Something to consider...

If you have assessments in your account that you created last year, you may want to edit them to give you more options.

Over the summer, our bank of questions was realigned to more closely match the Iowa Essential Concepts and Skills In Math and Literacy. While what you created and used last year was aligned to the Iowa Core, there may now be skills you couldn't find last year or more questions on those skills this year.

To edit an assessment, log in to the class you want to work in. Once you are in, click on the Assessments tab. Select the assessment you want to edit and then click the edit button at the upper part of the page. You will now be able to go through the assessment and check for additional available items. If you created the assessment using the Reading Curriculum standard, or the Iowa Grade Level Indicators in Math or Reading you should find more items available this year. You may also find completely new skills in the math alignment that were not there last year.

Give it a look, and if you need help, contact your project leader.

Welcome Back!

Some of you are in year-round school, and some of you are just thinking about getting back to school for the 2010-11 school year. Either way, it's the beginning of the Skills Iowa school year.

You will find that you probably have the same username and password that you had last year, and some of you will find that you still have Assessment Center assessments in your account that you created last year and assignments you made in Skills Tutor. We encourage you to revisit these and make changes that are appropriate for the new year. Assessment Center has made more extensive alignment to the Iowa Core Curriculum, and there may be items that you want to add to your old assessment through the edit tab.

You will notice that both of our programs have a new look. It may seem completely different when you sign in, but you should quickly recognize your way around. The functions are more or less the same, but we have some new reports and new looks to old reports that we feel are real steps forward.

Your school will be receiving a packet of information soon that will be used in training if you are training early or which can be used right now if your Fall Refresher will come a few weeks after the beginning of school. In some cases, your school's new imports have already been made, in other cases, we are waiting for the data to be returned to us, and we will get your students in as soon as we can. If you find your students are already present in the correct grade for the new school year, there is no reason to wait for us; go right ahead and get started.

We're excited about the changes in our programs, and we are looking forward to sharing them with you, but most of all, we're excited to help you use the data from Assessment Center to help your students raise their achievement. Formative assessment works, and you can certainly use the tests you create in Assessment Center formatively and address the areas of concern with Skills Tutor as well as with many other strategies.

Welcome back! We're looking forward to seeing you.