Skills Tutor Tip: Working with charts, maps and graphs

Many of our social studies teachers have let us know how helpful the Maps, Charts and Graphs lessons in Skills Tutor are for their students. Lots of schools find this a difficult part of their standardized testing. Skills Tutor can be a great way to sharpen up those skills.

To find the lessons, look under Information Skills. There you will find a section named Using Maps, Charts, and Graphs. You will find lessons such as: Latitude and Longitude, Picture Graphs, Bar Graphs and Tables. There is also a prescriptive pretest and a posttest to measure retention of the lessons.

If you need any assistance with Skills Tutor, contact your project leader with your questions.

Assessment Center Tip: Collaboration

With so many of our teachers now working in collaboration, it becomes necessary for more than one teacher to be able to manage an Assessment Center class. This is an easy adjustment and here's how you do it.

First, log in to Assessment Center and open your class by clicking its name from the list of classes. Next, click on "Class Details" from the menu on the left. A sub menu containing two choices appears after the page reloads; choose the "Add/Remove Teachers" command. A list of available teachers will appear in the left window; choose the teacher you want to add to the class and click add. Then click save and you will have two teachers with equal access to the class and its information.

This practice is useful for checking reports and seeing how any student in the class is performing as well as seeing how the entire class is doing. Good communication between the collaborating teachers is important because either teacher can delete, reset, add or create an assessment. Having both teachers in the same account can also increase communication since both teachers can always see what assessments are pending.

If you need assistance adding another teacher to your class, contact your project leader for assistance.

Assessment Center Tip: Sharing an Assessment

One of the great features of Assessment Center is the capability of using an assessment in more than one class.  There are two situations to be considered here.  The first situation ins using an assessment in more than one class that you teach. This one is easy; when you are creating the assessment, you will come to a page where you are asked to name the assessment. On this page, you will see a box at the bottom in front of these words: Make this assessment available in my other classes. After clicking this box and saving the assessment, you will find the assessment listed as an unassigned assessment in each of your classes. Remember, this assessment is not yet assigned in the class you are working in until you assign it on the page after the naming page

The other way to share an assessment is to share it with other teachers. This decision should be made right away when creating an assessment. On the very first page of the test creation, there is a box at the bottom of the page which says: Share this assessment, so that other educators can search for it. Now when other teachers search for your assessment, it will be available to them. It is a good idea for your staff to agree to some common language for assessment names so the search is more efficient. For example, it might be good to put your grade and/or subject in the title of the assessment.

Need more help with sharing assessments?  Contact your project leader.

Skills Tutor Tip: Loading Reports

Sometimes when you try to load a report in Skills Tutor, you end up in a sort of loop; in other words, you get sent back to a page you just came from.  Don't get frustrated; you haven't done anything wrong.  Your computer probably has a pop-up blocker turned on.  There are several solutions for the problem.  If you want to leave the blocker on, you can usually override it on a windows system by holding down the control key while clicking on the continue command.  If you want to use a more permanent solution,  go to the Tools command on a windows machine or the Safari menu on a Macintosh and simply turn off the pop-up blocker. Your reports should now load just fine.

If you do not have access to the commands to turn off the pop-ups, you may need to contact your school's tech support and ask them to stop blocking pop-ups for the two Skills Iowa websites.

If you have further questions about turning off pop-up blockers, contact your project leader.

Grant Funding

Vic Jaras is the new tech guy at the DE. He has provided these sites for us that highlight technology grants and money that are available. Hope you find them useful! Thanks very much, Vic!

Win a wireless lab and all the trimmings!
http://cdwg.discoveryeducation.com/new/site/step1.cfm?pgid=enter

Technology Grants for Rural Schools:
http://www.fred.org/tech.html

Toshiba Grants for Math and Science:
http://www.toshiba.com/tafpub/jsp/home/default.jsp

Smart Board Grants for 6th Grade:
http://www.smarterkids.org/k12/connections/index.asp

Recycled Computers and Technology for Schools:
https://www.cristina.org/oga/

Olympus Camera and Toolfactory.com Grants (every month):
http://www.digitalwish.com/dw/digitalwish/grant_awards

Best Buy Teach Awards (available in July- awarded in September):
http://www.bbycommunications.com/crnew/teach.asp

Toolfactory PODCASTING Grants:
http://www.toolfactory.com/olympus_contest/olympus_podcasting.htm

Verizon Tech Savvy Technology Grant:
http://www.famlit.org/site/c.gtJWJdMQIsE/b.2180327/k.5E33/Verizon_Tech_Savvy_Awards.htm
Web Site Makeover Grant (this one could be good for smaller districts)
http://www.schoolspan.com/

Skills Tutor Tip: Differentiating the Lesson

Skills Tutor frequently has similar lessons that are presented at differing levels of expertise. In Reading Comprehension, for example, there are six Skill Lessons at each of the performance levels (LL, A, B, C). If a teacher assigns the lower reading level lessons to the struggling readers in the class, the on grade level to those students reading at grade level and the above grade level lessons to the advanced readers, all of the students in the class will be covering the same skills and each of them will be reading at an appropriate reading level.

After making the assignment at each grade level, go to the Give Assignment command on the left side of the page and select the appropriate assignment for each of your students.

If you need assistance with Skills Tutor, contact your project leader.

Assessment Center Tip: Finding the Skill You Want to Assess

If you want to assess a skill that isn't showing up in Assessment Center, perhaps Assessment Center has aligned it with a different grade level. Al Bode, a recently retired Skills Iowa Project leader, has created a great web page that gives links to all skills assessed at each grade level in all subjects. It can save you a lot of time when you are searching for a skill.

Go to: Assessment Center Grade Levels and then bookmark that website for future reference.