Happy New Year 2015!!!!!!!

I know, I know, I am a little late in my New Year’s greeting!  I hope you had a restful time from the normal day to day bustle.  I managed to catch up on some family visiting and some cleaning for sure.  The cold weather kept me from feeling like super cleaning woman so I refrained in several cleaning areas :)!

I know that many of you are concerned about the upcoming PARCC assessment or similar assessment.  For those of you taking the PARCC assessment in paper and pencil, these items are already posted on the website now here.

Further there are now more helpful sites emerging that are helpful for PARCC practice.  One of these such sites is Illustrative Mathematics.  This site has practice items that are very much like the performance based questions on the PARCC assessment like below.

The best site of all is a practice test site called Ten Marks which gives students digital PARCC like questions with multiple choice and multiple response answer choices.  Students can be assigned questions with the click of a common core standard.  These assignments can then be taken on the computer or iPad.  The results are immediately made available to the teacher.  If students miss a question they are given the opportunity to watch a video about what they missed while they are doing the assignment.  The program is free and so easy to use however, you must pay a fee for the best version.  This is definitely worth taking a look at and the teachers L-O-V-E it.

I hope these few ideas help you get a head start on the upcoming testing season!