Happy Holidays From All of us at Skills Iowa

Another year has passed, and your break has finally arrived. Take the time to enjoy and reflect on all of the positive things you've done this year for students. It may take many years to realize how many lives you will touch, and how many students will make life choices based on what you teach them and how you interact with them. Education is an amazing career with the opportunity to change the world.

We at Skills Iowa thank you for letting us be a part of what you do.

Enjoy your break, and if you can, make a Skills Tutor assignment for your students before you go!

Happy Holidays

ELA Benchmark Assessment Results

Each month, we send you the results of all of the ELA benchmark assessment results from participating schools. We do this to help you compare your school's performance on these assessments to other Skills Iowa schools.

The best way to make this comparison is to run an Assessment Results report from the teacher account to compare your class to school accounts or to run the same report from the administrator account to compare your school to other schools. Finding your school in the report may be difficult since your report was run at a different time than the report we send you. The results could show assessments that have been entered after we ran our report.

The data you see is limited to what percent of each grade at each participating school fell into each of the four performance levels. This information should allow you to see if other schools are making progress that you are not making or vice versa. All data is useful, including disappointing data. If your school is falling short, you need to know this as soon as possible, and that is one of the purposes of this report.

What this report will not show you is where your students are excelling and where they are falling short of goals. Your own Assessment Results will show this, and this data is very important.

If you need help using these reports, please contact your project leader.

Which assessments appear automatically?

As you know, Skills Iowa has created and assigned ELA (reading comprehension) and Math benchmark assessments for your classes. These assessments appear automatically at predetermined intervals. The ELA assessments appear on the first Monday of each month and end on the last Friday of each month. The Math assessments appear three times a year, and the next one will appear on January 4th. The level of the assessment you get for your class is determined by the choices you made when you created your class. Our request is that you give these assessments at the grade level that your student is in, not for the achievement level which you have determined to be correct for your student. This is the same procedure that your school uses for standardized testing. IF you are finding that you have assessments showing up for a different grade level each month, then it is likely that you entered multiple grade levels in your class creation process.

If you want to edit this to remove the incorrect grade designation, log in to Assessment Center and choose the class in question. Next, click on Class Details on the left side and then click on the Edit button at the top of the resulting page. Scroll down on this page to the course list and make sure that you have only ELA and Math designations for the correct grade level. If you have additional levels, you should remove them. The easiest way to make this correct is to click on the "Click Here" link just above the Course List designations. This will align your class to the grade level you have chosen earlier in the creation process. IF you have a multi-level class, you should not make this change.

Making this change will make unwanted assessments disappear from your assessment list.

Two good ideas

There is always a concern about how to use the data from the we gather when we use Assessment Center assessments. If you are giving Reading assessments (ELA) here are two good ideas.

A teacher in Pocahontas Area Elementary has her students take her assessments on paper to control the climate of the room and also to allow her to make the assessment more authentic. She has her students go to the passage and write the number of the question next to the part of the passage that contains the answer. In this way, she slows down the students, and encourages them to go back to the passage and take some time to make sure they understand the question and are confident that they have answered it correctly.

A second teacher in the same school has his students go over the printed assessments after they have taken the assessment. He has the students work in pairs to discuss each missed question and together they have to find the answer in the text. This works on student communication and helps students explain their thinking to another student.

Both of these techniques are great ways to have your students increase their understanding of the passages they read. Both of these ideas are simple to implement, and easy for students to understand.

Good job!

It was a tough week!

The week of the December 09 Blizzard was a tough week for school. I imagine that kids were getting a little bored by the end of Thursday. Hopefully, some of your kids took advantage of the assignments you made in Skills Tutor. It's a good way for them to keep fresh on the skills you are, or rather would have been covering in class this week. There is no reason that those with computers at home can't do work that will be engaging and will keep them on track during a snow day.

Now would be a good time to sit down and plan what you would like your kids to do over the upcoming break. You can do review assignments in Reading Comprehension, Math, and Language Arts. You could also do introductory lessons in the units that you are going to be starting after break. For those of you who are looking at semester tests when you get back from break or before break, this is a good time to create those and let the kids know they are there. Kids get tired of television after a day or two, and lots of families will be getting new computers for Christmas gifts. What a great opportunity.

Remember to take your username and password home with you. If you get a snow day, you can quickly go online and create a "Snow Day Assignment" for your kids to work on. Let them know that just because they aren't in your room that their education doesn't have to come to a halt for that day.

If you need any help with Skills Tutor, log in to www.skillsiowa.org and click on the Documents link. The Quick Reference guide for both programs is listed there for you to download.

Enjoy the season!

Creating a New Student Account

If you have gotten a new student in your class, someone has to create a new Skills Iowa account for that student. This is a situation that can be handled in your school in a number of ways. This is something that you can easily do, but something that you do not want another teacher to duplicate. To be safe, the first thing to do is to open the class the student will be enrolled in. Next, click on Class Details and from the menus under that, click Add/Remove Student. You will have two windows on the screen that appears. The one on the left will have students who are in your school at the designated grade level, but not in your class. The window on the right will have those students already enrolled in your class. To be safe, you need to look through the list of names in the window on the left to see if someone else has already created the new account. If the student is not there, no one has created the account at that grade level. It is possible that someone has created the account at the wrong grade level however, so to be sure of this, go to the menu above the windows that says Students in Grade ? and switch your choice to Students in the School. This should be everyone not in your class. If the student is not in this list, you can create the new account.

Above the windows is a link that says: Click here to create a new student account. Click on the click here link. Click on the Next link on the resulting page. On the next page, enter the student's first name, last name, grade, unique id (10 digit state id, or another unique id you create), and password (first initial and first five letters of last name or complete last name if it is shorter than five letters.) You can also click on the box in front of the name of your class to enroll this student in your class. Click on Next and on the next page, review the spellings of the student's name. If all is correct, click on Next and on the following page, you can copy the student's new usernamen and password before you click on Done.

The student is now in your class, but has not been given any of the Assessment Center assessments or the Skills Tutor assignments. To see how to give the student this work, click here.

Locating a Skill in Assessment Center

Sometimes it's not so easy to find the skill you want to assess in Assessment Center's Iowa Core Curriculum alignment, Essential Skills and Concepts. Of course, you can select and open all of the options and look through them, but there is another way you could proceed.

Skill Resources contains a search function that is intended to help you find an additional resource to address a skill with additional activities. This search can also help you find where in the assessment alignment this skill is located. For example, let's say you wanted to make an assessment for your 6th grade math class covering ratios. Click on Skill Resources. Select Math and 6th. In the search criteria, enter ratios and click on search. You will get a list of the topics which contain ratios. Look at the number/letter combination which precedes the skill; this is the designation for the skill you want to assess. For instance, in the example you can see that the topic falls under 6.N. When you create an assessment, look for the section labeled 6.N (Numbers and Operations) and open this section by clicking on the plus sign to the left of it. From the resulting list, put a check mark in front of 6.N.4, the next part of the code. Click Next to proceed. On the next page, click on the plus sign in front of 6.N.4 and then look for 6.N.4.e. Open this link and proceed by selecting the number of questions you want. Remember to open the very first section to remove the unwanted question that was selected by the program in the first section. Continue creating your assessment as you would normally.

This is a pretty quick way to see if the skill is covered in Assessment Center. Give it a try!

Pausing a Skills Tutor Lesson

Pausing an assessment in Assessment Center is easy; there's a pause test button at the bottom of the testing page. Pausing a lesson in Skills Tutor is less obvious, but just as easy. All of the Skills Tutor lessons except Algebra, Science 1 and 2, Information Skills and Workforce Readiness will pause automatically when a student closes them before finishing. If at least one question in the activity has been answered, the next time the student opens that lesson, an animation of a book flipping pages will appear and take the student to the point where he or she left off. Actually, the student has no other option for that lesson except to start it at that point.

Of course, all Skills Tutor lessons except the pretests can be taken as many times as a student chooses. If a student can't finish a lesson in the time available, he/she doesn't have to start it from the beginning.

If you have more questions about using Skills Tutor, contact your project leader.

How are you using the data?

How are you using the data from your Assessment Center assessments? We've had a lot of benchmark assessments and teacher created assessments given this fall, and we're excited about that. The question is what are you doing with the data?

If you haven't already gone to reports to see how your students have done, try to find the time to check that out. For math, it's mostly a matter of seeing how your students did on the benchmark tests on concepts that you expected them to know when they came to you or to know by the time they took the assessment. Probably the easiest way to see how your students performed on a single assessment such as the benchmark assessments is to look at the Assessment Results report. While the scores at the top of the report showing each student's performance on the assessment are interesting and can tell you something about how seriously a student took the test, they shouldn't be used as a real sample of how well that student is doing in your class. After all, there is typically only one question on the skill, and they may perform better on a larger sampling. The assessment is more useful to see how your entire class did, and this information is found in the last part of the report where you find the multicolored bars. The red portion of the bar shows low performance and the blue part reflects high performance. Clicking on the bar will give you the names of the students who struggled and succeeded with this skill. More importantly however, is the idea that this is a skill which should be taught to the entire class or one that can be done in targeted instruction that will help remediate a group in your class. In math you may want to look at the performance in a given skill and make a decision to give an assessment of your own with more questions over the same skill. Just take note of the number/letter code in front of the skill and then create a new assessment that covers that exact same skill.

In ELA (reading comprehension) you may want to design a lesson plan around the passage that was used in the assessment. Print the passage out and distribute the passage section to your class. If your students struggled on inference, for instance, you could ask them an inferential question that they can answer in small groups. Have them find evidence in the passage that will support their answer. Have them discuss their ideas in small groups, and then have them write a short paragraph that answers the question. If they struggled on main idea, have them underline the most important sentence in every paragraph and then in 20 words or less, explain the main idea of the passage. Cause and effect cause your kids problems? Design a lesson which asks them to find the reason something happened and then what effect that action had; next, ask them to explain it in an outline, a short paragraph or a mind map.

The assessments you are giving your kids are just the starting points for increasing student achievement. It is only through using the data to drive your instruction that achievement increases.

If you want to get more ideas like these, sign up for the Skills Iowa Regional meetings. You can find the sign up information on the opening page of our website: www.skillsiowa.org

Individual Student Reports

In both Assessment Center and Skills Tutor, you can choose to have a report for an entire class or for an individual student. These are useful for conferencing and to help monitor progress.

In Assessment Center, the last two reports on the teacher's Reports page are called Overall Student Performance and Student Performance. By name, they seem to be almost identical, but they offer some different options that may be of use for you.

Overall Student Performance offers the teacher to ability to view ALL of the results from all of the assessments taken by subject and type. For instance, you might choose ELA as the subject and Administrator Created to see all of the reading assessments that had been created by Skills Iowa and/or your administrator. You could choose to see the same information over assessments you had created by choosing "Teacher Created". These options are available in ELA, Language Arts and Math. This report will give you the results of ALL of the assessments of the subject and type selected. It will aggregate the performance data on these areas.

Student Performance will also aggregate data, but it will do it over any assessments you choose. You can put the assessments you create and the administrator assessments together in one report. You can also include Math, ELA and Language Arts in the same report. Another option is to only select the assessments that cover the time period you are interested in.

These two reports give you the ability to get a good idea of how a single student is performing on Assessment Center assessments.

In Skills Tutor, you can get a report on any number of individuals by choosing Student Detail from the reports page. You select the student(s) you want to know about, the subjects you are interested in, and the time period you want the information to cover, and you will create a report.

Using the reports in Skills Iowa's programs will help you help your students to reach their potential.

Having trouble accessing the Assessment Center website?

If you have recently experienced difficulty trying to sign in to Skills Iowa using Assessment Center, you may be using the old address, asc.princetonreview.com. Assessment Center initiated a new address in late summer, ac.corek12.com. The old address was redirecting the user to the new site until the first of October. From now on, the old address will not work. You can only access Skills Iowa through the new address.

ac.corek12.com

Benchmark Round One

Our first round of benchmark assessments has concluded, and they have been a resounding success. Thousands of benchmarks were given, and this will give all of the participating schools great comparison data.

The two biggest problems that were encountered involved turning off the pop-up blockers and making sure that classes were created properly. The pop-up problem is pretty simple, and the class creation problem requires that ELA or Math at the appropriate grade level must be in the course list on your class details. We found our way through these problems. A couple of other problems that arose involved students not being enrolled in the class and teachers not realizing that a test code must be entered to take the assessment.

The real reason for the benchmark assessments is to get a look at how your school, building and classroom are doing in some of the essential skills which are tested in the Iowa Core Curriculum. The data raises a lot of questions, and that is a valuable part of the educational discussions that must take place in schools. This one small piece of data may help you and your school make decisions not only applying to your classroom but to district goals as well. We hope the classroom teachers will validate individual classroom results with further formative assessments. Larger samplings of questions that zero in on single skills will help teachers make even further instructional decisions.

The next round of reading benchmarks starts on October 5th, and the next math benchmark assessment will begin on January 4th.

If you have further questions about the benchmark assessments, you can look at the benchmark information at our website, www.skillsiowa.org or you can contact your project leader.

How are things going?

We'd like to know. If you are having problems, let us know. If you do have a problem, be sure you give us all of the information you can. Give us the username/password of the student who is having problems. If it's you with a problem, send your username/password. We'll be able to help you better. If it's with a specific test or class, give us the name of the assessment or class. We'll get back to you sooner if you give us the full picture.

If you are finding success, and things work beautifully, we'd love to hear that kind of information too. We'd like to opportunity to share your success stories and great ideas with other Skills Iowa teachers.

Let us know!

October 2nd ends the 1st benchmark window.

If you have not yet administered the first math and reading benchmark assessments, your time is running short. Both of these initial benchmarks end at midnight on October 2nd.

You will not have another opportunity to give another math benchmark assessment until January 4th, but you will get a monthly reading assessment. If you have to choose which one you will not do if you run short on time, taking the math assessment is probably more critical.

You will want to allow enough time to complete the math assessment. It has 30 questions, so it will take somewhere around an entire class period or more to take.

Of course, you will be able to create your own math, language arts and reading assessments to give at any time. The benefit of the benchmark assessments to you and your students is the comparison to other Skills Iowa schools who have taken these assessments.

Remember to turn off your pop-up blockers for these assessments to load.

Is your benchmark assessment working correctly?

If your students are loading the correct number for a benchmark assessment and the assessment is not coming up, one of a few things might be happening.

Number 1: There is a pop-up blocker in place on your computer. There might be two if you have a Google toolbar on that computer. You must turn off all pop-up blockers.

Number 2: Your school may be blocking our site from pop-ups even though things worked last year. We have a new address (ac.corek12.com). You may need to have your technology person change the settings to allow this new address.

Number 3: The student not getting in to the assessment may not be in a class. If the student has been recently created and not yet enrolled in an Assessment Center class, that student will not be considered a valid recipient for that assessment.

Number 4: The student may have already completed the assessment. Once the assessment has been taken, the student cannot retake it.

Number 5: The time period of availability for this assessment may not have arrived, or it may have already passed.

If you are having problems that do not fit one of these situations, please contact your project leader for help.

The Benchmark Tests are Live!

If you haven't yet noticed, you have at least one assessment in your class that you did not create or assign. This is the benchmark test in math or reading (ELA). Your students will need to use the test code protection which has been provided to your principal and possibly a lead teacher in your building. You can also see the test code listed with the assessment when you view the assessment in your list of assessments. Check out the information about the benchmarks on: www.skillsiowa.org

One thing you must be certain to do for the benchmark to work is to have the pop-up blockers on student computers turned off. With a test code, these tests become pop-ups and they will be blocked if the pop-up blocker is on. If you need help with this, contact your school's technology leader or contact your project leader.

The benchmark data is a great way to see how your students are doing.

Tips From the Blog

If you frequent the Skills Iowa Blog, you see some articles that address immediate problems and concerns, and there are others that address situations that come up year after year. It's these articles that we have reformatted as PDF files and placed them on the Skills Iowa Web Page for you to download and use.

Check it out.

Formative Assessment

This blog has been going for a while now, and some of the earlier posts are sort of buried. From time to time, we'll bring one or more of them up for your viewing.

Click here for a post about formative assessment.

Assessment Center Reports

Assessment Center has six reports available to teachers. Each of them is useful in a different way, and each raises and answers different questions about the same data.

The first report listed is the Assessment Results report. This report gives the scores on a single assessment, breaks the scores down into the four performance groups, gives the ability to drill down to see a single student's assessment, and shows the performance data on each tested skill. This report gives a quick look at what we just did, and allows us to make decisions quickly about the tested skills.

The next report in the list is a Compare Assessments report. This report will allow you to show a comparison of how many students performed in a given performance group or groups in selected assessments as well as showing the entire distribution of total scores on a single assessment. For example, if you were interested in showing how many students had scored in the top two proficiency groupings on two assessments, you would merely click the Meets Standards and Exceeds Standards buttons above the list of assessments on this report page. Next, you would click the assessments you want to compare. Your report will show the newest assessment on the left. You may want to run this report more than once using different choices of performance groups to show the entire picture.

The third report is called the Question Details report. This report provides an item analysis of the assessment. With this, you get the ability to see not only which skill caused your students problems, but also which question or questions caused students problems. Any incorrect answer displays the incorrect choice. The correct answers are shown by a + sign. At the bottom of the columns is a series of buttons with the letter "I" displayed. These icons will allow the teacher to see which skill was tested by this question. To see the skill, just let your cursor hover over the appropriate icon.

The fourth report is called the Overall Skill Performance report. This report allows the teacher to see how a student has scored on all tests given and taken in a given subject area. The selection of ELA, Language Arts or Math must be made when building this report. The teacher must also choose from a list of Assessment Types. If the teacher is evaluating assessments that he/she has created, he/she should choose Teacher Created. If one is looking at the performance on the benchmark assessments, you would choose Administrator Created. The resulting report shows a multicolored performance bar graph. Clicking on each of these bars will show the grouping of students on each of the tested skills in all of the assessments used so far in this class. This aggregate report gives a look at how students have done on a series of assessments. This report is not available immediately after taking the assessment. It will be available within 24 hours.

The fifth report in the list is called Overall Student Performance report. This report does essentially the same thing as the Overall Skill Performance report except it does it for one student at a time. It is a good way to look at how one student is doing on multiple skills over the course of all of the assessments taken in a class. This report is also not available until 24 hours after the last assessment has been taken.

The final report is called the Student Performance report. This report gives a detailed report for a single student over any assessments the teacher chooses. It offers the opportunity to see how any student has performed on all skills tested in this class.

All of the Skills Iowa reports are easy to generate and use. Each of them has its own purpose and each of them displays a different view of the data generated by the assessments. This is the Analyze part of our Assess, Analyze, Act process. If one uses the data generated in these assessments to inform the instruction in this class, student achievement can be raised substantially.

Take a look at the reports over your assessments. They are great diagnostic tools. If you need help, contact your project leader.

Benchmark Assessments

This year Skills Iowa has made an addition to the very successful math benchmarks we introduced last year. We now have monthly reading assessments available at each grade level. These assessments are automatically assigned to your students, but they can only access them by entering a seven digit test code that will be provided to each of our schools by your project leader.

The schedule for math benchmarks is:

Test 1: August 31 - October 2

Test 2: January 4 - February 5

Test 3: April 26 - May 28

The reading assessments will be available on the first Monday of each month and will end on the last Friday of each month.

These assessments will do several things. They will generate data that will help your school in making program decisions and should help drive the instruction. They will also make test creation problems nonexistent since the tests are already created and assigned. Finally, they will allow your school to compare your results with other Skills Iowa schools who have taken the assessments.

To assign the assessment, your students will only have to enter the seven digit test code in the appropriate window on their Assessment Center page.

We encourage the use of these assessments to aid your school and your students.

A Report on 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. If neither of these solutions works, try holding down on the control key while you execute the unsuccessful comand again.

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 ac.corek12.com and www.myskillstutor.com.

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

An important change in Skills Iowa

We at Skills Iowa are very excited about a new feature in our programs this year. It may take you by surprise, but you'll love it. When you create a class in Assessment Center, a class bearing the same name is automatically created in Skills Tutor. It's a great time saver in training, but it also saves confusion as the year progresses. Any time you add a new class or a new student to a class in Assessment Center, the changes are made in Skills Tutor.

We think you'll like the change! One thing you need to keep in mind however is that even if you can get an unsupported character accepted in Assessment Center, the same character might keep your class from being created in Skills Tutor. Don't use characters such as: @, #, / and & and you should be just fine. Keep it simple!

Enjoy the upcoming year.

Assessment Center has a new URL

Assessment Center has a new URL, or web address. To access Assessment Center, and in turn Skills Tutor, you can now log in at: ac.corek12.com. Please note, that just as with the old Assessment Center address, there is no www in front of this address. The web address you are used to using for Assessment Center will continue to work for a few months, but it will stop working during the school year. If your tech person is working on bookmarking the program during the summer, this would be a good opportunity to make the change and avoid confusion later in the school year.

If you have any questions, please contact your project leader.

It's Summer

We're all still available by email or phone, but the blog will be pretty inactive until late July or early August. If you have questions, please contact your project leader; we'll all be glad to take your call or answer your email. You can always search the blog to see if your question has been dealt with. Look at the top left for the search box.

Have a great summer.

The Skills Iowa Folks

Summer School

If you are having summer school this year and will be using Skills Iowa's programs, you need to let your project leader know your ending date. We will be cleaning up the sites over the summer, and we don't want to do that for your school while you are still using the programs for your summer school program.

Have a great summer whether it includes summer school or not!

The End is Near...

The end of the school year that is. Before you go home for the summer, it might be a good idea for you to print out some of the reports that have helped you determine what direction your teaching for the current year needed to go. While the next group that comes to you will be made up of different kids with different needs, it will be interesting to make comparisons on student performance and the success of strategies you have used this year. 

Another good reason for saving the reports is to answer the questions of the teacher who will have your students next year. Data drives the instruction, and knowing how kids ended up this year will be a great starting point for next year's teacher.

We at Skills Iowa thank you for all you have done this year to increase student achievement. You have one of the most important professions in our country. Thanks for all you do!

7th Grade Math Benchmark

We have discovered that there was an error on the final 7th grade math benchmark assessment. 

Question 17 had an incorrect answer identified as the correct answer. This has been corrected. If you have already administered the assessment, you can go into the answer sheet for each student and simply click on the button to score the assessment. You will then get the correct results. If you need assistance with this, contact your project leader.

If you administered the test telling all students to choose "C", those results will be skewed. C will now not be the correct answer. In this case, you could go in and mark every answer sheet with the correct answer, or you could simply ignore the third test's results on that skill.

We apologize for the error. The Princeton Review corrected the mistake as soon as it was brought to their attention.

Adobe Flash Player Version

Skills Iowa makes use of Adobe's Flash Player. Some of the lessons in Skills Tutor will load with older versions of the programs, but the ones created most recently like Language Arts, will not. It isn't easily evident which version of the program you have installed on your computer, so it can take a bit of time to go to Adobe's website and run through the install routine on your computer. Fortunately, Adobe does offer a tool to determine which version of the program you have installed on your computer. Just go to www.adobe.com/shockwave/welcome . Once there, you will click on the About button to see which version of the Flash program you have installed. There is also a Shockwave Player section, but Skills Iowa doesn't use this technology.

If you need any help with this, please contact your project leader.

Spring Math Benchmark

The third math benchmark is ready for you to administer to your kids. To find it, you must log in to Assessment Center and choose the class in which you want to administer the test. Once you are there, click on the Assessments link. By default, the new page will have a search window available for you. Enter the words Skills Iowa and click the search button (note: hitting return or enter will not do the same thing). Your search should result in an assessment named: Skills Iowa Grade X Math Test 3. If the assessment does not show up for you, you may have to check the settings in "Class Details". If you do not have the math level for that class set in the last set of settings on that page, the assessment will not be available. You can add the appropriate math level to the settings, and then save your settings and search again.

Once you have located the assessment, put a check mark in front of it; click on assign, and then choose the options you want on the next page. After clicking Next on that page, you will be given a list of students who have been assigned the assessment. You must click on Save at the bottom of the page, or the assignment will not be given.

This assessment is a good end of  year check up and can be compared to the beginning benchmark assessment and the mid year assessment if you administered them. Let us know if you need help.

Looking for a way to work on "Main Idea"?

Something sort of odd happened to me today. During a demonstration of the program, I was asked whether a science lesson in Skills Tutor would read the text on the page. I said, "Let's click on it and see." Not all Skills Tutor pages work in exactly the same way. Some read passages sentence by sentence, some read the entire page, and some read a summary of what is on the page. Science is one that reads a summary of the page. 

While it was reading the summary or main ideas of the page, it occurred to me that this could be a great way to work on identifying main idea or summarizing.

Here's the suggestion. Assign a science lesson that you think would be interesting to your kids. We used the lesson on the cell in Science I. Either have them all bring the page up, or, if you have the technology, bring it up on a projector or smart board. Have the kids read the contents of the page; a process which will take about three minutes. Then, have your students write a quick summary of what the main or most important ideas on this page were. Next, click on the text on the page and it will read its summary out loud. It's a quick way for the student to do some self evaluation to see if they were correct. There should be about three pages at the beginning of any science lesson which will operate in this way, and when you get to the point where your students are having to answer science questions, you can either choose to have them answer, or you could exit that activity and go to another.

Keep in mind that the Science lessons are leveled for high school, but are frequently used in middle school and occasionally lower. The vocabulary may be too difficult for lower grades. I'd love to hear from you in the comments if you try this

Do you have questions?

Sometimes we don't ask questions because we don't want to bother someone who might have the answer. We at Skills Iowa want to assure you that you are never a bother to us; we are always happy to answer your questions. Just contact your project leader and he or she will get right back to you.

Another solution is to ask someone at your school who is using Skills Iowa's programs to help improve student achievement. Usually, those folks are happy to help.

A third option might be to ask the questions right here on this blog through the comments section. It's easy, and you can bet you aren't the only person with the question you might want to ask, so just ask!

Is your report not loading?

If you are getting a white screen that doesn't go away when you are trying to download a report, the problem is most likely an activated pop up blocker.

You may have already turned off the pop up blocker, but in a Windows computer, you may have a Google toolbar which also contains a pop up blocker. Check for that too. When you turn off the pop up blockers, try your report again, and it should load.

Reports, Reports, Reports

Skills Iowa usage really comes down to Assess, Analyze, Act. If you are giving assessments and assigning lessons in Skills Tutor, you really need to be checking the reports. This article gives a review of what the reports are and what they do. 

Let your project leader or your building leader know if you have questions.

Have you helped someone else at your school?

Skills Iowa's project leaders are always willing to help you with any questions you may have about the use of our programs, but sometimes there's nothing like someone sitting right down at your side and answering your questions RIGHT NOW. Since the project leaders can't always be right there right now, someone at your school who uses the programs might be the person to go to. The people using the programs may know the most about them.

Don't know who that might be? Your building administrator can log in and check on the number of logins and assessments given in Assessment Center, and the number of student minutes logged in Skills Tutor. It makes sense that the people with the the highest numbers are the people you might start with.

If your building administrator needs help running those reports, he or she should contact your project leader; they're always willing to help.

If you are that person in your building, letting others know that you might be able to help, may insure that your building keeps a viable level of usage that helps raise student achievement. You can make a difference!

Connecting

A few years ago, the novel Feed by M.T. Anderson presented a world where virtually everyone was connected to television and computers via a brain implant. People had these mechanisms implanted when they were born. The result was a world of people who could barely speak because they could already hear what others around them were thinking. They didn't need to read or write, and as a result, most couldn't. The world around them was bleak and deteriorating.

It all seemed interesting but impossible. Well, not so fast. At a recent meeting of TED, this presentation showed a mechanism that allows the beginnings of some of the same technologies. It presents a virtual sixth sense.

There is a link at the site that allows the downloading of this clip to your desktop or your iTunes account. It would make a great discussion/writing starter. Check it out.

It's amazing technology. Who knows, maybe this is the communicator of the future.

The "3 Rs"

In the March 22nd Des Moines Register an article by David Elbert entitled "Vibrant future predicted for Iowa" speaks about ideas for the future of Iowa. Eighteen prominent Iowans came together to brainstorm about Iowa's future, and they came up with many ideas ranging from light rail to a tongue in cheek notion by Fred Grandy that Iowa declare war on South Dakota. 

One of the participants, Anita native Victoria Bernhardt, spoke about how education has changed. The 3 Rs are no longer reading, writing and arithmetic but rather rigor, relevance and relationships. In other words, challenging, meaningful work that is supported at home, in the community and at school.

Skills Iowa is right there to help you do just that in your classes. The Assess, Analyze, Act strategy of Skills Iowa will help you make sure that your work is rigorous and relevant. Students who take formative assessments in Assessment Center can be directed to further work that is exactly what they need to master the skills needed for further learning. The reports in Assessment Center not only let you see how your school, and class are doing, but also give you specific information on how each student is performing on the necessary building blocks of education. With that knowledge, students can be directed to high quality resources in Skills Tutor. These skills are offered at performance levels from introductory to advanced so your students can work on rigorous lessons that are geared to their unique needs.

As for Relationships, Skills Iowa allows parents to sit down with students and work side by side with their student. Parents have the opportunity to be a part of their child's education. Skills Iowa lessons can be done at school, home or at the public library. Skills Iowa allows the teacher and school to see the larger picture of student performance for a classroom, building and district.

Skills Iowa is a great way for you to meet this view of modern education. No matter which way you view the "3 Rs", Skills Iowa is there to help you raise student achievement.

Skills Tutor Changes

There's a new feature in Skills Tutor that allows you some real choices. A new assignment option has been added to the assignment creation page. It states that the pretest can assign the posttest. By default, this box is checked, as are all of the option boxes.

What this means is that you can choose to have the posttest show up immediately after a student takes the pretest, or, if you choose, you can uncheck this option and give the posttest at a later time. This could be valuable if you want to do some additional teaching before your students take the posttest.

Any assignments that you have made before this option was added can be modified to allow you to make this change. Just log in and select your class. Choose the "Class Properties" and then select "Modify Assignment". Choose the assignment you wish to modify and under the options, uncheck the box which states that the pretest can assign the posttest.  Then you can make another assignment later that is just for the posttest. You must remember that some of your students may have already taken the posttest, and when you reassign it, it may show up as already completed. This doesn't need to be a problem since students can take the posttest as many times as they choose.

Since this is a brand new feature, there may be other implications. Give it a try if this is a control which you have been wanting.

Spring Meetings

Each participating Skills Iowa school will be having an implementation meeting to discuss the use of the Skills Iowa programs for the 2009-2010 school year.

If you have any concerns that you feel should be part of the discussion for your building, please share them with your building principal. This way we can be sure to have your topic brought up for discussion.

We thank you for your continuing participation is Skills Iowa and thank you for all you do for kids.

Renewal Notice

If you have noticed the renewal notice on the Skills Tutor home page, you may have questions about whether your school needs to renew your Skills Tutor account. The answer is no. All Skills Iowa schools receive our programs at no cost to the schools. Your account does not need to be renewed. You can keep right on using the program and not worry about this notice.

Spring Break

You deserve a break, and so do your kids, but sometimes, kids find themselves with nothing to do over a break. Their parents are still at work, their friends have gone out of town or there is just nothing to do. You could suggest that they log on to their Skills Iowa account and go to Skills Tutor and do some skills practice. Kids frequently find the activities engaging and they sometimes don't even realize that they are doing school work. Of course, you will have to put work on Skills Tutor for them to do before this will work. At this point in the year, it wouldn't be a bad strategy to assign everything in your subject area at their grade level. You might also want to assign the work at the grade level above their current grade so those students who have exhausted the work already assigned can take on a new challenge.

You can also suggest that your students look at the practice quizzes and skills resource lessons in Assessment Center. Self assessment is a valuable piece of any student's education. They might not really know whether they have mastered a topic or not, and with Skills Iowa, they can have the chance to find out and do something about it.

Enjoy your spring break when it comes. You deserve it!

Know anyone who works with geography?

Here's a site that has a quick, interesting game. It's not violent in any way, and I don't see how it could offend anyone. It shows the user where cities are located. It doesn't cover the entire world, but it does a good job of covering Europe and the Middle East, probably the airports where Lufthansa flies since they own the site.  Click here to give it a try!

Don't wait

If you have not done a lot in either Skills Iowa program this year, get started now; don't wait until next year. The gaps in your students' understanding can still be identified, and there is a lot of school year remaining to address these gaps. Use Assessment Center to create and administer the formative assessments that will allow you to discover where your students are struggling, and then use Skills Tutor to address those gaps and to help you help your students get a firm grasp on the basic skills that they need to understand and work with complex concepts.

Another good reason is that using Skills Iowa this year will allow you to get a better understanding of how you might use it next year. During training sessions, the time to decide how you might use the programs in your curriculum is limited. If you get a better understanding of the programs now, you can tailor the use of them next year when you set things up.

Get started now so you can use Skills Iowa to help you make that difference in student understanding this year and next. Click here for a brief review of the functions of each program.

If you have misplaced the quick reference guides for the programs that you received at your early year training, click here to find downloads of these guides. If you need further assistance to get going, click here to contact your project leader for help.

Compare Assessments Report and Math Benchmark Assessments

If you have given both of the math benchmark assessments, you should take a look at the Compare Assessments report in Assessment Center. To find this report, select the class you want to evaluate. Next, click on the Reports link on the left side of the page. When that page loads, click on the Compare Assessments link in the middle of the page.

When creating this report, you must select the two assessments to be compared. For instance, you might check Skills Iowa Grade 5 Math Test 1 and Skills Iowa Grade 5 Math Test 2. The other choice you must make is which performance group or groups you want to see on this report. The initial response is to decide that you want to see all groups. However, checking all four groups will provide you with a report that is of little use. It will show you that all of your students fell within the selected parameters. A better choice is to think of the question that you want to answer; for instance, how many students were in the Below Standards group at the beginning of the year and how many are in that same group now. Of course, you hope that the group is smaller the second time. More importantly, you can see skill by skill where the most and least progress has been made. Another choice might be which students are in the Meets Standards and Above Standards groups. For this choice, you would isolate those students who are doing well in your class. In this case, we would hope that the second assessment numbers would be larger. As you can see, you would want to run several reports to get a complete view of how your students are doing.

If you need assistance using the Compare Assessments report, contact your project leader.

Resetting a Single Assessment Center Assessment

If you have a student or two who really need to retake an assessment because something went wrong when they took the assessment, this is easy to do. 

Just log in to Assessment Center, click on the name of the class in question and then click on Assessments. Click on the name of the assessment you need to use and on the resulting page, scroll down to the list of student names. Put a check mark in front of the name of the student or students in question, and then scroll up to the blue command button which says, "Reset Selected Sheets", and click on that button.

The assessment will be reset for the selected student or students only, and the assessment will be reassigned for that student or those students.

Please note that there is a Reset button further up on the page. Don't confuse these two buttons. The Reset button will delete the results for all of your class and will unassign the assessment. If you are in doubt about which button to use, please contact your project leader for assistance.

Creating New Students

When a new student moves in to your district, it is best that someone in the office of your building creates an account for this student. Frequently, the principal or someone else designated to do this job will do this. If more than one person creates a new account for the student, it is possible that the student will have more than one identity, and that creates problems for everyone.

The instructions for creating new accounts are found on our website: www.skillsiowa.org. Click on the Documents link to find the instructions.

If you have any questions about creating new student accounts, please contact your project leader.

Skills Tutor and Math Facts

When you log in to Skills Tutor, you will see an ad from the Skills Tutor people for a free upgrade to Math Facts. You might think that this means that you can get the Math Facts program added to your account for free. In fact, the upgrade is simply an upgrade for schools around the nation that are using and paying for Math Facts. Math Facts is not a part of the Skills Iowa project, and therefore, your school is not eligible for the upgrade or for the use of the Math Facts module for that matter.

Sorry for the confusion.

Math Benchmark Assessment

Time is running out to assign the Math Benchmark Assessment. This assessment must be assigned before February 1st. If your kids can't take it before that time, it will still be available if you get it assigned before February 1st. 

Take a look further down this page to find the instructions on how to assign this assessment. If you have any problems, contact your project leader for assistance.

Have you checked the reports lately?

Both of Skills Iowa's programs, Assessment Center and Skills Tutor have full suites of reports that allow teachers and administrators to know where students have strengths and weaknesses in their academic progress. Using the programs without using the reports gives your students an opportunity to discover where they have success, but if you don't know that as well, the process is incomplete. Remember, it's Assess, Analyze, Act. The reports are the Analyze part of Skills Iowa.

Search this blog for Reports, and you will find several articles about how to use the reports that are included in each program. You can also contact your project leader if you need more help.

Bad Weather Plans

Recently, we have been experiencing some inclement weather that has prevented school from proceeding as usual. At these times, you might want to encourage your kids to work on Skills Iowa.

Students can always work independently on the Practice Quizzes and Skills Resources in Assessment Center, or, they can work on Skills Tutor lessons if you have assigned lessons to them. Remind them that these resources are always available. If you have questions about using the Practice Quizzes or the Skill Resources, contact your project leader.

Short Cut to a Student Performance Report

If you are looking for a fast way to get a look at how an individual student is doing on one or more assessments, here is a fast way to do it.

Log in to Assessment Center. Click on the class you want to use. On the main page for that class, there is a list on the right hand side. Click on the name of the student you would like to get information on. Next, there will be a list of assessments you have given that student. Check the assessments you would like to have shown in the report, and then click on the "Show Report" button below the list of assessments.

What will result is a break down of the student's performance on the skills tested.

It's a quick way to take a look at how one of your kids is doing.

Skills Iowa and ELL Students

Can Skills Iowa help with ELL students?

The short answer is: maybe. If you have high school level Spanish speaking students who struggle with English, some of the high school level lessons will speak portions of the lessons in Spanish. To do this, you must log in to Skills Tutor directly rather than using the link from Assessment Center. To do this, go to: www.myskillstutor.com  or click the link in Assessment Center for Skills Tutor, and once there, click the "Log Out" command on the left.

In either case, you will now need a site ID to log in to your school's site. If you don't have this, your project leader can provide it for you. Just send an email request for that information if you need it. You will also need to click the box below the log-in info which states: Play audio in Spanish (when it is available). 

If you have elementary level  Spanish speaking students who are just learning English, you might find the Beginning Language Arts and Beginning Math lessons helpful. These lessons can be accessed just as you would any other other Skills Tutor lesson, but before clicking on the start button, the student should click on the link which states: Esuche el audio en Español. The lesson then will have the audio in Spanish and the text in English.

Please let your project leader know if you have any questions about using Skills Tutor with your ELL students.

Time for some review...

It's easy to assume that the people who have been trained have an understanding of the Skills Iowa programs, but the training happens pretty fast, and it happens at a time of the year that you have a lot on your mind. So, with that in mind, let's review the purposes of each of our programs.

Assessment Center

Assessment Center is a program which is used to create multiple choice assessments which can be taken online or offline. When taken online, these assessments are graded automatically and the results are broken down by performance in each of the skills. The reports can show you how a class is doing on a given skill or set of skills or you can look at individual students to see where there are gaps in understanding. The testing can be done at any grade level from 3rd through 12th in Reading (ELA), Language Arts or Math. When this program is used for formative assessment, student achievement can be raised dramatically when coupled with judicial usage of the reports and an eye toward remediation. Multiple assessments can be made over the same subjects.

Skills Tutor

Skills Tutor contains pretests, interactive tutorial lessons, quizzes, posttests and problem solving lessons in reading comprehension, math, language arts, science, information skills, workforce readiness skills and vocabulary. There is only one lesson per skill at a given grade level. The lessons are divided into general performance levels. Level LL is for a lower level third grade reader and is only used in Reading Comprehension. The other levels are A: 3rd/4th grade, B: 5th/6th grade, C: 7th/8th grade and lessons such as Reading with no level behind them which are created for high school level students. Additionally, at the elementary level, Beginning Language Arts and Beginning Math are offered for struggling students.

There is a full set of reports that allow teachers and administrators to monitor student performance from an entire school view to the view of an individual student.

Skills Iowa

Skills Iowa is the name of the project. Each school is assigned to a project leader who does the training and support for that school. Typically, each school has a refresher training or an initial training at the beginning of the school year, and then follow up training sessions are offered to schools as they need them. The project leaders are also available to answer questions about the use of the programs and to help the schools and their teachers in utilizing the programs. 

Skills Iowa suggests using the Assess, Analyze, Act model. Teachers can Assess in Assessment Center, Analyze there with the reports and Act using Skills Tutor.

Questions

If you have questions, please contact your project leader or Susie Olesen, the project director.

January Math Benchmark Tests are Available

It's January, and as promised, the second math benchmark is ready for you to administer to your kids. To find it, you must log in to Assessment Center and choose the class in which you want to administer the test. Once you are there, click on the Assessments link. By default, the new page will have a search window available for you. Enter the words Skills Iowa and click the search button (note: hitting return or enter will not do the same thing). Your search should result in an assessment named: Skills Iowa Grade X Math Test 2.  If the assessment does not show up for you, you may have to check the settings in "Class Details". If you do not have the math level for that class set in the last set of settings on that page, the assessment will not be available. You can add it to the settings, and then save your settings and search again.

This assessment is a good mid year check up and can be compared to the beginning benchmark assessment if you administered it. You can also use this one to compare to the assessment that will be offered in May.

Let us know if you need help.

Do you have any questions?

This blog has tried to answer a lot of the questions that come up when our project leaders visit schools, answer phone calls and read emails. If you have questions that haven't been answered, and you think the answers would be good for everyone, why not hit the comment button and ask away. We'll try to come up with the right answer to each and every question.

Let us know. 

Welcome back!

Happy New Year!

Welcome back from a well deserved break.  Hopefully, you are rested up and ready for school. 

If you are pondering how to get things started, you may want to think of some review assessments in Assessment Center that will get kids thinking about skills that have already been covered in the year. It only takes a few minutes for you to put this assessment together and only a few minutes to look at reports that can give you a great deal of information about which skills your students have mastered, and which skills still need some work.

You can also set up activities in Skills Tutor to address those skills that individual students need to review. Just click the desired activities, assign them and let the kids know they are there.

If you have forgotten how to get these activities going, check out the Skills Iowa website at www.skillsiowa.org. There are quick reference guides there that will take you through the process for both programs. If you need more help, contact your project leader. We'll be glad to help.