A series of well-produced videos about the Common Core, and what the expectations are for each content area.

Interesting, and scary, read.

iNACOL Publication; extensive discussion on inputs v outcomes, and summative once-per-year testing. Paper provides an argument for full-time online schools. Dear Partners in Innovation, As a follow-up to our last meeting, I want to share with you a publication that was released last month at the International Association for K-12 Online Learning's (iNACOL) annual meeting. As you know, there have been quality standards for online learning for some time now, but these standards were predominantly inputs-based. Earlier this year, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded iNACOL to tackle the issue of quality from an outcomes perspective. In creating their report, iNACOL held a series of multi-day focus groups with experts from around the country. Over the last several months, Dr. Joe Freidhoff, our Director of Online Learning Research and Innovation, and I were heavily involved with participating in these groups and providing feedback on drafts of the report. The final report recommends discussions surrounding quality assurance using five outcomes-based measures: 1) Proficiency 2) Individual Student Growth 3) Graduation Rate 4) College and Career Readiness 5) Closing the Achievement Gap While the report's scope was limited to quality indicators for full-time and supplemental online learning environments, the multiple outcomes-based measures recommended in the report deserve consideration for their applicability to traditional face-to-face schools. MVU is proud to have been involved with this report, and we view it as another step toward improving the quality of education students receive. The report titled: "Measuring Quality From Inputs to Outcomes: Creating Student Learning Performance Metrics and Quality Assurance for Online Schools" can be accessed online at: http://www.inacol.org/research/docs/iNACOL_Quality_Metrics.pdf Jamey Jamey Fitzpatrick President & CEO Michigan Virtual Univer

Item and task prototypes taken from the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC). Twenty three states belong to PARCC, while 24 belong to the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium. Each organization's aim is to provide online assessments to test that the Common Core State Standards are effectively taught and learned in the 47 states who have adopted them. This webpage contains the links to the assessment item samples developed by PARCC to date.

Team Mouse: Please note that I used this as one of my SIG annotated resources.

The Prototypes for PARCC Math assessment samples are housed at a site other than the official PARCC website.

The Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium is developing a system of valid, reliable, and fair next-generation assessments aligned to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in English language arts/literacy (ELA/literacy) and mathematics for grades 3-8 and 11. There are two valuable pdfs (among many) at this link: SBAC Mathematics Item Specifications Grades 3-5 and SBAC English Language Arts Item and Task Specifications.

Online Assessment Strategy Tool called Test Quest from Houghton Mifflin Mathematics, developed for 4th Graders. Students are led through math exercises using various strategies to solve story problems: draw a picture, rule out wrong answers, check your work, rule out extra information and use and exact or estimated answer.

Team Mouse: Please note that I used this as one of my SIG annotated resources.

Resource found at engageny.org

This resource describes in detail the six instructional shifts needed to effectively implement the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in ELA/Literacy and the six shifts to implement them in Math.

No intention of purchasing these resources, but there's some interesting philosophical and pedagogical discussion in this website.

Again, even though these are 7th grade, the answers show the process a student needs to go through to properly perform on the assessment.

Even though these are 7th grade, they could be adapted for 4th grade on the short Quia assessment that we develop.

This site could be used as a resource to write test items within Quia. They'd have to be linked to CCSS, but it's a good resource for reference.

Link to the online assessment page within Smarter Balanced Consortium

Team Mouse: Please note that I used this as one of my SIG annotated resources.

A free online screencasting tool used to produce online demonstrations.