Escambia:
We have requested that middle school teachers who are participating in our technology professional development use the ST2L to demonstrate their students' technology proficiency. We have requested that each middle school Technology Coordinators set a goal for the percentage of their students who are technology proficient as measured by the ST2L. Our middle school Technology Coordinators' learning community has discussed administration of the tool at several of the monthly meetings.

Wakulla:

We actually administered the test to 4th and 5th graders as well as middle schoolers. For the elementary schools, we used computer labs and scheduled a time to administer the ST2L to 1 class after another. We sent the indvidual class results to the principals to share with the teachers. We also sent school wide results so the schools can see what skills the students need to work on.

For the middle schools, a few teachers were chosen and either someone from the district office or the technology teacher at that school helped that teacher get into a computer lab and get their students to take the ST2L. Again results were sent to the principals.

I actually loaded the classes into the system and let the system generate the logins,passwords. We sent them out to the teachers shortly before their classes were to take the ST2L so they could print and distribute them.

Our eventual goal is to take the results and create some activities teachers can use in their classrooms or in the computer lab to help students learn these skills (will be one of my summer projects)

Margo,
How did it go with the 4th and 5th grade students?
I like the idea of developing out classroom strategies for use with students to reinforce technology literacy and move the students to proficiency. Not only will these activities impact student technology literacy, you are also embedded these into classroom instruction which will increase teacher technology literacy. Will you be willing to share some of the classroom activities once you get started? Maybe we could work together to develop such resources that could be shared throughout the counties?

There are so many good ideas out there.
-Jennifer Krill
Pasco County
Department of Instructional Media and Technology

St. Johns

The district requires all 8th grade students take the assessment. The district Instructional Technology Department goes to each school to assist. We have eight middle schools and we stagger the administration from the week after FCAT until the end of the school year. We test kids in one of their core classes. Usually English or Social Studies because when we used electives we missed some students. We do use hard wired computers. We do the rosters for each school. At the completion of the administration we send a report of the data comparing all of our middle schools. We base some of our instructional technology goals for the following year based on the results of the data. The data is very beneficial for instruction and for writing grants.

Putnam used this tool at all Middle Schools this year. The first test was administered before January. We plan to use the post test in May to measure growth. Reports have been shared with administrators at the district level and at each school site. I built student accounts at the district level using the import class option. We used our social studies class rosters for creating testing groups to make sure all 8th graders would have accounts. The reports are being used to plan instruction and to help write technology plans. The tool has increased awareness and generated good discussions on NETS and expectations.