1/9/2023 Important updates for FAST, ELI & Panorama's Student Success (Updated links)

Welcome to the new year. This email contains an assortment of updates related to MTSS, FastBridge, Student Success and the Iowa EdPortal. Please take a moment to read these and share with your colleagues as appropriate, especially if you have new administrators who may not be signed up for these (see below).

  • The Iowa Education Portal is continuing to experience intermittent errors. Bookmark this link to check the status of all of the systems we support:MTSS Systems Status. This page includes any workaround suggestions, ETA for fix, etc. that are known at the time.
  • There’s a new article on known issues with FAST assessment instructions, scoring and materials in the Iowa Resources section of the FAST knowledge base that will be update as new information becomes available. 
    • Example: The directions for Word Segmentation scoring in the FastBridge earlyReading test have been clarified, but not all of the references to the scoring rules are updated yet in the FastBridge materials. The correct directions can be found in the Administrator Materials for Progress Monitoring, which are available under Downloads on the Training & Resources tab in FastBridge. Currently the PM directions are correct, but the screening directions are not. The key clarification in the directions is that the score is based on the correct number of phonemes isolated. Blends do not count as correct. In other words, /bl/ is not correct, but /b/ /l/ would be counted as two sounds. Some of the directions have an incorrect scoring example for the word “block.” 
  • The winter screening window runs through February 3rd. With winter weather, flu season, etc. it’s best to not wait until the last minute to take care of screening. We recommend focusing first on completing literacy screening with your default assessment, especially K-6. The system will allow you to continue to screen students after the official window closes, but those scores won’t update Healthy Indicator reports or literacy status calculations.Read more here. 
  • Start the new year off with an important self-check: Are you following Iowa’s Early Literacy Implementation Law (ELI) requirements? Not only is the law still in effect, but the requirements align with best practice for helping improve student outcomes. Students with a literacy status of At Risk and Persistently At Risk (as identified in Student Success) still need to have high quality interventions in place and regularly monitored, plus the monitoring data should be reviewed to identify and change up interventions that are not working well. It is still a DE requirement for ELI to log interventions in Student Success. Doing so allows you to take advantage of the intervention effectiveness reviews to help identify and refine the interventions being delivered. If you have questions, please use the Student Success ticket system.
  • You can find important information to support Iowa users of FastBridge in the Iowa section of the FastBridge knowledge base, as well as articles and videos to support use of Student Success in that help library. We are constantly updating articles and creating new resources as we learn where our users tend to have questions. In addition to “how to” articles, there are “why” articles designed to support building leaders working on improving practice and outcomes for students. 
    • Have an idea for an article or see a need for a resource in either knowledge base? We’d love to hear it! Please submit a support request in the appropriate ticket system with your suggestions.
  • JMC, Infinite Campus and PowerSchool now support “live” grades for Student Success.Read more about it here.

Please share this message with your colleagues, especially any new administrators or district leaders who may not be getting these emails. They can click here to sign up for future emails

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