Flash Player

There is a new version of Flash Player out, Version 10. You should not yet install this on your computers because it will cause problems with using Skills Tutor.

If you have already installed it, you will need to downgrade to Flash Player 9. Please consult your tech staff for help in doing this.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

Adding a second teacher to a class

If you and another teacher both work with the same group of kids for the same subject, you can add a second teacher to your Assessment Center class. You cannot, however, do the same thing in Skills Tutor. This does not mean that you cannot monitor your students.

In Assessment Center, adding a second teacher is pretty simple.  You go to Class Details and add a new teacher just the same way you add a new student to the class. This teacher will have full access to the class, and can make assignments, create assessments, add students, delete students, and of course delete results. In short, anything that a lead teacher can do, this teacher can do too. Adding a new teacher to a class is not something that you should do without giving it some thought. Be sure that you and the person you are sharing the class with will be able to work together with good communication. It's a great way to have someone share the load with you, and it's a great way to cooperate with a teacher who has equal responsibility for the class.

In Skills Tutor, the same procedure is not possible. Only one teacher can have ownership of a class. This doesn't mean that a second teacher can't monitor the progress of a student however. In Skills Tutor, the data stays with a student, not with a class. This means that a teacher who shares responsibility can create a class with the same population and can monitor a student's progress by using the Student Detail report. This report will show the results of any student work done in subject areas that are selected for the report. 

It's not the same as sharing the class, but it does provide data. If two teachers really need to share a Skills Tutor class, they will have to share a username and password.

Remember, these are two separate programs owned by two companies. They are brought together under the umbrella of Skills Iowa. Sometimes, the differences in the company procedures can cause confusion. What we have to remember is that both of these are great programs with different procedures that can help our students increase achievement.

Conferencing and Skills Iowa

With conference time coming up at lots of Iowa schools right now, communications with parents come to the forefront. Parents frequently want as much information about their students as they can get. They want to know what they can do to help, and the want to know how their student is progressing.

Skills Iowa can help with all of these needs. First and foremost, the reports features in both of our programs, Assessment Center and Skills Tutor can help you paint the picture of a student's achievement as well as a student's efforts at school. In Assessment Center and Skills Tutor you can print reports that only report on one student at a time. Parents can use the data there as a point of discussion with you and with their student. In Assessment Center, go to the class in question by clicking on its name on the home page. Next click on Reports from the menu links on the left. Once the page refreshes, you will get a listing of six report types. For individuals, you want to look at the last two reports. The Overall Student Performance report is the most wide spread report. It will give you the student's performance on every skill over which he/she has been assessed in your class. The Student Performance Report is intended to show the results on selected assessments. Both of the reports will give you comprehensive information about the student, and will in fact lead to the same information. It is the organization which will be different.  Two other features of Assessment Center which you may want to point out to parents are the Skills Resources and Practice Quizzes selections. Each of these is a great way for parents to be involved in their student's learning process. The Skills Resources are web based activities that parents and or students can print off and work on together or alone, and the Practice Quizzes are short, narrow quizzes that test individual skills. These can help relieve test anxiety, and can be great practice for students to use to get accustomed to the procedures of the program.

For Skills Tutor, the process is a bit easier. Choose the class you want to use, and then click on reports. From there, you can choose one of two reports, Student Detail or Parent Letter. Both of these reports are identical with the exception of one addition on the Parent Letter where you can type a note that you will use for the entire class. Each student's report will contain the same note. You can, of course, choose to make a handwritten note on each student's report to personalize it, or you can choose to make the conversation the personalized contact. These two reports can cover any subjects you choose to have on them and can cover any time period you choose. For conference time, you probably want to choose to show all work covered up until the time the quarter ended. The report will show how much time a student has spent on each activity, what score and percentage the student achieved, and what date and time of day the student did the work. 

The one thing that could cause you trouble in creating these reports is having your pop up blocker activated. The pop up blocker will not allow reports to be created. If you are being taken back to a previous page instead of being taken to a report, then you have a pop up blocker stopping the progress. Turn off the blocker, and you will be in business.

Wondering why a student who gets a high score on Reading Comprehension still gets assignments?

This question comes up now and again. Why did my student get assigned all of the work in Skills Tutor's Reading Comprehension even though he got a 90% on the pretest?  The answer? Reading Comprehension LL, A, B and C are not prescriptive. Neither are Reading Vocabluary A, B and C. Everything else in Skills Tutor is.  In these two modules the pretests result in an all or nothing situation; either you take the pretest and get assigned everything, or you can set it up that you take the pretest and get nothing except the lessons that the teacher chooses.

If you want to use the Reading Comprehension pretests and not have them generate an assignment of all of the activities, you must uncheck the option that states that pretests can assign work based on the student's performance.  This is the first year for this option, and we have found it to be especially useful for Reading Comprehension.

If you have made the assignment without unchecking this option, and would like to change this effect, go to Class Properties, click on Modify Assignment, and uncheck the option to give work based on pretest performance. Save the change by clicking  on Done, and you're in business.

Skills Tutor Level Indicators

One of the biggest questions we get about Skills Tutor is what the A, B and C mean behind a lesson.  These are indicators about the level of difficulty of the lessons. A is roughly at a third/fourth grade level. B is at a fifth/sixth grade level and C is at a seventh/eighth grade level. In the one case where it exists in Reading Comprehension, LL is for lower level third grade readers.

Beginning Math and Beginning Language Arts lessons are for struggling learning in elementary school.

The rest of the lessons do not have a grade level designation, and are generally considered appropriate for high school students.

Skills Tutor Resources

Skills Tutor offers a number of wonderful resources right on the home page. To get to this page, log in to asc.princetonreview.com Once at the Assessment Center site, click on the Skills Tutor link on the left side. You will be redirected to the Skills Tutor site.

At this site, you can view any of the activities that you can assign by using the View Activity link. This is a good practice if you are using and activity to demonstrate to the entire class over a projector or if you are going over a skill with an individual student.

You can also click on the View Tutorials link and get instructions and examples of many of the items used in Skills Tutor. One that we frequently use in training is the Sample Accountability Reports. This will give you a good example of most of the reports used in Skills Tutor.

A resource that is often overlooked is the View Guides and Worksheets link. This link will download a teachers' manual for the module you select. These frequently have lesson summaries, examples, and reproducible worksheets.

Take a look around at the Skills Tutor 1st page. You'll find something useful.

What happens if my students can't finish a lesson?

Students who are not able to finish a lesson or assessment in one sitting do not lose what they have done. In both of our programs, the student will be be able to resume work where they left off.

In Skills Tutor, most of the lessons support a technology called bookmarking. The process is invisible and seamless. All a student needs to do is to click on the activity they were unable to complete, and the program will load to their point of departure. A book flipping pages will appear on the screen to let the student know what is happening. A student will not have to go through the entire first part of the lesson again; he/she can just resume work on that lesson.

In Assessment Center, the student can just click on the Continue button which will appear after the name of the assessment in the student's list of assessments.

Why won't my Skills Tutor lessons load?

A recent email asked why the assignments given in Assessment Center loaded just fine but the lessons in Skills Tutor wouldn't load at all. 

The short answer is probably that something on the school's end is preventing the lessons from loading---probably. While Skills Tutor is not immune from something going wrong at their end, we know of no outages this school year. So what did cause this problem. 

One possibility is that the computers that your students were using did not have the latest version of Adobe's Flash Player installed. If your students can't get Language Arts lessons to load, but can get other subject area lessons to load, this is most certainly the problem. Language Arts lessons are among our newest lessons, and they require Flash Player 9 or later.

If the lessons from all subject areas fail to load, you may have a pop-up blocker stopping the lessons from loading. Skills Tutor lessons contain pop-ups in them, so obviously, having an effective pop-up blocker installed could prevent the lessons from loading.

If you discover that neither of these situations is causing the problem, then it is probably time to call Skills Tutor Tech Support. There are so many situations that can arise in individual school situations, that it  is difficult for your project leader to diagnose all problems. The Skills Tutor Tech Support number is: 888-764-2446.

If you continue to have difficulties, please don't hesitate to contact your project leader to seek help.