Hi all (again) I thought some of you might be interested in this (especially the reading specialists and IST’s)– I already forwarded it to Nancy and Ella. When you look at the attachment, make sure you scroll all the way to the top of the spreadsheet to see ELA and Math, and the various filters you can use. Begin at the bottom of the email to see the conversations thread. Janet What Cheryl is speaking about are the items in the custom test item bank. This effects a small percentage of the total items in the bank, mostly in the ELA area. The work around is to click "Any" at the grade level expectation (performance indicator) drop-down. The other option is to search for skills by skill group instead of by standard. Items will be realigned during our summer release. There should be no dead-ends for next fall. Items on the predictive and diagnostic pre-built test forms should already be properly aligned. If there is an objection to any of the items on the diagnostic or predictive tests, please report that to us asap including the test form, item number and description of the problem. Thank you!!! Tom From: Caraveo, Cheryl Sent: Sunday, March 04, 2007 8:49 PM Janet- I have a document that I have attached “Item Bank Count by Standard”. The dead end that your curriculum writer experienced is a glitch in the system and is being fixed. Tom do you have any additional information for Janet? Cheryl From: Gillmeister, Janet A. Sent: Sunday, March 04, 2007 9:28 AM To: Caraveo, Cheryl; Wynne, Dawn; Parsons, Thomas Subject: Question from the field Hi everyone. In meeting with various groups, and with the Curriculum coordinators, I have received the following question. One of the curriculum writers, who had also been trained to turn key trainer was surprised when she clicked on a subskill area of Acuity to find there were no questions. Back in October my goal was to align the curriculum power benchmarks to the subskill areas addressed on the state assessments. I had asked if it was possible to get a copy of Acuity’s subskills tested. Can I get this list, I’d like to check for consistency. Is it possible to obtain this for ELA and Math? Sounds like they would want this for the Diagnostic, Predictive, and Custom Test Item bank?????? Janet Janet A Gillmeister Director of Evaluation, Assessment, and Planning

Janet, At the training it was mentioned that CTB will be interfacing with our pentamation program to have the latest updated information. When I trained a few people the other day, this appeared to cause a great deal of stress to know when they were going to do it. Many people are already making the changes necessary with their building secretaries. Is it possible to have CTB do this at least a week before April break so buildings can do one final check to make sure all the information on Acuity is accurate. This may already be the plan - but I was not sure if it was going to be done over April break. If that happens, then buildings will have to make any corrections when the testing begins and that would cause a huge headache. Overall, as long as a student is in the system they can be reassigned after, when reports need to be run, but many people may not be happy without a clean roster prior to testing time. Just thought I would ask. I also checked out the place you can assign more than one teacher - it is on the second screen and pretty easy to do. Great for those inclusion rooms with two teachers and resource! Laurie Holtsbery IST for Technology in ELA

Hi everyone This attachment was offered from Laurie Holtsbery for student logon. Be sure to have the teachers print the class roster first, since some of the logon names may be slightly different from their actual name (for example: JOHNSMITH1). The jury is still out on unique passwords – use syra1234 for all students until further notified. Janet The attachment is posted on Library Links in Laurie's document format and Maria's PDF format

Hi everyone. I received this tip from CTB. I haven’t gotten into the Manage students screen as most of you have – so maybe this will help you. It also may help with the Beard/McCarthy concerns. Janet From: Caraveo, Cheryl Sent: Tuesday, March 06, 2007 4:10 PM To: Gillmeister, Janet A.Subject: An Acuity tip! You may have already found this out! You can have a student in more then 1 ELA or Math class: I just asked the acuity people about this and they showed me a pop-up screen that has two radio buttons for Add and Replace. Add is the default. Have you seen these when you add a student to a second class of the same subject? They were showing me from the Manage Student screens, and that may be the trick.

2 new listserves have been created: Acuity.turnkey and Acuity.trainers Welcome! This list-serve has been developed to provide key constituent groups with the opportunity to dialogue about the implementation of the new Acuity Assessment system. Please be aware that this is a learning process for all of us. I ask that you be patient as we work through the system. The information that we will be able to extract from Acuity will be invaluable in helping to understand our student needs for instruction. Some reminders as you use a list-serve: Although this is a tool, it can also become overwhelming. Make sure that you choose “reply all” if you wish to receive feedback from the whole group (this will be helpful – someone else may have the same question but was hesitant to ask!). If you want to send a personal message to the sender, make sure you address the reply just to that person. Messages from a list-serve (especially as we get started in this endeavor) will tend to fill your mailbox quickly. Make sure you clean out your mailbox often, so that we all don’t receive a “mailbox full” message back! I’d like to thank Patty Vilello for facilitating the set-up of this list-serve for our use. Janet Gillmeister

FYI, some questions and answers that were sent to me. Janet A Gillmeister From: Parsons, Thomas Sent: Thu 3/1/2007 1:02 PM Subject: FW: Syracuse City SD training problems We had a school administrator create a custom test. When attempting to share it, we get an error that no tests are selected, even though it is selected. I tried to share it from the district admin login as well, but had the same problem. Go to custom tests and try to share the one that is listed. The sharing is not working because there is an apostrophe in the custom test name. There is another test out there without the punctuation and it seems to work fine. We have confirmed this is a defect and will get it resolved as soon as we can. In the short term, we should make it known that the use of punctuation in a custom test name may cause issues with sharing. We also had a problem when trying to edit several classes. You can see this by logging in as a school admin: Edit class 105 On the edit screen the class name changes to a different number. Also the teacher dropdown lists teachers from a different school. This behavior happened to several other people as well. I was unable to replicate this problem. I logged into their appliance using the username and password provided. The class name never changed and the list of teachers in the dropdown was consistent with the list provided when I searched for teachers under the manage educators section. Any additional details (hardware/browser being used) would be helpful. We also had a different school admin who could not see any of her classes in her school. When she logged in on a different computer she could then see them. Any ideas on why that would happen? Our minimum browser requirement for Acuity on Windows XP is IE 5.5. Any details on the hardward/browser will be helpful.