Start of Year Tasks/Reminders
New Students
Have your EMIS coordinator send Mike (mandre@ohioces.org) a comma or tab delimited file or an Excel spreadsheet containing Student ID, last name, first name, grade, and building.
Templates
The OASIS assessment templates tell the system the name and subject of your assessments along with the point value and grade level indicator covered for each question. If you made changes to your assessments you will need to modify your templates or have our office modify them.
Assessment Generator Changes
More of the districts have the new assessment generator which is much faster and has automatic page formatting. Another important feature that we implemented is that only teachers that create a test can modify it in any way. The curriculum coordinators (Level 7) do have the ability to change ownership by logging onto OASIS, selecting DB Admin, and then "Change Assessment Ownership".
DIBLES, DRA, D3A2 analysis on OASIS
Greenfield and Reynoldsburg are going to pilot importing their DIBLES and DRA scores into OASIS for analysis. Once we have most of the kinks worked out, we'll make this available to other districts. I want to meet with Ross Pike ESC to investigate tying OASIS and D3A2 together.
OSBA Conference
We'll have a booth at the Ohio School Board Administrator Conference on November 11 and 12, 2008, at booth #1612. Stop by and say hi and try to win a decorative candle.
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New On-Line Pacing Charts
A new on-line Pacing Chart feature has been added to OASIS. Curriculum coordinators can create and edit Pacing Charts easily with an on-line standards selection program. Curriculum coordinators can also add "mapping" or curriculum implication notes to grade level indicators.
Scanning
We are continuing to make scanning answer sheets into OASIS easier. Scottish Corners in Dublin is using their Canon departmental copier to scan answer sheets and send them directly to our server via FTP where they are graded and entered into the OASIS database. Thanks for trying this out Laura and Ron!
Assessment Generator Improvements
We will begin piloting some new improvements to the assessment generator. One of the new features is the ability to renumber the questions on an assessment without having to push the up and down arrows. We now have a "Reorder" button that you will be able to push which will order your questions based upon the values that you numbered the questions. I have also made it so the assessment generator automatically adds the headers and footers to the assessments without having to "Add Page Break" manually.
On-line Standards Manual
The on-line standards manual has been improved so the standards and grade level indicators are selected via a word description selection process instead of a numeric selection process. (e.g. Reading, Standard 1 is now displayed as Phonemic Awareness instead of "1."). You can access this in OASIS by clicking on the "Standards" tab on the navigation menu.
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Start of Year Tasks/Reminders
New Students
Have your EMIS coordinator send Mike (mandre@ohioces.org) a comma or tab delimited file or an Excel spreadsheet containing Student ID, last name, first name, grade, and building.
Templates
The OASIS assessment templates tell the system the name and subject of your assessments along with the point value and grade level indicator covered for each question. If you made changes to your assessments you will need to modify your templates or have our office modify them.
Tutorials
We now have some much needed tutorials for OASIS and the assessment generator. Turn your speakers or headphones up and go to the following website: http://www.ohioces.org/_StartDemo.htm
*** New Features ***
Ryan and I are working with Alea Barker on a new on-line Pacing/Mapping chart. We are hoping to have it in a prototype status before November 12, 2007.
Let Mike (mandre@ohioces.org) know what you think of a place on OASIS where teachers can easily generate their own webpage for their class use.
Also, let me know if your district is paying for software (e.g. block scheduling) that is not doing what you would really like it to do or let me know if you have any ideas that would benefit students and teachers that you would like to see developed. Thanks.
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Tonya Cline of New Lexington suggested we distribute an OASIS newsletter to keep everyone updated on the latest enhancements and news about OASIS. This is the first newsletter. I have categorized this newsletter into "Latest News", "Teaching Ideas/Tips", and "Frequently Asked Questions". I may add categories as necessary. Thanks for this much needed idea, Tonya.
Latest News - May 18, 2007
New Report - Assessment Comparison
Tim Curtis and Mark Grashel of Huntington and Janie Halaiko of Junction City both suggested a new report for teachers. This new report will allow teachers to select a class and then check which assessments they will view the percentage achieved for those assessments. Each assessment chosen will be represented by a bar graph on the x-axis while the percentage achieved for that assessment for that particular class will be on the y-axis. This will let you track student progress over time. You could select your first 3 Math assessments and see how the class performed on those 3 assessments. To access this new report, a teacher will login and select "Reports" and then select "Assessment Comparison Graph". The teacher will then be prompted to select the class period. A list of all assessments that have been chosen with the "Add Assessment" button will be displayed with a check box next to each assessment displayed. Check the assessments that you want to view on the graph and then click the "View Report" button. The graph for your selections will then be displayed.
New Report Option - Disagregate by sub groups
Diane Michaels and Julie Werstbaugh of Hillsboro and Debbie Younge and Nancy Matuschonek of Chillicothe both suggested the ability for teachers to view their various reports by sub group (IEP, LEP, ethnicity, gender, disability). Diane and Julie prototyped this new feature and we now have several districts using this feature. For districts that want to see how their different sub groups performed, a teacher can select the "Assessment" tab on OASIS and select the assessment that they want to analyze. They can scroll down to the bottom of the assessment data entry spreadsheet, select their disagregate conditions from the drop down menus and then select a report to view.
Score Data Entry Enhancement
Paul Alford and some of the teachers at Fairfield County suggested that we enhance the score data entry grid ("Assessments" tab) by allowing teachers to go to a student score row and enter in "100" into the "Percent" column and all of the scores for each individual question will automatically go to the maximum point value for the question. So if a teacher enters "100" into the percent column and then moves their mouse to a different cell besides the current "Percent" column, that students scores will automatically go to 100 percent. This is a quick data entry technique for when a student gets all or almost all of the questions correct. If the student gets almost, but not quite, all the questions correct, you can still type in "100" in the percent column and then go back to the few individual questions to change those few cells. Do NOT forget to "Save"!. Thanks Paul.
Scanning Answer Sheets
With an enormous amount of help from Tim Curtis and Mark Grashel of Huntington who were the orginal pilots of scanning answer sheets directly into OASIS to Belinda Banks and the people at Fairborn Schools who helped us refine and perfect easier scanning, we have developed a method of grading student bubble answer sheets and entering the data directly into OASIS without having to enter the scores into the Assessment spreadsheet grid. The newest method involes all teachers adding their assessments to their classes by clicking "Add Assessment" for the assessments that they want to give. The OASIS coordinator can then click "Reports", then "Generate Cover & Answer Sheets" and print off the assessment answer sheets for an assessment. The teachers give the answer sheets to the students, instructing them to only fill in the multiple choice bubbles. The teachers will grade the short answer and extended response questions and fill in numeric bubbles on the student answer sheets. You can then walk up to a scanner that has the Optical Mark Recognition software loaded and scan in the student answer sheets. The software will grade the multiple choice questions and input all the student scores into the OASIS web database. If any districts are interested in checking this new technology out, give us a call and set up a time we can show you how this works.
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