Teachers and administrators from schools and districts that took part in the PARCC and assessment tests share their experiences to help others prepare for testing this spring.

According to Chief Technology Officer Brandt Redd, the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium saw “significantly fewer problems than it had expected during its spring 2014 field tests,” he said in an article on THEJournal.com.

“Things went more smoothly than our expectations,” said Redd. “We didn't have any system wide issues; issues that happened tended to be isolated."

The article offers ten lessons learned from the assessment field tests. One of the lessons is to “do a dry run.”

Redd said the most important piece of technology advice that came out of field testing “was the importance of doing a dry run,” the article said.

“If you're taking a room that's normally used for other purposes and dedicating it to testing, you may find that once you've packed it with ‘30 computers and 30 people, the air conditioning isn't adequate to keep it cool. It's not the thing you'd think of right off the bat,’” the article said. “Another possible scenario: You find out too late there isn't enough power to run all the systems.”

Redd also noted that “there are the IT concerns, such as the wireless access point that serves that room.”

“Does it have sufficient capacity for that many computers and bandwidth need?’ he asked. “You might have enough Internet bandwidth coming into the school, but it may be that the access point that serves a particular sector of the school was expecting a dozen devices, and all of a sudden you have 30 or 40, and it's not built for that much capacity.”

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Article by Kassondra Granata, Education World Contributor