Monday, September 29, 2008

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.

Saturday, September 27, 2008

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.

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

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.


Sunday, September 21, 2008

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. 

Saturday, September 20, 2008

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.



Thursday, September 18, 2008

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.


Tuesday, September 16, 2008

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.

Sunday, September 14, 2008

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.

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.

Monday, September 8, 2008

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.

Saturday, September 6, 2008

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.

Wednesday, September 3, 2008

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.