So today we had a demo from Nicole Fryeson at eInstruction and I thought it went well. We chatted up some of the Examview/CPS integration questions that I hadn't gotten satisfactory answers about and then she asked me to forward those and she'll see who she can get to reply from the development team. Here are the questions:
1. While it is possible to export Examview questions to CPS and CPS sessions to examview, a lot of important data get lost. Specifically, from Examview to CPS only the Keyword and State Standards are kept, so the reports that can be run are limited. When the sessions are sent from CPS to Examview, even that data are lost. If a teacher wants to track student and class performance on, say, specific learning objectives or local standards, he can’t. That matters more than you think, because in schools now the focus is all on RtI (response to intervention). So if a class or student is struggling with an objective, we need to be able to measure the success of specific interventions (like an engaging CPS session). How much priority is the cross-program maintenance of those data tags getting as you all continue to develop and integrate the two products?
2. Our district has had two high-level meetings recently to establish a standard testing software. Examview has been one among several candidates. In my opinion, in most ways it is the strongest. However, we’re replacing ParScore, and one complaint that has come up with Examview is the lack of any strong “statistics engine”. By this, the administrators were contrasting ParScore’s ability to measure the reliability coefficient of specific questions, etc. The second problem with Examview came in contrast to Amesweb (sp?). Specifically, the administrators were looking for a way to track waypoint progress for specific objectives. While Examview does allow a teacher to measure specific learning objectives for a given assignment OR across a range of dates (as an average of performance across that range), it does not plot performance on those objectives for specific assignments across a range of dates. While this can be done manually in a program like Excel, the administrators were looking for something that looked like a chart/graph that showed dates and performance levels along the way. Had you been at that meeting, I assure you that you would have seen the enthusiasm for the graphs on AmesWeb among the administrators. With RtI (again) being the big issue, we need an obvious and clear way to measure the effectiveness of interventions throughout the unit (not just at the beginning and end of the unit).
3. Finally, we’ve all been impressed by the flexibility of the algorithm-based questions, especially as they relate to math. However, teachers using vocabulary (foreign language, language arts, biology) would like something similar – a word bank that creates random questions from a collection of words and their definitions. As it stands, right now we use a lot of multiple choice and matching, and students get used to the same wrong answer set being attached to vocabulary words. Is this something in the works?
Of course, I also asked for freebies on a desktop launcher program, but we'll see. Bad news, looks like eventually they'll stop supporting quizshow. Darn.
Very excited about project with a teacher at Central. Odd b/c I only podcast a little, and that's the meat of the presentation. but what I like is that we're using google apps to try to pull it all together and I'm enjoying using the shared docs. Also google-apping the spreadsheet that records tech work. Anyway, I gotta go, but I just finished the camtasia/power-point/CPS practice for clauses, conjunctions, and sentence variety. I can't wait to see how it works. Seems like it has potential for stop motion interactive teaching with AV enhancements (which has been a weakness of mine historically).
Later
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