 Hi, my name is Heidi Rethmeyer and this Wednesday webinar is on ACT resources and as many of you are aware, the 11th grade NISA test is now gone and is replaced with the ACT. So I have gathered some resources together to help all the different content areas prepare for the ACT and help their students do well on the ACT. And as I go through this, I'm sure a lot of you have some great resources as well. So after this video, if you don't see some great things, please email them to me and I would be happy to add them to the Google document. So here is a QR code that will take you directly to the Google doc. I also have a Google shortener there in case your school blocks the Google shortener. You can use the QR code. I also noted on the left hand side how what we're going to talk about today covers several of the AQUES tenants. We talk about transitions, educator effectiveness, college and career ready, educational opportunities for students and certainly assessment. So I'm going to go out now and take you to this document and go through some of the resources I've gathered. So here's a document the QR code should take you to. Again if you have some great resources, please email them to me and I'd be happy to add them to this so everyone could benefit from some other resources. So to start just in terms of the organization of the document, I started with just some general resources about ACT for every content area and then I have separated the content areas for some specific information. So first we will go out to the official ACT website and there is an abundance of information here. It's actually a little overwhelming. This is where students can actually register for the ACT. There are all sorts of products and services, most of which have a cost involved. However I will show you one particular area where you can go and create an account and then it will send you weekly questions which I think would be very useful for your class. So lots of information here on the official ACT website. I also have some free study guides both in English and Spanish. So this is the most recent for 2016-17. You can notice that 64 pages long so it's pretty all inclusive. It has just some general test-taking strategies. It talks about each content area and how long they'll take, types of questions. And then as you scroll down to the middle here there is an actual practice test that you can take. So teachers can certainly pick some of these out and use them in class. You can use them as bell ringers. So a lot of ways that you can use these. Again here is another link to several practice tests. And I found a lot of things on prep scholars so that's where a lot of the links are going to take you. So on this particular one if you scroll down here, here are some full length practice tests from multiple years that you can give your students or just again pick questions off that you can use throughout the year to help students become familiar with the content, the method and the types of questions that they might see on the ACT. Now the ACT profile, this is the one where you can actually go and create an account for free and once you do that, if you go under profile, my account and settings, you can sign up for weekly practice questions and I'll show you what those look like because I've received some. First I'll go ahead and take you out there. So here's where you would go to join ACT profile and you would sign in or create an account. I already have an account so I will go ahead and sign in. Then once you're signed in you can go to profile, my account and then if you go to settings, here is where you can ask for weekly practice questions. It can send you some information. There's a lot of other things you can do in here and I think counselors probably do a whole lot more with it. I'm going at this from the perspective of a classroom teacher as to what would be most helpful in obtaining some information and some practice questions for students. So you can do this and then it will send you an email with a link to some weekly questions. Now keep in mind those practice questions are going to be all content areas. So if you're a math teacher that week you might only get two math questions because some of them might be science and some of them might be reading. And it says here are this week's questions. So there's several questions in here from this week. English, math, I think we have some science. I can go ahead and go straight to my ACT profile and since I'm already logged in it's going to take me straight to the questions. So here are questions. This is a science question. I can hit this arrow and go back to the previous day which was a reading question. Here's a math question I could use. I could use this again as just a bell ringer. I can select an answer, have your students do this and it will give you some information as to whether you're correct or incorrect. So that's just a great way that you could do something really quick every day. So that's under ACT profile. Students that are familiar with Quizlet. I think I already have my Quizlet open so I'm going to go over here to Quizlet. So if you have a Quizlet account it's very easy to just search for vocabulary sets that have already been created and I'm shameless if someone else has created a great set I will be more than happy to borrow it. So you can see all sorts of sets come up. Lots of information we can do here we can take a look at. So if I see one that I like I can select it. Notice I can make a copy of it so I can make it my own and then I can edit it as well. And if you're familiar with Quizlet Live that is a great way for students to interact with the vocabulary words using some gaming and if you're wondering how to use that you can go and watch my YouTube video on Quizlet Live. So this would be a great way to have some fun with some of these vocabulary terms that we find under ACT. So you can do ACT Science, ACT Math, ACT Reading. Lots of information already there for you on Quizlet. If you don't have an account I would recommend you get one and make sure you get a teacher account so that you have this Quizlet Live option. Okay some other information here. I'm not going to go through all of these links but some general resources and tips again from PrEP Scholar. Some other practice tests either through Kaplan or McGraw Hill. There's like I said there's a lot out there so you just have to find what works for you and for your students. Right so now I'm going to get into specific content areas. I found a couple lists of vocabulary words I thought were pretty good for reading. So this is the one from PrEP Scholar, the top 150 ACT vocabulary words. If you do L to J at your school this might be a great resource to use for vocabulary terms. Again under Scholastic they also have a list vocabulary terms that can be used. Okay Professor Word. This was a new one I ran across that I thought was pretty cool. It's actually an app so if you click this link it will take you to the Professor Word website and it's in beta so it's something that's kind of new but it's worked pretty well for me and I thought it was pretty cool. So I'm in Chrome right now I tried it in Firefox and it worked really well too. So all you have to do is take this and drag it up to your bar right up here and you can see I already have mine up here to my bookmark bar. Okay so once you have this in your bookmark bar what you can do is open up an article. So I went over and opened up a news article on the poor galaxy phones and if I hit run Professor Word it will go through the article and highlight words that would be considered ACT or SAT vocabulary words. And now as a student I can just come over and it will give me definitions of each of these words. So that's a great way to pull out vocabulary of something that you're doing on a website. So that is Professor Word. I just thought that one was pretty cool so I think that's a pretty neat link that you can take whatever you're working on online and look for specific vocabulary words right out of that particular article. So that is Professor Word. Okay vocab sushi that's just kind of a vocabulary quiz kind of a game there is a paid version but if you just want something for your students to do for free they can work on the vocabulary quiz and it is kind of in the ACT format style so that's just kind of a game. Some other links that provide grammar rules and then just some information on preparing for the reading section again both from prep scholar. Okay math again from prep scholar we can look up some information to help your students just understand what the math section is going to look like. Okay so it gives you the format how many questions how long is it going to be I like this right here the content breakdown in terms of what areas pre-algebra, elementary algebra, intermediate geometry and trigonometry. Okay some information on the scores and then some very specifics in terms of each area what types of questions you might see and then they give you some samples. Okay so that's really an introduction as to what the math test will look like. Math formulas very important I think for math teachers to know what formulas your students need to be exposed to and know how to use so under each content area there's all sorts of equations that the students will have to understand how to use and know so that is really a good checklist for math teachers in terms of the formulas. Permitted calculators there's often a question as to what types of calculators you can have on the ACT so this link actually takes you to the ACT website I think it's the frequently asked questions and if we scroll down to test day right here it says can I use a calculator here's where you get some information on what calculators you can and cannot use it specifically lists the ones that are prohibited which are TI-89 and TI-92. The TI-83 which is a very common one is an acceptable calculator and most of your scientific calculators that students use as well. Okay science again from Prep Scholar this will take you to their website that has information about what the science section will look like and the topics and skills that you'll be tested on and I think most of the science teachers know that the science test on the ACT is very much about interpreting data a lot of graphs a lot of tables so this gives students and teachers some more information about what they'll see so question types data representation like I said almost half of the test over a third of the test on interpreting graphs some research summaries a lot about the scientific method and the different viewpoints also some questions some more information some science passages again from Prep Scholar so this is a lot just like what we talked about questions on data research this has a lot to do with the scientific method here and then some viewpoints so again here are some more examples of some practice questions that you can use with your students and then science vocabulary lists again you can find those on Quizlet I thought this link was a pretty good link that has a lot of vocabulary terms as well and then the last section the writing again it takes you out to Prep Scholar which gives you a guide and some tips for writing an ACT essay and they give you an example and they go through step by step how this particular person would have approached the process of writing an essay for the ACT ACT okay so those are all the resources that I have gathered again if you have some great ones please send them my way on an email I'll go back to my presentation here put my email back up so if you have any other great ideas please send them my way and I will add them to the document but I just wanted to give you a head start as to some things that you can do right now maybe with your classes and getting them comfortable and familiar with some of the content and the skills that they're going to have to know on the ACT this spring so good luck thanks for watching