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.