October Update

A little late getting this up, many of you should have gotten this in your monthly DAC e-mail update.

We still need volunteers for the study! If you are willing to participate, please send me an e-mail.

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Perspective™ - October Update

In October, a number of exciting new resources were launched; including new interactive study guide resource pages. October’s highlights include:

Interactive Study Guide Resource Pages

Over 60 select pages from interactive study guides have been introduced to the site. The pages were selected for their rich content and aligned to the MCA II standards.

Study guide pages are available for Math, Science, and Reading.

Some examples may be viewed by entering the following resource ID numbers in the show a resource box on the resource overview page located here: http://perspective.pearsonaccess.com/perspective/appmanager/mn/educator/?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=edu_lr_overview_page

Some IDs are: ols0450, ols1245, ols1336, and ols2852

More science added
A new batch of 50+ science resources have been added in addition to the interactive study guide pages.

More new users everyday
The educator site had over 9,000 new visitors in the last 30 days with an average of 305 new users a day.

The family site had over 4,000 new users in the last 30 days with an average of 137 new users daily.

Visit length is increasing
34% of visitors to the family site spent 20 minutes or more on the site with 29% of users spending more than an hour on the site.

50% of visitors to the educator site spent 20 minutes or more on the site with 39.1% spending over an hour on the site.

65.8% of the visitors to the educator site were first-time visitors.

Don’t forget the online calculators
Lat month we mentioned the launch of the online four function, scientific, and graphing calculators.

These are great online resources for students that have forgotten their calculators or who need some extra practice with graphing calculators.

The calculators are located at: http://perspective.pearsonaccess.com/perspective/appmanager/mn/family/?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=par_tools_page

In the upcoming months we will be adding some more great resources and an exciting new feature. For the most up-to-date information on Perspective, visit the blog APerspective at: http://www.pearsonperspective.com/blog/index.htm

Remember:
Encourage parents to visit http://www.perspectiveforfamilies.com/mn to access free supplemental materials for their children.

Educators can take advantage of our robust library of teacher supporting materials by visiting http://www.perspectiveforeducators.com/mn and clicking on the Teaching Resources tab.

From the Perspective Team: We are still seeking participants for a research study. Please consider circulating the following page among your colleagues.
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Help Improve Perspective

The Perspective Team is looking for educators to participate in a brief survey and/or interview about their experiences with Perspective.

The data collected in this study will be part of a larger scientific study of the technical qualities of assessments for learning. Your responses will also be used by the Perspective development team to further enhance Perspective to better meet the needs of educators, students and families.

Your Input is Important
By participating, you will have the opportunity to influence the development of Perspective so that it better meets your needs. The focus of our study is educators. We are not seeking input from students or parents at this time.

We Seek Your Opinion
We hope that you have found Perspective to be a valuable tool and can provide us with some insight in to how you use it. If your experience was a less than successful one and you are no longer using it, we would like to hear about that, too. Your input will help us understand how we can improve the current Perspective offering.

Won’t you please consider participating in this valuable research study?

If you would like to make sure your voice is heard, please send an e-mail with your contact information to:

Chris.shira@pearson.com

· In the subject line, please key: MN Study.
· In the body of the e-mail please indicate the grade and subject you teach or your role in the district/state.

Thank you, in advance, for participating in this research study and helping us improve Perspective.

The Perspective Team

Participation in this study is voluntary and limited to educators who currently use Perspective or have used Perspective in the past. In order to maintain the integrity of responses received, an honorarium is not offered to participants. Volunteers will be contacted at a later date and asked to complete the survey and/or interview. Your contact information will be used only for the purposes of this inquiry in accordance with Pearson’s Privacy Policy available here:
http://www.pearsonschool.com/index.cfm?locator=PSZ19q