STAAR-A On-Line Testing
I’ve been away from posting EdTech tips on this teacher blog for a few weeks while we helped prepare our school district for this most recent wave of on-line STAAR-A testing. Initial fears were pretty high. The tutorials and documentation offered by TEA (Texas) were actually pretty good, but very time consuming for the average teacher to read up and study. I suspect quite a bit of it was skipped. Also, we have been migrating to MacBooks, Chromebooks (at our alternative campus) and iPads in our district. TestNav by Pearson works well on the Macs, once a couple of details are taken care of, but not at all on iPads or Chromebooks. So we were left with upgrading and running a bajillion updates on old Windows PCs.
All in all, things went pretty well. We had a couple of minor issues come up. We had to significantly restrict web traffic to guarantee that our test takers had a good experience. For us, this meant blocking YouTube. Teachers had to learn to plan ahead and either download media or do something else with their kids.
The test proctors seemed a little anxious the day before, so I made this infographic and did another training to help assuage their fears. All our preparation paid off. We had a good experience and were able to debrief in order to get ready for a larger group testing STAAR-A later this month.
header image: https://cbsdallas.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/gettyimages-488893074.jpg?w=625
