game at WHY or HOW. Students sort prompts by WHY and HOW.

On the Writing Tools page, the Sentence Weather Forecast card opens a daily bell ringer. The student labels every word in the forecast sentence with its sentence weather symbol. A Weekly Forecast mode practices parts of speech across the week.

Teachers see Thesis Time! results on the dashboard. A district access code turns on Thesis Time! together with TBASE essay scoring. See One code for all three.

Writing Workouts

Writing Workouts are whole group SmartBoard games: OnRAMP, Evidence Detective, and Explanation Station. Students climb the five thinking levels from Foundational to Reflective.

Reading and writing slide decks

Daily Decks licenses include reading decks, writing decks, and Word Wisdom. Every weekly set is a Triplet: the class slide deck, the teacher script, and the student tracking sheet.

Students cannot open slide decks or teacher only pages.

Administrators

Teach BIG administrators sign in and choose Administrator dashboard on the landing page, or open Administrator dashboard directly. From there you manage districts, licenses, and access codes. Keep this page off a big screen in front of students.

District and campus leaders also use the campus dashboard, the district report, and bulk upload when access is granted.

Campus dashboard

The campus dashboard shows every class on one school license, read only. Choose the license at the top, then read the campus in three views:

Use Average level and Low, Medium, High to switch every badge on the page. TBASE administrators can also give a principal or a district leader read only access to a license from the same page, and remove that access later. Nothing on this page opens student essays, and only identifiers are shown.

District report

The district report rolls the same numbers up across a whole district, and then drills down: district, then campus, then teacher, then student. At every level you get:

Until essays are scored, the numbers show as none yet. Export a district or campus view two ways: District CSV or Campus CSV for spreadsheets, and District printable report or Campus printable report, which you print or save as a PDF. The printable pages carry the Teach BIG logo and have their own print styling. The report is read only, and no essay text is sent anywhere. You see a district only if a TBASE administrator granted you district access.

Bulk upload

Start with the training page How to bulk upload. Teachers add class students from a list. Campus, district, and Teach BIG admins use Bulk add teachers (name, email, school) within seat limits.

The district bulk upload page also imports full campus rosters and essays from a spreadsheet. It opens for TBASE administrators and district administrators. Two templates come with it:

  1. Choose the campus, then choose the file. Choose Student roster or District essays as the import type. Accepted formats are .xlsx, .xls, and .csv, up to 2000 rows per file.
  2. Select Preview file. Nothing is saved yet. The preview lists every row, what TBASE will do with it, and any errors to fix first. A row whose identifier looks like a real full name gets a soft warning, not an error, because identifiers are still the right choice.
  3. Fix the rows listed with errors, then select Import roster for a roster or Score essays for essays. A teacher who already has an account is reused. A new teacher gets an account and sets a password with Forgot password. A class or student that already exists is reused instead of duplicated, and a row that is already imported is skipped.
  4. A roster imports in batches, with progress shown as each batch goes in. When it finishes, the class codes that were created are listed with a Download class codes CSV button, so you can hand them out.
  5. Essays are scored one row at a time, with a running count of what is done, so you can see progress and stop and start again. For an essay file, check Also add missing classes and students from this file to add any new classes or students in the file. The teacher must already be on the roster.
Safe to run again. Re uploading the same file creates nothing new. Teachers, classes, and students are matched and reused, and reports that were already imported are skipped, so a file with an error fixed in the middle can be run again without duplicates.

One code for all three

A district access code is one code that turns on three things at the same time:

A teacher enters the district code once on the teacher dashboard, and all three are there. There is no second code to remember and no separate sign up for each tool.

Students do not use the district code. Students join with the teacher last name, the class code, and the student identifier, and students need no password. The printable page How students join has the steps in plain language, with room to write your class code, so you can hand it out or print it for families.

Students

  1. Go to Student: Join Class.
  2. Type your homeroom or content teacher last name, then the class code, then the student identifier your teacher gave you (like Student 4 or Dolphin). Do not type your real name.
  3. Pick a reading activity or a writing activity and play. Your teacher sees your results.
  4. If your school has Essay Scoring, select Write and score my essay. Choose a passage and prompt, or use the one your teacher assigned. Answer the prompt in your first sentences, then submit.
  5. If your teacher turned on Spanish side by side, you see English and Spanish next to each other for the directions, the prompt, and your feedback. You can also turn it on yourself on the essay page.
  6. If your paper has sentences to revisit, fix them and select Rescore. You get up to three rescores for each essay, and you can see every level you reached.

Students do not need a password. If you use a different computer, join again with the same teacher name, class code, and student identifier. A teacher can print the How students join page for a family who needs it on paper.

Samples and free try