The last two weeks have consisted of your friendly neighborhood GCSEC curriculum specialists bouncing from school to school across the county helping out with benchmarking. I can now safely state, I have every first to second paragraph of every fluency benchmark passage memorized. So if you're ever curious about Charlie Clark and his postal route, how the mountain and river were bitter rivals, or jellyfish and their plastic like bubble tops...just let me know. I'll recite them for you.
We also hear the same mistakes stated over and over, lump of grass instead of lump of glass, big bay bridge instead of big bay ridge, not fallen yet instead of not yet fallen among many others. My personal favorite is testicles instead of tentacles. Jean Ann had a student furiously apologizing to her through out his timing once he realized his mistake. He'd read a sentence "I'm so sorry" read another sentence "I'm really sorry", and Jean Ann being the model of standardization waited until he left the room to bust out laughing.
I've learned a couple new tricks the last few weeks.
1. Laptops are faster than iPads.
I used my laptop exclusively, Jean Ann would switch back and forth between her laptop and iPad. Both of us noticed the laptops' increased speed navigating between pages, and overall the laptop seemed not to "clitch up" as much as the iPad.
2. Safari and AIMSweb are frenemies.
For the most part AIMSweb will work in any web browser you choose. But there have been issues with Safari not recognizing passwords, or not interacting fast enough with the browser based scoring. If you simply switch to firefox, chrome or any other browser you should be fine. On an iPad you will have to download the app for that browser. (I personally recommend chrome)
3. Stop and reload.
Some of us have had an issue setting up our progress monitoring schedules. Once everything was loaded it wouldn't give the assess now option for fluency passages. (This is the most awesome perk of AIMSweb right now!!! It must work!!!) The only way I could find to fix it was to file those schedules and start over. (YUCK!) Luckily both teachers who had to deal with this are AIMSweb ninjas and did not have any data other than the initial score in for students, so it wasn't a major dilemma. If this happens to you, LET ME KNOW, and I will stalk AIMSweb for some answers!
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