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.