For the 45 states (plus the District of Columbia) that have adopted the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), the 2014-2015 school year will mark the beginning of formal online assessments. For technology staff, supporting computer-based testing means more than adjusting curriculum, a big enough task in itself. It means making the necessary technology infrastructure changes required to enable the new assessments. Things like upgrading wireless connectivity and increasing bandwidth, purchasing adequate laptop and desktop computers, installing software, learning how to deliver the new assessments and providing and undergoing professional development for the new technology.
The Mountain Brook School District located in a suburb outside of Birmingham, Alabama has just completed a series of infrastructure and hardware upgrades ahead of the testing deadline and has piloted computer-based testing using GlobalScholar, a formative assessment solution that supports the CCSS initiative.
“In our state instead of calling it Common Core they call it College and Career Readiness. For us, it’s either your preparing someone for college or you’re preparing them for the workforce,” says Donna Williamson, technology director for Mountain Brook Schools. “We wanted to make sure we covered both of those from one end or the other on the spectrum.”
Last fall, the district began the pilot using GlocalScholar and encountered some unanticipated difficulties. “There were some issues on GlobalScholar’s part. There were issues on the state-wide network’s part and there were issues in local school’s preparing for that, but we worked it out,” says Williamson.
Infrastructure
Her staff has learned that while no one can predict what your experience will be on any given test day, there are many things you can do to make the transition to online testing a near seamless experience and the trials of others may serve as a guide for you. The Mountain Brook District began preparing for online assessments about two and a half years ago. Williamson knew the district would have to upgrade its internal infrastructure and that many factors would prove to be a variable in their success including the time of day testing occurred and on what machines students were tested.
“As part of our plan to prepare, we looked at the machines that would be used, time of day [for testing], the local area network (LAN), wide area network (WAN), the firewall, our filter and then actually looked at bandwidth,” says Williamson. “The piece that a lot of people don’t take into account is if that traffic is passing through Internet filters because that can slow you down.” The same can be true of some firewalls that may only be able to accommodate a certain bandwidth, as was the case in Mountain Brook.
In order to accommodate district-wide testing, the schools’ internal infrastructure was upgraded to a 10-gigabit backbone. Desktop connections were upgraded to one gig. The wireless infrastructure was also upgraded to 802.11n.
Choosing a Device
If states choose to implement Common Core they will be administering assessments developed by the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) or the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, the two major providers for standards-based testing. There are other assessments aligned with Common Core such as the ACT Suite chosen by the state of Alabama, but most Common Core districts are using the aforementioned. Each test has a different set of requirements for device specs, things like memory or processing power.
The Mountain Brook Schools are a Dell shop so the laptops they chose are Dell Latitudes. The district refreshes its technology every few years so there are several models in circulation, but all meet the basic specifications.
“If you’re rotating your machines at a fairly aggressive rate, you’re not going to have a
