 started. Welcome to both of you. We're expecting hopefully a few more folks and the other thing we're going to be doing is recording the webinar this morning so that we can archive it so our colleagues from across the province can join us and check in and get the same information in the next couple of weeks. So let's jump in. It's going to be a really quick webinar this morning just to give you some updates and some information and don't hesitate to jump in and ask questions or put something down in the chat box. We'll be following the chat feed while we're on to get together this morning. So the goal for today, I'm just going to figure out how to, there we go, just get my advancing slides working, goal for today is really just to familiarize everyone with the options for administering the student learning assessments this year, provide hopefully a few tips for getting students ready and just allowing time to answer any questions or what brought you here today. So I'm hoping at the end of it you'll be very happy and excited about launching into the SLAs. So I pulled a few frequently asked questions. The first one that's really important this year is that they are keeping the SLAs available for the entire school year right up until June 30th and so that means that you have lots of flexibility on whether you test them right away, whether you want to retest them, or even consider that you could test grade twos at the end of the school year. So this buys us lots of options. The next thing that is exciting is that teachers can choose to test one. A few are all of the students. So however many students are submitted on the class lists is who can be, who can take the test. So it's not a required thing that you test your entire class. The next piece that is different again this year is that teachers are going to have some options about administering one, two, three or four of the SLAs components. So there's a lot more flexibility available this year and like we mentioned here you can administer and or re-administer certain parts of the test. So sometimes we get questions about which devices work or don't work and they generally say that tablets cannot be used to respond to the digital questions and most Chromebooks work and really it's recommended that students have access to a mouse because the trackpad sometimes is tricky for these younger students. The data reports are available within 24 hours of submitting the results so that's great because you don't have to wait for an extended period. You are encouraged to share the SLA results with parents so that means whether you print out that parent report off the dashboard or you just have conversations with them at the fall interview times it's really up to you how you share those and so it's getting a little blurred on the bottom but the results do not get reported back to any accountability pillars but just to be clear principles and superintendents can see the student results. Now let's just dig in a little bit on the four components. So these four components haven't changed over the entire piloting period. There are digital literacy questions. This year there's 45. There's a literacy performance task with four sub-activities. The numeracy questions there's 39 this year and the performance task there's again two numeracy performance components. The totals are slightly different for anyone testing their French immersion or Francophone students. They have gone back to field testing so field testing means that while the students would answer 45 literacy questions they will actually only report 30 of them in your data report because the other 15 are field testing. So the last thing maybe to mention here is just they want to reiterate that while we're testing for literacy and numeracy which obviously touches language arts and mathematics outcomes they actually pull questions from contexts as far reaching as arts education health science and social studies. So your kids will get a full range of questions on all sorts of interesting topics. If you've done SLA testing before you should be fairly familiar with your dashboard. I don't think you'll see anything different there this year. This is where you access everything from setting your students up on which particular test you want them to write. Their login is there. You've got some preview practice questions release questions and then of course that's where your data results will show up. Now one thing we recommend is that if you want to get a little head start teachers are welcome to actually preview the questions. Now clearly they don't want you to go and give the kids too much info but obviously if there's some pieces you feel might need to be pre-taught perhaps how to answer a particular style of question you are welcome to go in. This is all the different testlets that are available that your students will be writing if you choose to do both the literacy and the numeracy side. But yeah it's available now for teachers at any point to do a preview. I will mention that when you write you choose to have your students write literacy and or numeracy they have to write the entire set of testlets. So in our picture here I can't just say well I'll have my kids only write the happy cappy and the tooth story. It doesn't work like that so if you're choosing to do the literacy digital component the students will be writing all five of these testlets. Hopefully that makes sense. So while we're talking about administration just a couple things to keep in mind. This is what teachers have been telling us over the pilot years. The practice opportunities are really valuable to students. So definitely helps them get familiar with the type of testing how to answer online so definitely worth a little time there. One of the pieces that teachers were surprised about was that maybe not surprised but they definitely commented on was that students aren't necessarily used to listening to materials and accessing materials in multiple mediums and then turning that into an answer on the test. So they thought if there's some way to prep students that they have to pull some information for perhaps a reading and some from a little video or the audio clip that they get used to being able to pull information from multiple mediums to answer a question. And on that same prepping idea they talked about how some of our younger kids aren't necessarily used to answering a question that has four or five answers built in. So for example if they're looking at their schedule for the week and the question asked them to identify where they're putting swimming students aren't maybe used to practicing having to answer multi-step questions so you could possibly review that with them. If you choose to administer the full SLA with all four components teachers would remind you to space that out because clearly we don't want our students to sit through four straight test components you're not going to get their best results. And a lot of people found that sometimes it took up to weeks just to get through all the pieces and and give those students some some mental breathing room. And as you very well know our students all write at different pacing so definitely allowing for some time for those who need some extra time or perhaps a student who is away you're gonna have to pace it so that you maybe have other tasks while a couple of your kids are finishing up SLA components. From here I just want to highlight again that there's practice questions and we want to differentiate the practice questions from the released questions because you'll see both on your dashboard. Practice questions actually have been updated this year but the Albert education wants to be really clear that these are not intended to reflect the content or complexity of actual SLA questions. This is almost just to get students familiar with how to interface with the testing site so these questions might be somewhat simpler just so kids can get used to where to click and and how to work with this tool. So if you really want to dig into a little bit more in-depth questions this is where you would look on your on on the site and find the release questions. And they have released questions from both 2014 and 2015. I've just given you a sampler here from the 2015 panel but you can see that you have released performance tasks as well as the digital assessments. So kind of winding down here just want to touch on what would need to happen before testing students or gearing up to test the students. First step of course is that teachers need to get approval from their principals and and then once that happens then they get access to the extra net and then they can sign on to the SLA teacher dashboard. If you're just setting up an account for the first time good reminder to use your work email rather than any personal emails when signing up for an account. And grade three student data needs to be submitted to the the system prior to setting up. So that typically happens within the school processes. And then last two points here the upper education documents state that school staff notify parents that their child will be participating in SLAs. So you can certainly have conversations at school about what that might look like. And so the last item is just a reminder that students sign in with their nine digit Alberta student number. So you'll want to make sure you have those perhaps cut out on those little slips of paper ready to go for for the students. So we at ARPDC have built a support resource page sorry that titles are going a little funny on our screen here. The webinar today of course here you are thank you for joining us. And we are going to do another one on October 12th when a lot of the teachers are ready to really dig into their data reports. And so we'll do a 15 minute walk through just some tips and tricks about some of the little more hidden places about how to quickly get some some class results and do some quick analysis. And if you scroll further down this web page if you actually went to the live page you'd see links to some of the how to videos and many of the resources that Albert education has put in place. And we will archive all the webinars on the same page and I've got a hyperlinked below. But you can access it from any of your ARPDC sites where you would normally look up resources. You would just look up SLAs or student learning assessments. So with that that's kind of our in and quick this morning about SLAs. Is there anything that I can answer that would be helpful? Any questions you still have? So type in the chat or jump on with your mics. And if there's anything I can answer please let us know. Yeah, sure. We'll just wait. And if you've got what you need this morning I thank you for stopping in and otherwise I'll stick around for any questions. I hope you guys have a fabulous Friday and I wish you all the best with your SLA testing.