Happy Holidays From All of us at Skills Iowa

We would like to take a moment to wish you all the best of the season. All of us with Skills Iowa appreciate all that you do to make a difference for kids, and we know that high achievement for every student is much more than a slogan. We know that you are the biggest influence outside the home that your students are likely to have this year. We are honored to be one of the strategies you use.

Enjoy your time away from school, and know that when you come back from break, we will be available to help you help your kids.

Happy Holidays from the Skills Iowa Staff!

Winter Break Activities

Since  kids will have lots of time on their hands, winter break is a great time to have your students do some extra review in Skills Tutor. In  all subject categories except Reading Comprehension LL, A, B and C and Reading Vocabulary A, B and C the pretests are prescriptive. In other words, if you give the pretest, the program will determine where your students need extra work and will assign lessons to address the gaps in mastery. If your kids are going to have semester tests when they get back from break, this could be a great way for them to sharpen their skills.

You might also want to point out to them that they can take practice quizzes in Assessment Center. These quizzes can give them an idea of how they are doing in their quest to master these skills.

Don't forget Skills Iowa over the holidays. Your students can learn a lot on their break.

Is your semester ending soon?

Since almost everyone is going to be ending the semester on one side of the other of Winter Break, it's a great time to use Skills Iowa to determine which of your benchmarks your students have already mastered, and which they need more work on. 

Giving a review assessment in Assessment Center which  covers the skills that will be covered on your semester test can give you a good idea about which skills have been mastered and which skills your entire class has not retained. It will also give you a pretty good idea about which individuals in your class might be lacking in the mastery of some skills.

Once you know, you can send your students to Skills Tutor to hone those skills, work with the students in small groups or individually, or reteach the skill to the entire class.

Skills Iowa is a great way to identify and address skills that your students may not have mastered and which ones they have. Knowing which is which gives you the opportunity to make a difference in your students' achievement.

How are your kids doing?

If you're not sure, there are ways to find out in Skills Iowa's programs.  

In Assessment Center, click on the Reports link on the left side of the page.  This will take you to a set of reports that you can use for this class. Two reports stand out above the rest for checking on a class: Assessment Results and Overall Skill Performance.

Assessment Results will give you information about how the class has done on an assessment. It will break the class into four performance groups and it will also show you how your students did on each skill assessed in the assessment.

Overall Skill Performance allows the aggregation of assessments and shows you how students did on a series of assessments. If you have assessed a reading skill over the course of four assessments, this report will put all of those assessments together in one report.

In Skills Tutor, the reports link is available on the very first page. By choosing the class and the desired report, you can get a good idea how a class is doing as well as how individuals are doing.  Two reports that get a lot of use are the Gradebook and the Student Detail reports.

Gradebook is under Assignment Reports. This will show how each student has done on one selected assignment. It looks just like any gradebook except all of the math is done for you.

The other Skills Tutor report that tells a lot about a single student is the Student Detail report. Choosing all of the students, the correct modules, and the time period will show you how often a student has done the lessons, how much time he/she has spent, what time of day they were done, as well as the score and percentage. This is an excellent report to use to conference with your students.

If you have not used Assessment Center, there is no time like the present to get started. An assessment that covers the essential outcomes that you have taught in the first half of the year will show you where you and your students have been successful and where there are still gaps.  The whole concept of formative assessment is made quite simple with Assessment Center.

If you have any questions about how to proceed with the reports or the use of the programs, please contact your project leader.

What version of Flash Player are you using?

Wondering what version of Flash Player you have installed on your computer?  You must have at least version 9 installed to be able to use the newest modules on Skills Tutor. This includes all of the Language Arts modules.  You can check your version of Adobe's Flash Player by going to www.macromedia.com.software/flash/about/

Look for the little boxed are on the right side of the window. It will tell you what version of Flash Player you have installed.

A word about classroom climate...

Taking a group of students to the computer lab can frequently be confused by the students as going to a fun place, a place where we can behave differently than we do in the classroom. For the teacher, it can become a place where we now not only have to deal with 20 plus students, but also with 20 plus computers. There are lots of questions, and lots of distractions, and lots of opportunities for the classroom climate to become noisier and more distracting than usual. It's natural, but if this situation persists, the results of Skills Iowa's assessments and lessons may not truly reflect a student's ability. 

Students need to learn that the computer lab is just an extension of the classroom. Behaviors that are not tolerated in the classroom, such as talking to your neighbor, should not be tolerated in the computer lab. Teachers need to realize that when they are helping students, that they can be creating distractions too. Answering student questions needs to be as quiet as possible, and as infrequent as possible. Students need to be encouraged to be independent when in a large group.

To make quiet and independence possible, we need to do our prep work. Students should be shown how an assessment works before they are expected to take one. LCD projectors and smart boards are great tools for this. If you have access to this technology, creating a sample assessment and going over it with the class will prepare students for taking assessments on their own. If you do not have access to these technologies, you might just want to have students gather around a computer while you show them the procedures that will be utilized, or you might have each student at a computer while you guide them through, step by step an assessment or a Skills Tutor activity. Once they have completed this assessment or lesson, they can proceed to take an alternative assessment on their own. 

If you have students who cannot or will not behave at the computers, you may want to consider making the use of the computer a priveledge that students earn. You can print out a student version of the assessment and have those students who are too distracted take their assessment that way. Once they see the other students at the computer, they may want to behave differently.

The bottom line is that the computer lab is still your classroom. The same attention to learning climate that is maintained in the regular classroom is just as important in the computer lab.

Adding Students to an Existing Assignment

This question came up twice in one week, so it must be worth touching upon.

If you get a new student in a class, you must add that student not only to the class, but also to the assessments in Assessment Center that you want him/her to take. To do this, you go to the Assessments link on the left side of your Assessment Center class page. A list of assessments that you have created will show on the lower part of the page. These assessments are not necessarily assigned to students, but the problem occurs on assessments that are already assigned. To assign the assessment to a new student, start by putting a checkmark in front of the assessment. Next, click the Assign button above the list of assessments. The new student should be in the left window; click on his/her name and click on Add. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click Next and on the next page, scroll to the bottom and click Save. The student will now be assigned this assessment.

You should not remove any of the students who already have been assigned the assessment from the list of assignees. They will not be assigned the assessment another time; only the new student will receive a new assignment. If you do remove the student from the assignment on a teacher created assessment, you will lose that student's test results, clearly an undesired effect.

To add the student to Skills Tutor lessons, click on the Skills Tutor link on the left side of the screen. Next, click on Classes. Then, click on Class Properties. At this page, click on Give Assignments and you can check the empty boxes to the right of this student's name to give him/her the these assignments.

Adding a second teacher to a class

If you and another teacher both work with the same group of kids for the same subject, you can add a second teacher to your Assessment Center class. You cannot, however, do the same thing in Skills Tutor. This does not mean that you cannot monitor your students.

In Assessment Center, adding a second teacher is pretty simple.  You go to Class Details and add a new teacher just the same way you add a new student to the class. This teacher will have full access to the class, and can make assignments, create assessments, add students, delete students, and of course delete results. In short, anything that a lead teacher can do, this teacher can do too. Adding a new teacher to a class is not something that you should do without giving it some thought. Be sure that you and the person you are sharing the class with will be able to work together with good communication. It's a great way to have someone share the load with you, and it's a great way to cooperate with a teacher who has equal responsibility for the class.

In Skills Tutor, the same procedure is not possible. Only one teacher can have ownership of a class. This doesn't mean that a second teacher can't monitor the progress of a student however. In Skills Tutor, the data stays with a student, not with a class. This means that a teacher who shares responsibility can create a class with the same population and can monitor a student's progress by using the Student Detail report. This report will show the results of any student work done in subject areas that are selected for the report. 

It's not the same as sharing the class, but it does provide data. If two teachers really need to share a Skills Tutor class, they will have to share a username and password.

Remember, these are two separate programs owned by two companies. They are brought together under the umbrella of Skills Iowa. Sometimes, the differences in the company procedures can cause confusion. What we have to remember is that both of these are great programs with different procedures that can help our students increase achievement.

OK, I turned off my pop up blocker, and my report still didn't load....

If you are like many people, you may still have another pop up blocker in force. People using a Windows machine frequently have a Google Toolbar installed that can also have a pop up blocker. If you see a Google search bar at the top of your browser window, look to the right of it. If you see something like "2 sites blocked" you have another pop up blocker in place. You can either turn it off, or have it allow the Skills Iowa sites. 

Pop up blockers are not the friends of Skills Iowa!

Conferencing and Skills Iowa

With conference time coming up at lots of Iowa schools right now, communications with parents come to the forefront. Parents frequently want as much information about their students as they can get. They want to know what they can do to help, and the want to know how their student is progressing.

Skills Iowa can help with all of these needs. First and foremost, the reports features in both of our programs, Assessment Center and Skills Tutor can help you paint the picture of a student's achievement as well as a student's efforts at school. In Assessment Center and Skills Tutor you can print reports that only report on one student at a time. Parents can use the data there as a point of discussion with you and with their student. In Assessment Center, go to the class in question by clicking on its name on the home page. Next click on Reports from the menu links on the left. Once the page refreshes, you will get a listing of six report types. For individuals, you want to look at the last two reports. The Overall Student Performance report is the most wide spread report. It will give you the student's performance on every skill over which he/she has been assessed in your class. The Student Performance Report is intended to show the results on selected assessments. Both of the reports will give you comprehensive information about the student, and will in fact lead to the same information. It is the organization which will be different.  Two other features of Assessment Center which you may want to point out to parents are the Skills Resources and Practice Quizzes selections. Each of these is a great way for parents to be involved in their student's learning process. The Skills Resources are web based activities that parents and or students can print off and work on together or alone, and the Practice Quizzes are short, narrow quizzes that test individual skills. These can help relieve test anxiety, and can be great practice for students to use to get accustomed to the procedures of the program.

For Skills Tutor, the process is a bit easier. Choose the class you want to use, and then click on reports. From there, you can choose one of two reports, Student Detail or Parent Letter. Both of these reports are identical with the exception of one addition on the Parent Letter where you can type a note that you will use for the entire class. Each student's report will contain the same note. You can, of course, choose to make a handwritten note on each student's report to personalize it, or you can choose to make the conversation the personalized contact. These two reports can cover any subjects you choose to have on them and can cover any time period you choose. For conference time, you probably want to choose to show all work covered up until the time the quarter ended. The report will show how much time a student has spent on each activity, what score and percentage the student achieved, and what date and time of day the student did the work. 

The one thing that could cause you trouble in creating these reports is having your pop up blocker activated. The pop up blocker will not allow reports to be created. If you are being taken back to a previous page instead of being taken to a report, then you have a pop up blocker stopping the progress. Turn off the blocker, and you will be in business.

Did you administer the early Math Benchmark Tests?

If you did, you really need to look for trends by using the Assessment Results Report. 

The results at the top of the page will help you get an idea about class trends. It will help you identify the success of your school's math program, but it really isn't a good place to make big decisions about individual student ability and achievement. Keep in mind that each student had only one question about each skill that was tested. Most of us would like a bigger sample used to see if we knew what we were being held accountable for. 

The second part of this report will identify the students who have not yet taken the assessment. The decision is yours, but as the year progresses and you have taught more of the material that some of your students had not been taught before taking the test, the results will start to be diluted. You may want to examine the results of the assessment now rather than waiting for those results to come in.

The last part of this report may be the most important section. The bar graph at the bottom of the page shows class results by skill. These bars show the distribution of student performance in each of these skills. You can find which students performed well on a skill and which didn't. This might not be as important as looking at the class performance. One suggestion is to take a look at the skills that you would have expected your students would not have done well on. If this is a skill that they have never been taught, the results might be taken as interesting, but not necessarily important since there would be little expectation of high performance. The next group to look at might be the skills that you have already taught this year. If your students, as a class, did pretty well on these skills, you have some indication of how well the class mastered this skill. If your results are mixed on one or more of these skills, you should probably prepare another assessment that has enough questions on this skill, or these skills to be reliable, and not so many that you have to give up a lot of class time for the administration of the test. Reteaching these skills will not be easier any time later in the year. Finally, look at the skills you really expect that students should have a solid foundation in when they come to your class. If your students do have that foundation, great. If, from the results of the assessment, they don't appear to have that understanding, you should probably think about another assessment for these skills too. You need to make a decision about how you will address these deficiencies. 

This is what formative assessments are all about. It is a matter of making adjustments to your educational plan. Sometimes you will be able to shorten the time that you had planned to use for teaching a concept, and sometimes you will have to go back and teach something that was not in the plan at all, but which is essential for the understanding of the entire course. 

Nobody said it would be easy, but without the information provided, it would be easy to just move on without knowing why some students just didn't get it.

Wondering why a student who gets a high score on Reading Comprehension still gets assignments?

This question comes up now and again. Why did my student get assigned all of the work in Skills Tutor's Reading Comprehension even though he got a 90% on the pretest?  The answer? Reading Comprehension LL, A, B and C are not prescriptive. Neither are Reading Vocabluary A, B and C. Everything else in Skills Tutor is.  In these two modules the pretests result in an all or nothing situation; either you take the pretest and get assigned everything, or you can set it up that you take the pretest and get nothing except the lessons that the teacher chooses.

If you want to use the Reading Comprehension pretests and not have them generate an assignment of all of the activities, you must uncheck the option that states that pretests can assign work based on the student's performance.  This is the first year for this option, and we have found it to be especially useful for Reading Comprehension.

If you have made the assignment without unchecking this option, and would like to change this effect, go to Class Properties, click on Modify Assignment, and uncheck the option to give work based on pretest performance. Save the change by clicking  on Done, and you're in business.

Best Practices

What's the best way to use Skills Iowa? That's a question we hear a lot in our training sessions, but the answer that we must give is that we are not sure what is the best way to use our programs in your situation. One thing we do know however is that research about how people learn does exist. Bruce Joyce and Beverly Showers cite evidence in their book Student Achievement Through Staff Development, 3rd Edition (ASCD 2002) that achievement occurs through a progression of techniques. 

They use these  steps: Theory, Demonstration, Practice, and Coaching. These are all solid parts of raising achievement, but it is important to note where the achievement numbers reach the point of transference to increased achievement.

Study of the theory behind a concept is important. The inquisitive in the room will always want to know why something works the way it does. The transfer of studying the theory to the student's achievement however is 0%. That probably doesn't really surprise anyone. If we only talk about something, it doesn't usually stick with kids.

So what happens when we use demonstrations of the concept. Our classes get to see what happens, they can watch the phenomena in action. The difference this makes in achievement? Once again, Joyce and Showers indicate that this is still 0%. Once students understand the concept, the demonstration might come back to them, but by itself, it doesn't make the difference in achievement that we are after.

Practice makes perfect is something that we have all grown up with, and surely it must be right, but Joyce and Showers' research shows disappointing results on this one as well. Practice on its own only leads to making a 5% difference in achievement. This is where jaws usually drop. "Really? Only 5%?" Thinking about it makes sense however. Imperfect practice leads to imperfect results. How is a student to know what parts of the practice are incorrect?

The really good news here is that coaching does make a huge difference. Coaching has a 95% transference to increasing achievement. Teachers probably do this without really thinking about it. Showing a student where his/her math work went wrong, or helping a student edit an awkwardly worded passage are both examples of coaching. The truth of this is that effective teachers are coaching all of the time. ALL of the four steps are important parts of the teaching process, but finishing the job is what makes the difference. We must coach the kids through the process.

So, what are the implications of Joyce and Showers work for working with Skills Iowa? What steps do we need to use to increase student achievement? In short, all of them. We can't expect that giving assessments will lead to increased achievement unless we are running the reports and acting upon them, and we cannot expect that giving Skills Tutor lessons will replace the importance of an effective, highly qualified teacher. What we can know is that the opportunity for practice that is offered through Skills Tutor is part of the process, and we also know that the results of Assessment Center help the teacher target which parts of a unit of study have already been mastered and which parts will need more  study. 

The tools offered in Skills Iowa are parts of the process. Of course there are many other tools that effective teachers can use to accomplish the same end. The point is that we must understand the effectiveness of the practices we are using. All good teachers work hard; if we are to increase achievement, we must also consider what the research says about increasing achievement.

Skills Iowa and Pop Up Blockers

One of the biggest cause of problems with Skills Iowa's two programs, Assessment Center and Skills Tutor is the use of pop up blockers.  If you are having a problem with a page not appearing, check to see if your pop up blocker is on. It may be that you have more than one pop up blocker in effect on your computer. Start by going to the Tools menu on a windows machine or the Safari menu on a Mac. If the pop up is on, turn it off, or tell it to allow pop ups for this web site. Next, you might have a pop up blocker in a Google tool bar. Turn this off as well. It is possible that the school has a pop up blocker on that can only be administered by your tech person. If this is the case, you must ask him/her to allow pop ups for asc.princetonreview.com and www.myskillstutor.com.

The short word on pop ups is that they will create problems for Skills Iowa's programs.

Shared Assessments in Assessment Center

If other teachers in your building teach the same subject at the same grade level, you may decide that you want to share assessments with them.  

When creating your assessment, you must make the decision to share or not share on the first page of the creation process. To share the assessment, click on the "Share this assessment, so that other educators can search for it." After doing this, the rest of the assessment creation process is exactly the same as any other assessment. The only aspect that you may want to give extra consideration is the naming process. While you might know what Math 4 Assessment 4 means, your other staff members may not. Naming the assessment with something from the topics being covered is helpful for other staff members.

To assign an assessment that another teacher has created and shared,  go to your class main page for the class you want. Once there, click on the Assessments link from the links on the left side of the page. By default, the Search for Assessments window will come up on your screen. The window is only one text line high and is about three inches long. Type the search criteria in the window, i.e.  4th Math. Click on Search. (Note: Hitting the Enter key on your keyboard doesn't do the same thing as clicking Search.) The page will refresh and a list of assessments matching your search criteria will appear.

The blue buttons above the list of assessments will allow you to preview the assessments and to assign them as well. To assign one of the assessments, click on the box in front of its name, and then click the blue Assign button. Once you have done this, you will be able to continue with the assigning process just as you would for a test that you have created.

Working together with other staff members in the creation process can help you to save some time and help evaluation by using standard procedures within departments.

If you need help using this skill, or any other, please contact your project leader.

Skills Tutor Level Indicators

One of the biggest questions we get about Skills Tutor is what the A, B and C mean behind a lesson.  These are indicators about the level of difficulty of the lessons. A is roughly at a third/fourth grade level. B is at a fifth/sixth grade level and C is at a seventh/eighth grade level. In the one case where it exists in Reading Comprehension, LL is for lower level third grade readers.

Beginning Math and Beginning Language Arts lessons are for struggling learning in elementary school.

The rest of the lessons do not have a grade level designation, and are generally considered appropriate for high school students.

Skills Tutor Resources

Skills Tutor offers a number of wonderful resources right on the home page. To get to this page, log in to asc.princetonreview.com Once at the Assessment Center site, click on the Skills Tutor link on the left side. You will be redirected to the Skills Tutor site.

At this site, you can view any of the activities that you can assign by using the View Activity link. This is a good practice if you are using and activity to demonstrate to the entire class over a projector or if you are going over a skill with an individual student.

You can also click on the View Tutorials link and get instructions and examples of many of the items used in Skills Tutor. One that we frequently use in training is the Sample Accountability Reports. This will give you a good example of most of the reports used in Skills Tutor.

A resource that is often overlooked is the View Guides and Worksheets link. This link will download a teachers' manual for the module you select. These frequently have lesson summaries, examples, and reproducible worksheets.

Take a look around at the Skills Tutor 1st page. You'll find something useful.

Did you administer the Skills Iowa Math Benchmark Assessment?

If you did, you will want to check the reports. If you are an administrator, log in to your building administrator account. If you are a teacher, log in as you normally do.

For administrators, choose the Reports link on the left. From the resulting list, choose the Assessments Results report and then select the subject and grade. In this case we will select Math. You should see a list of assessments, which should include the Skills Iowa Math Benchmark assessment.  Select that, and then view your report. 

For teachers, select the class you want to work with and then select Reports. Choose Assessment Results and then choose the Skills Iowa Math Benchmark assessment from the list of assessments. Finally, select the Show Report button to view your report.

You will also be receiving the data from other Skills Iowa schools who have administered the assessment. We hope that you have found Assessment Center easy to use and that more importantly, that you have found the data generated from the assessment useful in driving your instructional program.

What happens if my students can't finish a lesson?

Students who are not able to finish a lesson or assessment in one sitting do not lose what they have done. In both of our programs, the student will be be able to resume work where they left off.

In Skills Tutor, most of the lessons support a technology called bookmarking. The process is invisible and seamless. All a student needs to do is to click on the activity they were unable to complete, and the program will load to their point of departure. A book flipping pages will appear on the screen to let the student know what is happening. A student will not have to go through the entire first part of the lesson again; he/she can just resume work on that lesson.

In Assessment Center, the student can just click on the Continue button which will appear after the name of the assessment in the student's list of assessments.

Where do my students log in?

One question that comes up now and again is, "Where do my students log in?" The answer is simple. They log in the same place you do: asc.princetonreview.com

Since they are students, the page that loads for them is slightly different than the page you see when you log in, but some of the geography is the same. They also have links on the left side that will take them to different functions and also to their Skills Tutor home page. You can see the student page in this blog entry.

In the past, many schools logged in at www.myskillstutor.com. Once there, they needed a username, password and a site id. Since students can log in at the Assessment Center site, there is really little reason to log in at the Skills Tutor site. The only reason to log in there is to make the choice to have the supported modules speak the instructions in Spanish.

To keep things as simple as possible for you and your students, logging in at asc.princetonreview.com is our best choice.

Skills Tutor Report Loading Problems

Sometimes people report problems with their Skills Tutor reports not loading. There are two causes of this problem. The number one cause is having a pop-up blocker in effect. If you have this situation, try holding down on the control key while you give the final command that will load the report. If this doesn't work, you may find success by turning your pop-up blocker off completely. If your district has the ability to allow pop-ups for specified web sites, you should request that www.myskillstutor.com pop-ups be allowed to load.

The other cause is not having access to a PDF reader. The most often used reader on a Mac or Windows is Adobe Acrobat Reader; however, Preview on a Mac could handle this task as well. It may be that you have not opened your copy of either program for the first time, and it needs to be opened and have the usage agreement dealt with. If you have to have administrative access to do this at your school, ask your tech person for assistance.  If you can open other PDF files, this is not your problem, and you should look into pop-up blockers.

As always, contact your project leader if you need some assistance with this.

Why doesn't a student show up in Skills Tutor?

A problem that can sometimes arise is a student appearing in Assessment Center, but not being in the list in Skills Tutor. Without taking the time to explain what happened, here is how to fix it from the teacher account.

Go to the Class Details page in Assessment Center and find the student in your list of students. You may need to click on one of the numbers at the bottom of the partial list until you come to that student. Click on the student's name. You are now at that student's account page. All you will need to do is to scroll to the bottom of the page, and there click on save. The student's name will then be sent to Skills Tutor, and when you refresh the Enrollment page, your missing student should show up for you.

Why won't my Skills Tutor lessons load?

A recent email asked why the assignments given in Assessment Center loaded just fine but the lessons in Skills Tutor wouldn't load at all. 

The short answer is probably that something on the school's end is preventing the lessons from loading---probably. While Skills Tutor is not immune from something going wrong at their end, we know of no outages this school year. So what did cause this problem. 

One possibility is that the computers that your students were using did not have the latest version of Adobe's Flash Player installed. If your students can't get Language Arts lessons to load, but can get other subject area lessons to load, this is most certainly the problem. Language Arts lessons are among our newest lessons, and they require Flash Player 9 or later.

If the lessons from all subject areas fail to load, you may have a pop-up blocker stopping the lessons from loading. Skills Tutor lessons contain pop-ups in them, so obviously, having an effective pop-up blocker installed could prevent the lessons from loading.

If you discover that neither of these situations is causing the problem, then it is probably time to call Skills Tutor Tech Support. There are so many situations that can arise in individual school situations, that it  is difficult for your project leader to diagnose all problems. The Skills Tutor Tech Support number is: 888-764-2446.

If you continue to have difficulties, please don't hesitate to contact your project leader to seek help. 

Assigning an Administrator Created Test

If you are an administrator who has created an assessment, or if you are a teacher who is going to assign an administrator created test, there are a few steps that you must follow before you can assign the test to students.

As an administrator, you need to make a decision about how you want to assign the assessment to students. You have several choices; you can make an assessment searchable, recommend an assessment to teachers to assign, assign an assessment directly to students to take online or offline, or you can change the test's status to unassigned/unavailable.

To do this, you must first create the assessment as an administrator, and when assigning it, choose one of the Assignment Details from the top of the assignment page. If you choose make searchable, teachers can search for your assessment, if you recommend it to educators, it will automatically appear in a teachers list of assessments and can be assigned. If you select the option to assign to students, the assignment will be assigned to all students in the grade level appropriate classes that are set to align with the chosen subject, for instance, any class aligned to Math7 will be assigned a 7th grade math assessment.



Once you have made your choice, proceed to the bottom of the page and click on Next, and at the top of the next page, click Assign. The Administrator's part of this process is now complete.

From the teacher's point of view, the process could take one of several paths. If the administrator has made the assessment searchable, you can choose a general search term such as Math and the desired grade level, or if you know the title, you can search for it directly. Once the assessment is found, you can click on the box in front of it and then click the Assign button at the top of the page.

If the administrator has recommended the assessment, it will appear in your list of assessments on the Assessment page for the selected class. Again, click in front of it and then click Assign.

If your administrator has assigned the assessment to your students, you have nothing to do other than instruct your students to take it.

If you have any questions about this process, contact your project leader.

Advanced Assignment Options in Skills Tutor

Skills Tutor's Advanced Assignment Options include an option called Students can choose the order they take activities. We have discovered that this option does just a bit more than allow students to choose the order of the assignment or not allow them to choose the order. In practice, when the option is UNCHECKED students have only the number of times specified to take the before they are sent on to the next assignment. Once they have done this lesson the number of times specified, they cannot take the lesson again until they have completed EVERY lesson in the assignment. Once they are done with all of the lessons in the assignment, then the student is free to go back and repeat any lesson in the assignment.

One of the implications of this setting is that if  the assignment is very long, the student will not have the option of using any of the lessons for review for a long time. If the assignment is fairly short, then they will be able to go through the assignment and then, once they have done all of the components of that assignment, they can repeat any of the lessons in that assignment.

Please let us know if this is your experience with this option. We were a little surprised.

Searching Advice: Use the Search Button

Here's a little bit of information that can make a great deal of difference when you are doing a search in Assesment Center. After entering your search criteria in the search window, click on the "Search" button. If you click on "Enter" or "Return" on your keyboard, the page will refresh and it will not return any information. The Search button does the job.

Reading Comprehension and Skills Tutor

This year, Skills Tutor allows a pretest to be administered without it being prescriptive. This means that you can give a pretest and then look at the results and differentiate your assignments based upon the student's scores. 

The example above shows the Give Assignment page. The Reading Comprehension pretest at grade level was administered to each student in the class. The teacher unchecked the box which states: Pretests can assign activities based on the student's score, meaning the pretest WILL NOT assign further lessons.  Using the Gradebook report, the teacher made a decision to assign reading skills lessons to students at a reading level that was appropriate to each student. Some were assigned lessons that were below grade level; most of the students were assigned the lesson at grade level, and a few of the students were assigned lessons that were above grade level. 

The lesson illustrated is for Reading Comprehension, but this could be done in many of the categories. In Language Arts, Math, and Reading Vocabulary there are similar lessons available for students who are at different levels of progress on the subject. It's easy to give the pretest, make several assignments on similar skills at different levels, and assign the appropriate lessons.  Assess/Analyze/Act.  Skills Iowa helps make this a manageable practice.

Once a student starts to show proficiency at a level, it is time to add the lesson at the next higher level so the student can advance. 

Skills Tutor Guides and Worksheets

Skills Tutor offers an extensive teachers guide for each division offered. For instance, you can get a complete teacher guide for Reading Comprehension C, Math A, or any other division.

These guides are accessed on the opening page of Skills Tutor, and are listed as View Guides and Worksheets. 

There are a number of useful tools in the guides, including worksheets that accompany many of the lessons that are offered in Skills Tutor. One of the features of these worksheets is the inclusion of writing and art prompts. Using these can extend the lesson and can add to the rigor of the assignment.

Your school probably received several large spiral bound books containing all of these worksheets, but if you or your principal don't know the location of these books, the entire contents is always available online. 

The Guides and Worksheets document will be a downloaded PDF document. If you have difficulty viewing it, you may need to ask your technology director how your school's computers deal with PDFs. You may need to override your popup blocker to view this document.

Need help? Contact your project leader.

Using the "Enforce Date Range" setting

In Assessment Center, one can utilize the "Enforce Time Range" for several uses. This option is found on the Assignment page, and is listed as one of the Additional Settings.

If you want to set a time range during which an assessment is available, just click on the box in front of the words "Enforce Date Range" and then click on the "Select" box after the Start Date and End Date labels.  A calendar will come up under each box in which you can click on the desired start and end dates. Another way you can select these dates is to just type in the month/day/year, i.e. 12/05/08. By making this choice, you have made the assessment available for just the dates you are indicating. The default when making this selection is a two week time period, but you can make any choice you choose.  This choice is useful if you are making a pretest that you want to use to determine if instruction has been effective once you give a post test. You don't want the test to linger too long or the results will be tainted by the instruction that are underway.

Another use of the "Enforce Date Range" is to make a series of assessments that you will have come up at regular intervals over a period of time. This is very useful if you are giving reading comprehension assessments to determine a student's current and cumulative reading skill achievement. To use the choice in this way, click on the Start Date box for the first assessment. Enter the start date in the Start Date box, and then enter a date in the End Date box that is one year from your start date, i.e. Start Date: 10/01/08 and End Date: 10/01/09. Setting the date in this way will mean that the assessment will be available all of the current school year. It is not desirable that these tests would expire. Since assigned assessments are listed in your list of assessments by their due date rather than by their start date, you will know when each assessment starts by knowing that its due date is one year later than its start date. The advantage of using this method is that you can create a large number of assessments at a time when you have time available to use later at a time when you might not have time available. 

As always, if you would like assistance with this or any other questions about Skills Iowa, please contact your project leader.

New Students and Assignments

By this time in the year, it is likely that you have had a new student enter your class. Assuming that the person in charge of creating new accounts has created an account for the new student, you will still need to do a few things.

First, sign in to Assessment Center and select the class in which you want to enroll the student. Next, click on the "Class Details" link on the left side of the page. One of the topics that pops up under this link is "Add/Remove Students". Click on this link and enroll the student you are missing by clicking on the name in the left column and then clicking "Save". The new student is now enrolled in your Assessment Center class, and will be available on all of your new assignments, but he/she has not been assigned existing assignments. If you want to assign an existing assignment to this student, click on Assessments in the links on the left. Once the page refreshes, put a check mark in front of the assessment you want to assign, and click on the assign button above the list of assessments. You will want to try this for all of the existing assessments, BUT it will not work. You must assign the assessments one at a time. Once you have done this, you must add the student to the assessment, and then click next and then save on the resulting page.

This student is now enrolled in Assessment Center and in 2009, the class as well as the enrollment has also been created in Skills Tutor. Click on the Skills Tutor link on the left side of the page. Once you are in Skills Tutor click "Classes" and select the class you want to use and click on class properties. You will want to go to the "Give Assignments" page where you can select the assignments you want to give to the new student by clicking on them and clicking on "Done".

As always, if you have problems using either of our programs, contact your project leader.

Which browser should you use for Skills Iowa?

The simple answer is the one that works for you.

In our experience, Safari on a Mac and Explorer on a Windows machine are your best choices. However, in a few isolated instances, we have encountered problems using Safari. Something on an individual network may prevent Safari from working as it should. In these cases, we have tried Firefox; however, in some instances, Firefox can display operations symbols incorrectly in math. SO, the solution in at least one case was to use Camino, a less known browser. It is a free download, and if all else fails, give it a try.

IF you are using Firefox and are encountering a problem getting more than four reading passages in any given category, the problem is somewhere in the way Firefox interacts with Assessment Center. The solution? Safari or Camino on a Macintosh or Explorer on Windows.

The way a particular network can be configured is difficult to decipher, but give your project leader a call if things don't work. He or she may not know how to solve your exact problem, but they will know where to direct you to find help.

Looking for something?

In the upper left corner of this blog page, there is a search window. Type in one or two key words of what you are looking for; click search, and all of the articles that contain your search word or words will show up on your screen.

For instance, you might search for "Skills Tutor" or "Assessment Center". Another more specific example would be "Reports". Of course, the more specific you get, the less you will have to scroll through, but you might just find something that you didn't know you could use.

Try the search feature.

Skills Tutor Changes

There are only a few changes in Skills Tutor this year, but one change can mean some real opportunities for teachers.

The change comes in the Add Assignment command. This year there are three new choices to make in a Skills Tutor assignment.

Change #1: The teacher can now choose to force a student to follow the order of the assignment lessons. This means that students cannot jump ahead to another lesson in the list until they have met the proficiency settings on this lesson. Teachers can choose to control this, or leave it checked so the program will behave as it has in the past.

Change #2: Teachers can choose to have a pretest assign lessons based on student performance or choose not to have the pretest assign lessons. This is a big change for Reading Comprehension and Reading Vocabulary where the pretests used to result in the assignment of all lessons that followed. Many teachers are now creating an assignment that just contains the pretest in Reading Comprehension. With this information, they can make choices about how to differentiate future lessons.

Change #3: Teachers can choose how many times the program will recommend an activity. The number of recommendations can be set between one to five times. Three is the default number.

We feel that these changes have created a great deal of flexibility for teachers. If you haven't noticed the new features, take a look the next time you make an assignment.

Looking for a cool grammar resource?

Check out Grammar Girl on iTunes U. It's free, and it's something your kids will enjoy. You will find a variety of grammar topics handled in brief podcasts. You can choose to play these directly from iTunes store, or you can download them and play them later using itunes or an iPod. Grammar Girl also has a website where you can access these podcasts if you don't have access to iTunes.

Check it out.

Click here for the iTunes page.

Go to http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/ to find the website.

Enjoy. I think your kids will too.

Need some review?

If you have been through a Skills Iowa training, and now need a bit of review, there are a few places you can go.

The Quick Reference Guides that we distribute at our training sessions are great, brief guides to using both Assessment Center and Skills Tutor. If you have misplaced yours, these documents are available for download on our website. Just go to http://www.skillsiowa.org and click on the Documents button on the left side.

If you are the sort of person who wants much more than a brief guide, both programs offer extensive manuals for download. Again, we have linked to these manuals on our web page. Just click the Links button on our website. There, you will find links to user guides for Assessment Center and Skills Tutor. Or, you can click here for the Assessment Center User Guide and click here for the Skills Tutor User Guide.

And of course, one of the most effective resources is the other teachers in your building. Hopefully, you chose another teacher in your building as your Skills Iowa Buddy. Working as a team, you and your buddy can remember much more about the program together than you can alone.

If your problem isn't remembering how to use the programs, but rather something technical with your computer lab or network, it's probably time to talk to your building's tech person. Or, you may need to call the support number for Assessment Center or Skills Tutor.

You can reach the Assessment Center at: 1-888-778-7737 and you can email them at: k12support@review.com

You can reach Skills Tutor at: 1-888-764-2446 or email them at skillstutor_support@hmco.com

Of course, your project leader is always ready to help. Feel free to email or phone your school's project leader for help. You can find your project leader's contact information by clicking here.

We hope you use and enjoy the programs that are used in Skills Iowa.

Why won't my username and password work?

This time of year, one of the biggest questions that we are asked as project leaders is, "Why won't my username and password get me in to Assessment Center and Skills Tutor?"

The answer usually is that you have a new password for the year. Teacher records are  typically deleted from one year to the next, and you get a new password and username each year.  If you have not met with your project leader this year, you may not know your new username/password combo. So, what do you do? Your building principal can log in to discover your username and password, or you can contact your project leader, who can help you out. If your school has not yet submitted the data files for this school year, you may need to wait until that step is complete.

We want you to get started using Skills Iowa as soon as you can, and you do not need to wait for your project leader's first visit to get started.

Check the sidebar for articles of interest

This is the second year for the Skills Iowa Blog. There have been a number of articles written in the past that might answer questions that you have in the present.  On the left side of this page is a month by month archive of articles. Click the triangle by the month to view the article titles for that month. You can also use the search feature to see if anything has been written about a question you have.

Here's an example of an article written last year that explains how to use this blog: click here.

A word about teachers and teaching...

My sister is a retired teacher. In an email, she wrote this about teaching and teachers. I thought it was worth sharing.

"Today is one of those gorgeous days just hinting at fall—hard to explain, isn't it?  Suddenly, mornings are crisp, the leaves are tired, and things are sobering—perhaps it's the return to school. Remember? We used to think September—now things are well underway in August. We have a lot to answer for as teachers. On the other hand, I worked terribly hard, and most days shot my best shot. I'm proud of my fellow teachers. One would be hard pressed to find a group of more decent people. It's not especially "cool" to be a teacher—disgustingly middle class, decidedly altruistic for the most part. Teaching is not a job one can "fake" for any length of time."

My sister was a great art teacher and remains a great artist. She was also an English major, and taught English on occasion. 

I have met many teachers while working with Skills Iowa. It's a great bunch of people.

Jim Lippold

Skills Iowa Project Leader

The Student Page

The Assessment Center student page is similar to the teacher page in some ways. It has the navigation links on the left side,  including the Skills Tutor link. 

The assessment assignments are in the middle of the page, however  only the most urgently pending assingments are shown here. Students can click on the start or continue buttons or they can click on the name of the assessment.

To see a complete list of assessments for an individual class, students should click on the class name in the blue section of the page. To see a complete list of assessments for all classes, students can click on the "See comple list of pending assignments" link below the assessment list.

Once students have completed an assessment, a completed assessments window will appear beneath the Pending Assignments window. They  can click on "Report" and see detailed results for their assessment.

Missing Students

It happens to most teachers; a student who was not on your original class list shows up in your room. When you get started with Skills Iowa, this student may not have an account. The temptation is to create a new account for this student yourself so you can continue, and so can the student. This could create problems for several reasons. Your account may not be the only new account that has been created for this student, and if a student has multiple accounts, which one are we going to use? If both are in use, the student can easily get confused and not do the work you assign.

We ask that one person in the school be the person identified as the person who will create all new student accounts. This usually happens in the principal's office, but it could be another person who has been designated by the building principal. The best choice is to ask in the office if the new student's account could be created. It's an extra step, but it will save confusion later in the year.

Welcome back!

We've missed you! We hope you make the Skills Iowa Blog a favorite stop in your day. We will do our best to make the time worthwhile. We offer tips, suggestions, solutions to problems and a bit of fun.

Today's suggestion: At your initial training, check the accuracy of the student names in your classes. If you start with an incorrect student identity, your only choice will be to retain that i.d. or to abandon the work already done on the incorrect account. Talk with your project leader or trainer at your training to make the correction.

We hope to help you make a difference in student achievement. We firmly believe that the use of formative assessment and the follow up analysis and action will lead to higher achievement for your students. Assess, Analyze, Act!

All of us who work with Skills Iowa are excited to be your partners in what is the most important endeavor our country has—educating our children. The future of democracy and our country depends on it.

We're still here..

but we are aware that most of you are off for the summer. The postings on the Skills Iowa blog will start again in earnest in August. If you have questions in the meantime, please contact your project leader for help.

Time to share...

What will you be doing for fun this summer? What have you done in the past that you think others would enjoy? Share it with others and we'll let you know if it works out for us.

Have a good summer, and if a spare moment arrives, think about how you will use Skills Iowa next year.

Memorial Day Memory

I was thinking about a friend of mine who I haven't thought of in years this morning. We were great pals when we were just little guys. I'd go to his home and play, and he'd come to mine. He was the only one of my friends whose parents my mom had to call and tell them to come and pick him up. He was fearless. We climbed to the top of the corn crib inside the alleyway. We went to the top of everything that seven year olds could get to. I was brave on those occasions, but he was fearless.

As time progressed, we went different directions. I went to college, and he went into the Marines. Years ago, when visiting Washington D.C., I found his name on the Vietnam Memorial. I looked his name up in the directory, and found that we were there one day before the anniversary of his death. I also discovered that my wife and he shared the same birthday; he would have been one year older. Some time after that, I was at the cemetery in my home town for Memorial Day. I found a clipping in the gathering building there that told of his death. Strangely, whoever had cut out the clipping had left a notice in about a play that I was going to perform in at college. Such different paths, and yet we seemed to be linked in so many ways.

Here is a portion of what was written about him in his Bronze Star Citation, "...while conducting a patrol near the Khe Sahn Combat Base, the Marines came under intense mortar and automatic weapons fire from a numerically superior, well-entrenched North Vietnamese Army force and sustained numerous casualties. Ordered to attack, Private First Class Anderson and several companions boldly advanced, routing the enemy soldiers and seizing the emplacement. While consolidating to continue the assault, he alertly observed several wounded Marines lying in an area dangerously exposed to hostile fire. Reacting instantly, he unhesitatingly left his covered position to aid the injured men. Fearlessly maneuvering across fifteen meters of fire-swept terrain, he reached the side of a casualty and skillfully administered first aid. Ignoring the enemy rounds impacting near him, he continued to treat the injured man, and while assisting him from the hazardous area, private Anderson was mortally wounded. His heroic actions and sincere concern for the welfare of his comrades inspired all who observed him....He gallantly gave his life in the service of his country."

It surprised me that after forty years his memory is still so vivid. I'm sorry he died so young.

If you would like to find someone from your community who gave their life in the service of their country while serving in Vietnam, go to: http://thewall-usa.com/index.asp#search and search by home of record and state.

Jim

Before you leave for the summer...

All of us at Skills Iowa thank you for what you do for the students in your classes, school and communities. We are incredibly proud to be a part of what you do to increase student achievement. The recent changes in education have not come without some difficulty and some pain, but you have embraced change and have done what you could to insure that all students have high and equitable achievement. Thank you.

Over the summer if you have questions about how you might utilize the programs comprising Skills Iowa, please feel free to contact your project leader. We are available all summer, and will be happy to answer any questions you might have or to offer suggestions on the use of our programs. If one of us can't answer your question, we will be happy to share the question with the rest of our Skills Iowa team until we can find the solution.

Enjoy your summer. Take some time to do something that you've been wanting to do. Breathe deeply and relax. And then, when you are ready to start thinking about 08-09, we'll be there to help if you need us.

Thanks so much for everything you do for kids.

Skills Iowa in the Summer

Your students don't have to stop using Skills Iowa just because school ends for the summer. If you set up assignments in Skills Tutor for your students, they can work with them at home until July 31st. There are many ways to set these assignments up, and you are the one who knows best what needs your students have. If you are assigning a section which the students have not yet done, you could just assign the pretest and Skills Tutor will take care of the rest. If you are assigning in an area that students have already taken the pretest, you may want to assign all of the activities to ensure that the student has access to every skill. Any lessons that have already been done can be done again and again.

You might want to look at the reports and determine which students could go from the level they've been working in to the next level up in difficulty or which students need to work in a lower difficulty lesson to find success. You could also assign each of the A, B, and C levels and let the students determine where they need to work.

Students will spend their time doing something this summer, and not every day lends itself to playing outside or doing chores. If they have at least one alternative to video games, they might just keep learning. A letter home to parents with the instructions on how to access the programs, what the username and password for their student is might just insure that your kids will keep learning during the summer.

Have you found solutions to problems?

More often than not, the Skills Iowa programs work with no problems at all, however, once in a while problems do arise. Frequently, emails or calls to the project leaders can lead to a quick resolution. Sometimes, calls to the company's support numbers are needed, but lots of times the problems get solved at the local level by teachers or by the tech coordinator for the school or building. A big problem maker is pop up blockers and firewalls that have to be administered by your tech person.

Today we'd like to know what problems you've found, and what solutions you have found for those problems. It might be as simple as switching to a different browser or reloading a web page. Share your solution so others might have a starting point for their problems. If you have any questions about how to use comments, drop an email to jlippold@ia-sb.org.

Gardening

I'm a gardener, and as such, I start each day with a walk around the yard to see what's in bloom. It's the most beautiful time of the day. The light is gentle; the air is cool and crisp; and it's as quiet as the day will be. It's a good time to contemplate. I think about what needs to be done and make short term and long term plans, and when I see something that needs to be changed, I start to think about what I can do differently.

Sometimes, a plant has to be moved. Even though I have planted it where I was sure it would thrive, over and over again I find a plant struggling right next to a plant that loves the spot in which it is planted. So, I look around for a different plan. Is the soil different where this plant is growing? Is there too much shade? Not enough? Is the plant getting enough water or too much? There are lots of questions to ask, and if I do the diagnosis correctly and find the solution, the plant can be saved and can thrive once again. I have a little yellow hosta whose identity has been lost. Two years ago I moved it to a place where it would get more sun. It started recovering, and now it is a nice little clump of yellow leaves. I have another hosta that just isn't responding, and I'll have to start looking for the solution if I'm to save it. I noticed this year that I have a blank spot in one garden where a plant that was struggling has just not come back.

I wonder if education isn't a bit like gardening. We have to discover which students are thriving, and which are struggling. Sometimes, we can make easy course corrections for them with an explanation, and sometimes we just have to keep looking for the solution. Sometimes, it is difficult to notice that a student isn't thriving until we have tested the last time and are ready to move on. What happens to the student then?

Formative assessment helps us find those students and shows us just where they aren't thriving. With this knowledge, we can reteach those topics. We can provide further explanation, additional practice and further evaluation. The good news is that in doing this practice we don't only move this student forward; we move ALL students forward. Just like the garden, even those students who are doing fine can do better. It is a daunting responsibility, and a challenging practice, but Assessment Center can help in making these assessments. It takes little more than a few minutes to create an assessment that will give us great information in the reports that will let us know who is thriving, and who needs a different approach. With a little good fortune, we can find the way to help the struggling student reach the kind of success that my little yellow hosta is having. When we do, life improves.

If you would like to read more about formative assessment, Inside the Black Box, by Black and Wiliam is one of the definitive articles about the subject. You can find it here. If you need assistance with Assessment Center, contact your project leader.

Jim

Skills Tutor's Friendly Reminder

If you have logged in to Skills Tutor recently, you may have gotten a Friendly Reminder that your account is about to expire and that you should call the company to make arrangements to keep your school's account active. Don't worry; your account is not about to expire. Skills Tutor is used by schools all over the country who are not Skills Iowa schools. These schools pay subscription fees, and they do need to renew their accounts. All Skills Iowa schools will have their accounts renewed for next year without contacting the company. We're on the job for you! :-)

It's Friday!

It's one of the last few Fridays of the year, and it brings to mind evaluation of the week, the quarter and the year. How are you evaluating the student progress of this school year. We have the ITBS and ITED tests, and probably at least one other standardized test, and these are wonderful tools. Another wonderful tool that Skills Iowa schools have at their disposal is the Posttests that are included in Skills Tutor. If you have not assigned a posttest to your students, you might want to take the opportunity before the year is over. Using the posttest will do at least two things. First, it will show you and your students where the strengths and weaknesses lie right now, and second, it will serve as a review for any end of the year exit testing you will be giving.

Remember, that Skills Tutor subject areas are divided up by difficulty levels LL, A, B and C. LL is found only in Reading Comprehension, and stands for Lower Level third grade. Level A is roughly equivalent with third and fourth grade; Level B is designed for fifth and sixth grade, and Level C is at a seventh and eighth grade level. Lessons without a letter designation are designed for high school achieving students. Remember, these levels are arbitrary, and are not intended to be used only at the designated grade level; each of you has students who perform at, above or below grade level.

The posttests can be taken over and over, so they can be retaken now, even if the students have already them before. Both sets of results will be saved in the Student Detail report.

If you need assistance with making assignments in Skills Tutor, contact your project leader.

What would you do differently?

With the year so close to an end, you might want to take a moment and think about what you might have done differently in your use of Skills Iowa.

One of the biggest decisions teachers have to make at the beginning of the year is how to organize their students. Do you want to group all of your students together in one class, or do you want to keep each class separate? Each has its own benefits, but you are in the drivers seat on this call. If you are frequently putting scores from Skills Iowa programs into your grade book, you might want to keep the classes separate. If you are using the scores to determine how the larger group is performing in comparison to each other, then possibly having all students together in one class is your choice. Either way, the decision will have to be made at the beginning of the school year, and changing that decision later requires quite a bit of work.

A big decision in Skills Tutor is whether or not to use the prescriptive pretests that are offered in most subject areas. These pretests are great, but using them changes the progress of the class. If you want students doing a lesson together, then using the pretests might not allow this. On the other hand, if you are using the Skills Tutor lessons to review skills that students have been previously taught or that will not be taught again this school year, the pretests might be perfect for you.

There are lots of decisions to be made everyday in education, even using Skills Iowa is a big decision. If you would like to share how you use Skills Iowa, share your stories or suggestions with others in the comments.

Preparing for next year

All assessments created in your teacher account in Assessment Center, and all assignments created in Skills Tutor will be deleted after July 31st. If you feel that you will need to save a record of what you have done this year to aid you in what you might do next year, it might be a good idea to print off a few pages from each program.

In Assessment Center, the easiest way to keep track of what you have assessed is to print a copy of your assessment.  To do this, just choose the assessment from the list of assessments, and then click the print button above the test information. You will receive an email letting you know that your test has been prepared and a copy of the test will be attached to the email, or, if you revisit that test again in a few minutes, you might see a printer icon next to the print button, and in that case, you can print the test from that page. This test can be filed away for future reference.  Another idea that can be helpful in the future is to print off the page which shows how many questions for each skill you are choosing. Since you will have to recreate the assessment next year, this page might be more useful than the assessment itself.

In Skills Tutor, choose reports and then choose the Assignment Library report. This report will give you a reminder next year of what you did this year by showing each assignment you used.

If you have a suggestion of how you keep track of your Skills Iowa use, share it with others by writing a comment.

Skills Tutor and Problem Solving

Skills Tutor has pretests, skill lessons, quizzes, and posttests, but it also has a good offering of problem solving lessons. Each of these lessons utilizes the four step problem solving process. In each lesson the student goes through a review of the process and then gets the opportunity to practice and use the problem solving skills.

There are problem solving lessons in math of course, but there are also problem solving lessons in Writing.

If you want to assign a problem solving lesson, log in to Assessment Center, and then click Skills Tutor on the left hand side of the page. Once you have been redirected to Skills Tutor, select the Classes link. Next, select the class you want to use in the white window of the page, and then click on Class Properties. On the resulting page, click on Add Assignment. On this page, you will find a Search window on the left side of the page. Enter Problem Solving in this box and click Search. Every subject area containing a Problem Solving lesson will now appear in bold type; drill down in these subject areas until you find the Problem Solving lessons. Keep in mind that Problem Solving is also a frequently used phrase in education. You will find some areas where there are problems to be solved, but which are not Problem Solving lessons. The lessons you want to find are the ones that begin with Problem Solving: and are followed by a problem to be solved, such as Matching People to Pets.

Take a look at the lessons, and consider using them with students of all grade levels.

Need more help? Contact your project leader.

Assessment Center: Overall Student Performance Report

Some of our member schools are going to be starting summer school very soon. If you have been giving regular assessments in Assessment Center, you can easily discover which tested skills the student in question needs to revisit in order to reach mastery.

Just log in to Assessment Center, click on the class in question and then click on reports. Next, click on Overall Student Performance. On the resulting page, select the individual student you are looking for and then select the desired subject area and click Show Report.

You will receive a report showing the student's percentages in the tested skills. This report can be a great help when planning a course of study for the summer.  

One of the tools you can use to address the low percentages is Skills Tutor. You can create an individualized set of practice lessons for each student. It's a great help to have each student have an available activity while you are working with other students. The students can also do the Skills Tutor lessons over and over.

Don't forget that you can create new assessments in a few minutes that will help you monitor the progress during any period of study. There is no need to keep teaching a concept that a student has mastered.

Do you have good tips on how you use Skills Iowa in your summer school?  Let us know!  Join us in the comments.

“Ending on a Positive Note”

So much to do… so little time. When I was a teacher, I was sure thinking that about now. Where on earth did the school year go? Trying to complete the organizational mess of finishing up the year is hard enough let alone the emotional prep necessary to move those kids out the door and on to other things. Hope your year end is going smoothly.

I found this article called “Ending on a Positive Note” by Mary Ellen Bafumo you might enjoy.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3666/is_200605/ai_n17184868

How do you get through the end of the year and still manage to sit up and take nourishment? Share your tips. Thanks!

Susie

Assessment Center: Tech Check

If you have some computers in your school that work just fine with Assessment Center, and some which may cause problems, it may be time to do a tech check on the troublesome computers. The Princeton Review has a tech check which can help. You can find it at asc.princetonreview.com.

Below the login windows, you will see this link: Is Your Computer Assessment Center-friendly? If you click on this link, The Princeton Review will do a review of your computer system and let you know where the problems might lie. If you need more detailed information about what the minimum requirements for Assessment Center are, there is also a Tech Check button where you can download a PDF which gives detailed information about how your computer should be configured.

Still need more help? Of course, you can always contact your project leader, or you can call The Princeton Review's support number: 1-888-778-7737

Have you visited the Skills Iowa Web Page?

The Skills Iowa Blog is only one of Skills Iowa's online resources.  We hope you visit our web page as well.  Here you will find links to help you use Assessment Center and Skills Tutor.

We have posted links to other resources, lists of our schools and project leaders, documents that will help you use our programs, and timely reminders about our programs.

If you haven't bookmarked our web site, take this opportunity to go to: www.skillsiowa.org

Let us know what you would like to see on our web site as well as here on the Skills Iowa blog.

Assessment Center Teacher Tip: Overall Class Performance by Standard Report

The Overall Class Performance by Standard report is a useful tool to see how well a class has mastered a skill that has been administered over several assessments. This report will show what percentage of the class has fallen into each of the four performance levels. By clicking on any of the percentages in the bars that represent each skill, you will be sent to a page with the names of the students who fall into each performance category and you will also get their percentages for that skill.

To use the report, log in to Assessment Center and click on the name of the class you want to work with. Next, click on Reports, and when the page refreshes, click on Overall Class Performance by Standard. On the next page, select the subject you have assessed (remembering that ELA is reading) and the type of assessment that has been given. If you are a teacher and have created the assessment, you want to choose teacher created, TPR means The Princeton Review. Then, click Show Report. Your report will will show on the next page. Click on any skill, and you will be shown the list of students who have fallen into each of the four performance categories. To print this report, it is best to use the window just above the report that says, "Select a Format". You will probably want to select Acrobat (PDF) file. As always, your computer will deal with an Acrobat file the way it deals with all PDF files; it will either save it to a specified place (usually your desktop), it will open it, or it will open it from within your browser. You will need to print the report from within whatever program your computer is set up to use for PDF files. If you need help with this report, or any report, just contact your project leader.

This information will allow the teacher to determine which students have mastered the skill, and which still need more work on it. It's a fast easy report to use for a quick look at the performance of the class.

Skills Tutor Tip: Using the Student Detail Report

Skills Tutor has many great reports, but if you are looking for the most comprehensive information about an individual student, you want the Student Detail Report.

To get started, click on the Reports link in the left menu, and on the next screen, you will see Student Detail listed among the classroom reports. First, indicate the class for which you want information in the small window in the center of the page. Next, click on Student Detail. What will result is a list of the students in that class; either you can click Select All from the menu on the left or you can select the individual student or students for whom you need information, and then, click Continue on the left. The next screen is a list of all subject areas in Skills Tutor. You can either Select All to insure that you have all areas in which a student has worked, or you can select the subject areas that you are interested in. Next, click Continue and on the screen that results select the time period for which you are interested. After selecting the time period, click Continue and the report will start to download.

Depending on how your computer is configured to work with PDF files, the report will either open, download to your desktop, or be displayed from within your browser. If you have trouble with this, ask your school's technology person for some help, or contact your project leader.

This report will show every student's complete Skills Tutor work history for the selected time period and subjects selected. It will not only show the score for an activity; it will also show how many times a student has done the activity, how many minutes the student spent on the activity, the percentage, and the time of day the student did the work. Having all of this information helps you get a complete picture of how a student is using Skills Tutor.

Remember, each lesson in Skills Tutor is limited to a single skill, so the percentage a student has scored on an activity is the student's performance percentage for that skill.

Still need more help? Contact your project leader.

Using the Skills Iowa Blog

Here are a few tips on using the Skills Iowa blog.

Tip number one: Searching the Blog-You might not have noticed that there is a search window in the upper left corner of this page. If you are looking for something in particular, you can just type a key word into this window and hit search. If you want to find some help using Assessment Center, you might just type in Assessment Center and all of the articles containing the words Assessment Center will be shown. The down side of this is that we mention Assessment Center in lots of articles. If you get more specific, such as Gradebook, you will be shown only those entries which contain the word Gradebook.

Tip number two: Using Labels-Some of the entries have a label following them. You will find it just below the article on the right margin. If you click this label, you will be shown all of the entries which also have this label. So, if you want to read all of the Assessment Center Tips, clicking on the label Assessment Center will display all of these entries.

Tip number three: Comments-We would love to hear from you, and if you use the comments, we will. If you click on the Comments link below the entry, you will be taken to a page where you can leave your comment. You will need to create a Google/Blogger account to post, but this only takes a minute or two to complete. Your comment will not be visible immediately, but it will show up soon.

The point of this blog is to create an online presence to help you help students to reach their potential. We invite you to be an active participant in this endeavor.

Summer School

Skills Iowa and summer school make very good companions. Assessment Center is a great tool to find the gaps in student understanding. It only takes a few minutes to make an assessment in Assessment Center that will help determine the gaps in student understanding. With this knowledge, the teacher can address these gaps using a variety of teaching strategies including Skills Tutor. It is very simple to set up an individualized set of Skills Tutor lessons for each student.

Skills Iowa will be available for use by your school until July 31st. If you would like assistance setting up your summer school program, your project leader can help.

Skills Tutor Tip: Finding and Using the Gradebook Report

Skills Tutor breaks down its reports into two main groups: Assignment Reports and Class Reports. After clicking on the Reports link on the left side of a Skills Tutor page, you will see all of the Class reports, but you will have to click on Assignment reports to find the Gradebook report.

After clicking on an assignment on the right and then clicking Gradebook, you will get a report that matches our expectations of what we might find in any gradebook. One feature that is unique however, is that Skills Tutor will display a "-" rather than a score for a student who has been assigned a prescriptive pretest and has tested out of a particular skill.

There are two things to remember. First, this is a report for only one assignment, not for everything that a student has done in Skills Tutor. The second point to remember is that this report is a bit slow to download, especially if your class is large and your assignment is comprehensive. There is a lot of data in this report!

The Gradebook report displays the student's last, best score. If you need to see all of the information on a given student, take a look at the Student Detail report.

If you have comments on how you are using the gradebook, please take a moment to give your feedback in the comments. If you need more assistance in using this report, please contact your project leader.

Assessment Center Teacher Tip: Assessment Results Report

Assessment Center offers six reports to the teacher. The first of these reports is called Assessment Results. This is a great report to get a quick overview of the performance of the entire class on one particular assessment. Let's take a look at three of the main features of this report.

First, the class gets broken down into four performance groups: Below Standards, Approaching Standards, Meets Standards, and Exceeds Standards. In each of these divisions, the teacher gets an alphabetical listing of each of the students who fall into those categories. Each of these students has, following his or her name, the percentage which he or she received on this assessment. Clicking on this percentage will take the teacher to that student's assessment. There, the teacher can not only see how the student answered each question on the assessment, but can also see a breakdown of how the student performed on each skill on the assessment. This can be very helpful in answering the question of, "What part did the student not understand?". This report can also quickly point out which students need reteaching of the skill, which can use some practice, and which are ready for enrichment activities.

The next part of this report is a list of students who have not yet taken the assessment. Simple, but important information!

Finally, the teacher will find a series of bar graphs. The bar graphs are designed to show how a class performed on each of the skills found in the assessment. Obviously, this is more useful than the entire percentage since it points out where students are struggling, and where they are showing mastery of a skill. Each of the performance groups is represented on the bar by a percentage of the class who fell into this performance group. Again, there are two easy uses of the report. First, the teacher can quickly see what percentage of the class has met the standard, and how many need more work. Secondly, by clicking on the percentage representing each segment of the bar, the teacher can drill down and get a list of the students who fall into that performance group on that skill. The resulting report will look much like the first part of the Assessment Results report in that there will be four lists showing which students have fallen into each group, but the difference is that this information is representing just one skill, not the entire assessment.

If you have comments about how you use this report, please share it with others by clicking on the comments line below this post. If you have questions about how to use this report, contact your project leader.