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.