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!