Yearly Database Renewal

To prepare for enrollment for the 2008 - 2009 school year, the FCAT Explorer Team needs to purge the database. On August 1, sign-in names and passwords of all teachers will be deleted. Additionally, all student sign-in names, passwords, and performance data will be deleted. During this time, the websites will be unavailable, but they will be back online no later than Monday, August 4.

Teacher Training Available

The FCAT Explorer/FOCUS Support Services Team is available to provide training to teachers and staff across the state. Support Services Staff can train any teacher, media specialist, school administrator, or other school staff in using the FCAT Explorer and FOCUS Teacher's Desk features.

Using a conference call format, Support Services Staff can provide hands-on, step-by-step guidance through the features of the Teacher's Desk, including enrollment, class and student management, reports, program features, and content review. Training can be done on an individual or group basis.

To schedule a teacher training session, call 1-888-750-3228.

Updated User Manuals

Revised user manuals for FCAT Explorer are now available. The newly revised manuals reflect all new and upcoming development and include updated screenshots of FCAT Explorer programs.

You can access the user manuals by clicking here, or from the FCAT Explorer home page, click on Educator Resources; in the User Manuals section, you will find an updated School Administrator's Desk Manual and Classroom Teacher's Desk Manual. Both of these manuals are available as PDFs and as Word documents.

New Sunshine State Standards

The Florida Department of Education (DOE) plans to provide direction to districts and schools in January about the deployment of the new Sunshine State Standards.

In the current timeline for revision of state assessments, DOE will field test new reading and mathematics test items in 2010 and baseline these new assessments in 2011. Draft Test Item Specifications for these content areas should be available on DOE’s web site, fcat.fldoe.org, in late summer 2008. The revision of Florida’s science assessments will occur at least a year later than reading and mathematics. The revision of the state writing assessments will likely follow science by one year and baseline no earlier than 2013.

FCAT Explorer and FOCUS Newsletter

The FCAT Explorer/FOCUS newsletter is delivered to all public school teachers in Florida via e-mail. The newsletter is designed to provide teachers and administrators with the latest information about these two free resources from the Department of Education. If you would like to receive the newsletter and have not yet, please send an email to newsletter@fcatexplorer.com and type Subscribe in the subject line of the e-mail.

To see previous issues of the newsletter, click on one of the links below:
ISSUE 1, FALL 2006
ISSUE 2, WINTER 2007
ISSUE 3, SPRING 2007
ISSUE 4, SUMMER 2007

ISSUE 5, FALL 2007
ISSUE 6, WINTER 2008

FORF and MAZES

The Florida-Achieves Web site (www.florida-achieves.com) offers access to fluency probes for middle school students. These probes, assembled and leveled by the Florida Center for Reading Research (FCRR), are part of a coordinated assessment plan. In addition to the probes, Florida Achieves also provides access to Mazes, a set of assessments designed to measure fluency, comprehension, and vocabulary.

Florida Oral Reading Fluency (FORF) measures are grade-level passages that students read aloud while being timed for one minute. Two passages are administered at each assessment period and scores are averaged.

Mazes passages begin with a complete sentence. For every remaining sentence, the 7th word is replaced with a choice of three words. Students must monitor the general meaning of the passage to select the correct response.

These fluency assessments will be available on the Florida-Achieves web site according to a schedule established by the Progress Monitoring and Reporting Network (PMRN) assessment calendars.

• Assessment 1: August 10 until October 12
• Assessment 2: December 1 until February 26
• Assessment 3: March 1 until May 28

FCAT Explorer and Adobe Flash

Currently, most FCAT Explorer programs will run under Adobe Flash 6.0. However, it is a good idea to update the Flash program on your computer, especially if you want to take advantage of the new features planned for FCAT Explorer.

In June, we launched Science Station: 5th Grade Benchmarks. Science Station and other programs launched in the new school year will run under Adobe Flash 7.0.

Please note: The current Flash version is 9.0, so if you've updated since September 2004, your Flash player will support all FCAT Explorer programs.

You can download Adobe Flash at no cost from the Adobe site: http://www.adobe.com/go/EN_US-H-GET-FLASH.

If you have problems installing the new Flash, you can find help from Adobe at this site: http://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer.

Tools for Teachers

The FOCUS and FCAT Explorer Web sites offer tools to help teachers and administrators make the most of these free, benchmark-based programs.

On both the teacher's and school administrator's desks, PowerPoint presentations and users manuals are available for download. These materials can be used for teacher training, parent workshops, or mentor and tutor training.

To access these tools, teachers and administrators should click on the Tools/Resources tab from their teacher/administrator desk. The presentations require Microsoft PowerPoint. The users' manuals are available in both Microsoft Word and PDF (Adobe Acrobat required) format. Manuals and presentations may both be downloaded and printed.