Welcome!

Lingco is excited to be hosting the National Spanish Assessment for 2023! We’ve created a modern online educational platform designed to help instructors more effectively teach students foreign languages. We’re doing everything we can to make the assessment this year as smooth as possible, and we’ve created this guide to help get you started!

Technical requirements

Lingco is a modern web-based application that works best with the latest version of Google Chrome, running on a laptop or desktop computer (either Mac, PC or Chromebook).  It should also work on the last two versions of Safari, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge, but Chrome is highly recommended.  The activities used in the National Spanish Assessment courses are designed for larger screens, so we don’t support using any mobile device or tablet at this time.

In order to take the National Spanish Assessment on Lingco you’ll also need:

• A stable internet connection with at least 4 Mbps download and 512 Kbps upload speeds
• A screen size of at least 1280x720 pixels
• Functioning speakers or headphones connected to your laptop or desktop

<aside> ❗ Note: Certain school network components, such as VPNs and firewalls, can impact the quality of audio and video files in Lingco.  Please discuss this with your network administrator if you discover such issues when testing out the Lingco platform before taking the National Spanish Assessment.

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Pre-assessment checklist

To help ensure a smooth assessment experience, instructors and students must complete the following checklists at least one week before taking the assessment. This way nearly all technical difficulties can be resolved well in advance.

Instructors

• [ ] Read completely through these instructions.
• [ ] Talk to your school’s network administrator to see if emails from outside vendors are restricted. If the answer is “yes”, ask them if they have a process for removing such a restriction (such as updating settings for your school’s email system, or having Lingco sign a data privacy policy).
• [ ] Invite students to their appropriate assessment courses ( you can find the instructions here: Adding Students to NSA courses).
• [ ] Assign students’ seats on the Roster page of your NSA courses
  • [ ] If you have any students with special needs for more time, follow these instructions to set up their extra time before the assessment begins
• [ ] Preview the content for the practice material. This will help familiarize you with Lingco.
• [ ] Make sure each student has completed the checklist below.

Students