News Release - Oregon Department of Education

News Releases - Oregon Department of Education:
The Oregon Department of Education (ODE) announced today that all Oregon schools will use paper-and-pencil assessment tests in math and reading for the remainder of the 2006-07 school year. This action is necessary because ODE's contractor for TESA, Vantage Learning, has declined to continue performing services required under the contract. ODE exhausted every option to continue with TESA until the end of the school year. ODE is working with the Oregon Department of Justice to explore its legal options.

Below is a screen grab of what you find if you visit the TESA page. The page that schools used to log into the system for testing.

By the way as of this posting, Vantage Learning still notes TESA and the work they did for the Oregon Department of Education as one of their "Success Stories".... From where I'm sitting, thinking of administering paper pencil tests to my students, it sure does not sound like one.

Technorati Tags: TESA, Vantage Learning

More Testing Mess...

My previous two posts have concerned TESA, the Oregon online testing system developed and operated by Vantage Learning, and the technical issues that have come up that have forced the Oregon Department of Education to suspend testing using the system, which might force all Oregon schools to administer paper/pencil tests this spring.

I took a look at the Vantage Learning web site this morning hoping to find information from the company explaining their side of the issue. I did not find anything. I do find it a bit ironic that under the heading Success Stories, the first item listed it TESA, the Oregon State Achievement Testing system. The system that because of errors and technical issues has been deemed unusable by the Oregon Department of Education.

Technorati Tags: testing, ODE, Vantage Learning, TESA

More Oregon Testing and Vantage Learning

Below is the text of an email that was sent out by the Oregon Department of Education regarding the situation with Vantage Learning and the Oregon State Achievement Tests. I wonder what other state education departments or school districts work with these folks and if they are aware of this situation...

For the past several weeks, we have been working to maintain the integrity and stability of Oregon's assessment system - TESA - while dealing with performance and contractual issues that could disrupt our capacity to administer tests through the end of the school year.

Vantage has informed Oregon that because of a dispute over financial issues, it will terminate its work with us before the end of our scheduled testing window. Oregon maintains that Vantage has failed to meet its contractual obligations for service and deliverables.

ODE has made extensive efforts to resolve the issues with Vantage, including traveling to the company's offices in Pennsylvania. We have not, to date, reached a successful conclusion of the dispute.

More information will be communicated as it becomes available today.

Ed Dennis, Deputy Superintendent
Oregon Department of Education

Technorati Tags: Vantage Learning, TESA

Oregon State Testing Problems

In Oregon we have the option of conducting our state achievement testing using an online web based system called TESA. It is produced by a company called Vantage Learning. Recently we have been experiencing problems with the test. The web site that we connect to has been having many technical problems and on Wednesday the Oregon Department of Education announced they were suspending the test until they could get assurances from the vendor that the testing system was going to run properly. If they don't get it working properly, then we are looking at giving paper/pencil tests to all of our students. What fun... You can read more about this in this article from the Oregon Statesman Journal.

Technorati Tags: testing, Vantage Learning

Lewis Elementary Auction

The school where I work, Lewis Elementary, is holding an auction on March 15. The goal is to raise money to help fund things like our Americorps position and other school activities. If you are in Portland and would like to help, please consider attending. More information is available on the Lewis web site. If you do attend, you can bid on cool stuff like this chair painted by Mrs. Logue's kindergarten students.

Voicemail in your email...

I have often found myself wading through the voicemail on my mobile phone and wishing I could visually see a list of the messages and listen to them in a non linear fashion. The Apple iPhone will have this feature, but now through a free service called CallWave, you can accomplish the same thing with your mobile phone.

CallWave is a service that allows you to hear and respond to your mobile phone messages in your email. The free service sends a copy of your mobile phone message to your email, allowing you to:

• Sort and prioritize messages from your email in-box - viewing caller names and message lengths in the subject line.
• Listen and respond to messages instantly with powerful text reply and call back features.
• Be notified of new messages via detailed SMS alerts on your handset.
• Permanently save your messages on your computer.

I've been looking for something like this. Basically all your voicemail now comes to your email account. You can still access voicemail from your phone, but now also get a detailed email message indicating who called, the length of the message, and the option of listening to the message from your mail. You also have the option to call back the number that left the voice message. The service will call your mobile phone and connect you to the number that left the message. If the call came from a mobile phone, you also have the option to send a text message to the caller.

By way of Photo Matt

Technorati Tags: callwave, mobile phones, voicemail

DIY Coloring Book?

Dumpr is a collection of tools for manipulating images found on Flickr. One that looks interesting is the sketch tool. Kind of a do it yourself coloring book creator.

by way of CogDogBlog

Google Maps Transparencies

Google Maps Transparencies is a Google Maps mash-up that allows you to overlay a satellite and street map view while browsing Google Maps. You can toggle between views having the map overlay the satellite view, or the satellite view overlay the map. Great for getting your bearings in a new location.

by way of Digital Geography...

Technorati Tags: google maps

Post From IMified...

I am posting this from my iChat client using a service called IMified.

Imified is an instant messenger buddy that works across all major IM networks and offers access to a growing number of web applications, as well as productivity tools like notes, reminders, and todo's. Imified helps you get things done faster.

Basically IMified gives you access to various web services (Google Calendar, Wordpress, Basecamp, blogger, TypePad, LiveJournal, Remember the milk...) via your IM client. So this post is coming from iChat on my MacBook, but it could also be posted from my phone using my AIM client, or from Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, or Google Talk. At Lewis we have a reader board that displays an RSS ticker of upcoming events. The events are powered by a WordPress.com weblog. I can now update the events ticker just using my IM client.

From reading their support forums, it looks like they are at work on a metaweblog api implementation which means I should be able to add my Drupal sites and post to them too. A pretty nice little tool...

More BatchGeoCoder...

Cross posted on TechLearning.com...
In my school district we are beginning our staffing and enrollment planning for the next school year. In the case of my school we have a new boundary change which has added a new level of uncertainty based on the fact that while kindergarten aged students in the new area are automatically slotted for my school, students living in that area already enrolled in our district have the option of staying at their current school or moving to my school. The process for this decision making plays out over the next six weeks so I will have to make some staffing and grade level configuration decisions based on the best information available at this time. To help with with this decision making process I have plotted the addresses of the students in question in Google Earth. By visually seeing where these students live I can get a better idea of how close they live to my school and how likely they are to make the move based on things like walking distance and transportation options. To do this I took the addresses of the students in question and plotted them with tool called the batchgeocoder (batchgeocoder.com). This web tool created by Phillip Holmstrand allows you to...

"map any kind of street address list, for example copied from Excel, and geocode the addresses to get latitude and longitude coordinates using the tool below. The data can then be mapped in your browser, downloaded into Google Earth, saved to a web page, or transferred back into your spreadsheet. You can also use this tool to calculate distances to multiple addresses from a single point, or get quick driving directions to multiple destinations. Mapping multiple locations with your own custom data takes seconds, just follow the 6 steps below to plot your own data on a fully interactive multi-point map..."

By using this information, along with other information from my school district, I can begin this process with a few more educated assumptions and in the process make better decisions for my program and students.

Technorati Tags: Batchgeocoder, Google Earth