Over 30 significant improvements and enhancements have been made to ThinkLink over the past year! This allows you to further enhance your students’ experience with FOSSweb on ThinkLink. With an impressive 99.8% uptime, you can depend on ThinkLink to be there when you are looking for a reliable online learning resource to augment your Science lessons.
Teacher Features
Updates to Assessments:
- Hide Assessments: Assessments will no longer automatically appear in the course; teachers choose when to assign them to make them visible to students.
- Lock Assessments after Due Date: An optional tool that prevents students from accessing an assessment after the due date has passed.
- Reopen Assessments: Allows teachers to reopen an assessment for a student after it has been submitted.
- Time on Assessment: A timer feature that shows the amount of time a student spent on an assessment, visible in the assignment details and the Student by Item report.
Single Assignment Link for Multiple Classes: Enables teachers to share the same link for an assignment across multiple classes, eliminating the need for individual class links.
Jump to Specific E-book Page via Link: Allows teachers to provide a link that takes students directly to a specific page in the e-book.
Digital Teachers Guides (DTG): The new FOSS Pathways Edition features Digital Teachers Guides. All Pathways courses will have DTGs ready for the 2025-26 school year.
- User highlights and notes added within the guide are retained year after year.
- The DTG contains links directly to teacher and student materials, which can be shared with students for quick access.
Administrator Features
Assessment Raw Data Transfer API Integration: Integrates with Tableau and PowerBI business intelligence tools, allowing districts to track different groups of students, compare to state testing, and create custom dashboards.
Administrative Reports Refinements:
- Organized grade bands in the filters.
- Improved labeling in the reports at the student level.
Tailored Onboarding Webinars and Professional Learning
Our FOSS Events Page contains videos and information on upcoming webinars and professional development opportunities.
- Administrators, do you want a FREE ThinkLink back-to-school refresher course for your teachers? There are two options: You can share the pre-recorded video found on the FOSS events page with your teachers, or you can reach out to our technical support team to reserve a date/time for your district teachers. They are available via e-mail, chat, or by phone: 800–258–1302, option 3, Monday through Friday, 8am–7:30pm ET.
- Level up your FOSS teaching by engaging in our professional learning opportunities. We have options to fit every situation. Collaborate with fellow FOSS teachers nationwide in our New to FOSS and FOSS Science Notebooks Communities of Practice. You’ll meet synchronously four times in the fall and have time in between meetings to practice what you’ve learned. Registration links will be sent soon to the FOSS Events page.
- Review our recorded webinars on ThinkLink onboarding and science and literacy integration to get the help you need now. More webinars on FOSSmap and ThinkLink tips and tricks are coming soon.
- Our specialist team of former FOSS classroom teachers, PAEMST finalists, NBCTs, instructional coaches, and literacy specialists delivers professional learning on the science teaching topics important to you in a format that fits your needs. Reach out via https://www.foss-science.com/contact-us/ to schedule a consultation.
There’s more coming soon!!
- Custom Assessments: Teachers will be able to modify current assessments to better fit their instructional needs.
- FOSS Gradebook: Check the status of all your students for all assignments in one place. The gradebook will feature student levels on assessments and assignment statuses for all other assignments.
- Administrator Standards Report: This report will allow administrators to see performance based on NGSS Performance Expectations across the district, school, teacher, class, and specific student.
- Streamlined Assignment Creation: We have improved the assignment creation process to make it more intuitive for our teachers.
Ready to get started now?
Use this Quick Start Guide to help you get started on ThinkLink, watch a past webinar on ThinkLink Back to School Refresher by scrolling down to “past events,” or ask your administrator to schedule a custom webinar for your school or district by contacting the technical support team. They are available via e-mail, chat or by phone: 800–258–1302, option 3, Monday through Friday 8am–7:30pm ET.
Make a commitment to yourself to learn to use this powerful tool in the 2025-2026 school year to make your job easier and engage your students with the online tools ThinkLink has to offer.