WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2013
Problem Attic Expands Again - Quickly Create
Practice Assessments Problem Attic is a service that I reviewed when
it launched last year. Since then it has
continually expanded to the point that you can
now quickly create practice assessments and
flashcards for social studies, language arts,
mathematics, and science from a collection of more than 85,000 questions from
past state assessments given in New York, Hawaii, Kentucky, Minnesota, Ohio,
New Jersey, Delaware, Mississippi, South Carolina, West Virginia and Wisconsin.
To create your practice tests on Problem Attic you simply create a new document
then browse through questions and pin them to your document. After you have
pinned all of the questions that you want in your document you can arrange the
order in which they appear in your document. Finally, before printing your
document you choose and set the page formatting.
Applications for Education
Years ago one of my colleagues used old exam questions as review activities with
his students. Problem Attic takes that concept and makes it easy for any teacher to
build review activities based on problems from actual tests that students have
taken. Students can also use Problem Attic to find a big collection of questions
that they can use to help them prepare for tests in mathematics, social studies,
language arts, and science.
Ideas that Work
Resources to use when teaching in a low-income
school
By Ann Davis on July 18th, 2013 | Comments(3)
When teaching at a public school in New Orleans where more than 80% of my students
received free or reduce-priced lunches, I realized quickly that my school could only provide
so much assistance. Here are the resources that saved my year.
1. BetterLesson
As a teacher working in an under-resourced school, I created much of my own curriculum.
However, rarely did I come up with lesson plans from scratch. I maximized the
beg-borrow-steal method many teachers use. Many of my lesson plan ideas came from
BetterLesson — a free website where one can search by any subject for various types of
resources that include unit plans, lesson plans and worksheets.
2. Problem-Attic
Testing is often a large part of education at schools that serve a high number of students
from low-income families. I worked at a charter school, which meant high-stakes testing. I
often used Problem-Attic to find higher-rigor test questions that matched my standards.
Problem-Attic is a test generator that contains over 80,000 questions from the NYS
Regents exams, state assessments, academic competitions and other sources. Educators can
create classroom materials by searching by topic or exam and organizing and formatting
chosen questions.
3. Teachers Pay Teachers
Creating worksheets was not my favorite lesson planning period activity. I definitely
preferred my kids to participate in activities and hands-on learning over worksheets, and I
found that I could have the best of both worlds with Teachers Pay Teachers — an online
marketplace where teachers buy and sell original downloadable educational materials and
used educational resources. In addition to the priced items, there are THOUSANDS of free
materials. I’ve never paid a cent on their site!
Math Practice
Posted on January 7, 2013 by Ms.Stodola | Leave a comment
Looking for a great, free resource that allows you to make flashcards and quizzes?
Problem Attic offers some great material that comes from state assessments, Academic competitions, and the NY Regents
assessment.
This is a great resource for adding some rigor to your classroom.
http://www.problem-attic.com/
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http://techforcscshc.wordpress.com/
Educational Technology Resources for CSCSHC
Problem Attic
Posted on September 6, 2013
I recently mentioned this site in a training as a great test generator. Not only do I love its creative name, but I
also love its content. Pull in a variety of questions and save your tests as PDF files. Tests are also saved in your
account. Math, Science, and Social Studies are the current subjects that are offered and even more state
standard correlations are being added all of the time. Indiana has not been added yet, but I have noticed many
more states have been added since I used this site at the end of last school year. What a great, free way to
generate assessment questions! http://www.problem-attic.com/
This entry was posted in Educational Technology. Bookmark the permalink.
← Classroom Formative Assessments using Google Forms
Problem-Attic: Create Assessments from NY
Regents Items
February 20, 2013 | Assessment & Data |
Although I don’t live in New York, I have made use of the great questions available from the NY Regents as well
as other national and state assessments. Problem-Attic is a free tool that makes it simple to access over 80,000
previously released test items and use them to create a printable test for your students. Problems are grouped by
topic area as well as by the exam they were released from. Question banks are available for Math, ELA, Social
Studies and Science. As you browse through the banks of questions an +ADD button appears in the bottom right
corner of each test item to allow you to add items to build your own assessment.
Once you have finished selecting items, they can easily be re-ordered then the test can be formatted to your
specifications for things such as font type, size, headers and more. A PDF version of your test is generated for
printing and/or saving.
www.educatorstechnology.com/2013/05/10-awesome-new-web-tools-for-teachers.html
As is usual here in Educational Technology and Mobile Learning, every two weeks, I share with you here a list of the most
recently released web tools that might probably have some educational potential for your teaching and learning contexts.
It's been 7 months ago since I added this section featuring lists of educational web tools to my blog. You can check it to
view the lists I shared there so far.These lists are particularly created to help those of you who are busy and have no time
left to go online and hunt for the new releases in the world of educational technology. What you see in these lists are web
tools other edubloggers have reviewed in their websites and blogs.
Check out what I have curated for you during the last couple of weeks and let me know what you think of them. Enjoy
1- Widbook
An easy online platform to write books, share stories and add photos and video. Also invite friends to co-write with you.
2- Problem-Attic
Search by topic or exam. Select, arrange, and format questions the way you like. Crea
Create beautiful classroom materials in just minutes!
minutes!
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PlanbookEdu.com
Design a Test: Easy to Use State Test Question Bank
Posted by Michael Herlan on Thu, Sep 27 2012
Speaking with collegues this week, we
were excited to come across a website
called Problem-Attic at:
http://www.problem-attic.com. This
website is incredible, because it offers
over 45,000 NYS test questions that
teachers of Science, Math, English
Language Arts and Social Studies can
use to review and create sample tests
or quizzes. Teachers can pick questions based on topics, but also they can use full exams from
different years that are available. The best part is that problem-attic makes the questions and
the creation of quizzes or tests easily configurable as well as easy to save and print.
The process of creating a quiz or test for students is simple to do and takes only a few minutes.
First, sign-up for free on the website. Second, create a new document from the menu bar and
choose your subject area and topics. Third, read and select the questions you would like to use
then you can preview and save as well as print if necessary.
As you can see from the figure above, the topic is identified in blue the sample question is below
that then you have the options to add it into your document, get more information as to when this
question was used in other years on a state test and you can flag a question that you feel is
wrong, difficult to see or is in the wrong topic area.
Problem-attic is great tech tip and solution for teachers who are looking for ways to create
differentiated quizzes and tests that students can practice so that they become better at their
subject knowledge.
Michael Herlan
Mike Herlan is a French, Social Studies, and computer technology teacher who enjoys learning
and sharing his love for all things tech with students and other people. You can follow him on
his blog.
Posted in Tech Tips
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http://blog.algebra1teachers.com/2012/11/problemattic.html
Friday, March 22, 2013
Problem-Attic.com
A wonderful teacher in our building frequently shares great technology ideas.
This morning she shared Problem-Attic, a wonderful tool that will allow you
to create tests, practice tests, hand-outs, and overhead transparencies (if
anyone is still using them) quickly and easily. (She's the one that shared
Remind101 with us previously.) I made a practice test of 20 multiple-choice
questions in less than five minutes.
Start by signing up. It's free and only four
simple steps.
Then the program walks you through your
options, starting with where you want to
pull your questions from. Once you've
chosen where to get the questions and what
subject to use, you just click on the
questions you want to include.
When you've got them all, you can move, delete, and add to them. Then you
get to choose the format in which they are printed: one column, two columns,
one column with a space for answers, whether room for students to work on
the paper, etc.
Then you get to decide if you want a printed
test, overhead transparency, notecards,
flashcards, etc.
It truly took me only minutes to create a 20
question test; of course, I didn't go through
all the pages and pages of questions
options for each subcategory to find the best
or most useful. That would be the only
thing that takes some time.
Posted by SNunc at 2:31 PM
Labels: anderson, cool tool, problem-attic, remind1 01
For information about our library, v isit
Grantham Academy Library Website
As you are creating your first unit assessment, be sure you can answer the following questions:
What Common Core or Mississippi state standards are covered on this test? Why do you
believe the questions you’re asking are aligned and at the appropriate level of rigor?
What are the key mathematical ideas that students will be familiar with at the end of this
unit? What are the big questions they’ll be able to answer? What are the particular skills
that students should be fluent in?
Useful resources for creating your first assessment:
Read some thoughts from blogger and teacher Daniel Schneider about how assessments
impact curriculum (h⸈p://mathymcmatherson.wordpress.com/2013/03/17/some-thoughtsassessment-impacting-curriculum/).
One interesting approach you may consider taking to assessment is “Standards-based
grading.” Read more about that idea here (h⸈p://shawncornally.com/wordpress
Problem A⸈ic is a tool for compiling assessment items
from other state tests, and may be useful for creating high-rigor assessments
TUESDAY, SEP TEMBER 25, 2012
Problem Attic - Quickly Create Practice Assessments
Problem Attic is a free service that allows you to
quickly create practice tests and flashcards for
social studies, language arts, mathematics, and
science. Problem Attic has a collection of more
than 45,000 questions from past New York
Regents exams. To create your practice tests on Problem Attic you simply create a
new document then browse through questions and pin them to your document.
After you have pinned all of the questions that you want in your document you can
arrange the order in which they appear in your document. Finally, before printing
your document you choose and set the page formatting.
Applications for Education
Even though I live and work in Maine, one of my former department chairpersons
was a big fan of using old New York Regents exam questions as essay prompts and
review activities with his students. In my travels and work with teachers in other
parts of the U.S. I've talked with other teachers who also like to use old exams for
the same purpose. If you like to use old exam questions as review materials,
Problem Attic is a service that you should try.
Labels: Flashcards, Free Technology For Teachers, Language Arts, Mathematics, Practice
Problem Attic: "Standarized Bell Ringer"
Problem Attic is a website/test generator that houses a collection of over 80,000 of the best
questions from NY Regents, state assessments, and academic competitions. The website is free
and fairly easy to navigate and use. You can browse almost an endless supply of questions and
narrow them down by type of question (NY Regents, State Assessments) subject matter, (ELA,
Math, S.S., Science), class (Algebra, Geometry) and even strand (Rational & Irrational Numbers).
My initial thought is that these would make great bell ringers or reviews for students. As a special
education teacher I am constantly running out of sample problems for my students to practice
completing. I think exposing students to standardized questions will help get them prepared for the
high stakes testing they are required to complete in this day and age.
Posted by Michael Tharp at 5:27 PM
MARCH 13, 2013
Drafting an Exam
A couple days ago MathyMcMatherson asked how we write assessments. Today my department
divided by subject and worked on third quarter exams, let me tell you about the process for the
Geometry group.
The goal of these quarterly assessments is for students to practice taking a test like the state test
they will take in May. They are also a place to look at data- the results from scantron get analyzed
by administration all the way up to the superintendent. This process is new to us this year. It doesn't
really fit with my Standards Based Grading approach, but high stakes tests are a reality that's front
and center right now because one school didn't meet adequate yearly progress, which means the
whole district is labeled as "at risk." Point being, we have to give exams that look like state exams.
We started at the last meeting by discussing what we have currently studied this quarter and what
we will get to by the end of the quarter. There are three levels of geometry with different books and
different teachers and we all have different approaches. It's interesting to see what our common
ground is and how to negotiate being in approximately the same place at the end of each quarter.
Once we had a list of topics, we headed to ProblemAttic. This site is a great resource because it
has problems pulled from our state exam (MCAS in Mass.) as well as other states, organized by
topic. Then it puts everything into a nice format for you at the end! (The formatting is the only thing
missing from our state site.) We went through the relevant topics and added all of the problems that
were acceptable. The last step at this meeting was to save the pdf of 82 problems to the shared
folder we have on dropbox. (If you don't have dropbox ask someone for an invite- it gets both of you
extra free space!)
When I arrived at today's meeting I found all 15 pages printed and taped to the dry erase board,
labeled by topic. It was a beautiful sight, I wanted to photograph it but didn't want to be that nerdy (I
know, if I can't be nerdy in the math department something's wrong, but I was feeling shy). The six
of us then went through each section, identifying problems that were too easy, too hard or redundant.
We debated the relative merits of problems and how they align with our courses.
"This one has students determine that a rectangle is a parallelogram, while this one
gives them diagrams of the same shapes and asks them what they have in common"
"I spent a lot of time on always, sometimes, never problems so I'd rather the first one"
"Done!"
By the time we finished this process we were down to 48 problems (from 82). I was worried this
was still far too many problems because we have to give the same exam to everyone, including my
kids on IEP's. Another teacher made a good point, saying that many of the questions only required
use of definitions, no calculations required. To see how many questions fell in that category, we
grabbed a marker and put an orange smiley face next to any problem that shouldn't require kids to
put pencil to paper (sketching examples is always a good idea, but on a summative exam most of
these problems would be quick). Then because we'd already started color coding we put pink
neutral faces next to one step problems and blue sad faces next to multi step problems. By the time
we had finished I was okay with the number of problems, but still a bit worried about the stamina of
my low level kids. Another great idea: let's put them in order of difficulty like the SAT. This way
students would feel confident at the beginning and anyone who tends to shut down once they see
one problem they don't know how to do would have a greater probability of getting a good chunk of
the test done. I'm almost happy except this one lingering question: we only sorted the multiple choice
questions, and I want everyone to spend time on open response. I'm still deciding if I want them to
start with the open response or give that section out after an hour or give them the choice but make
sure to require that they write something for each problem before handing it in. Something to discuss
at the next meeting.
This process took a lot of time and isn't feasible for every assessment we give, but it was a great
way to spend our professional development time. We got to talk about our teaching, what concepts
we want to emphasize, how to assess that and implicitly, what we value. Everyone got a chance to
analyze the questions which will make the data we get back so much more meaningful. (That was
the issue I had with the midterm data, there wasn't time to go through this process so I didn't have
any investment in the questions.) I'm interested to see how it plays out, especially to see if the
problems students find most difficult match the ones we expect to challenge them.
Posted by Tina C
Moving Math Forward
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Blog Archive
▼ 2013 (3)
▼ January (3)
Problem Attic Problem Generator
Webinars on High School Math
Opportunities for High School Math
Teachers
► 2012 (13)
Contributors
Michael Elder
Jazz Fan
nglish/language
www.Problem-Attic.com
http://new-to-teaching.blogspot.com/2012/11/problem-attic.html
Problem-Attic
Is a great name for a great new web 2.0 tool you should be using. Problem- Attic gives you instant access to 30
years of Regents Exams for math, science, social studies, and English. With Problem- Attic you will spend less
time preparing materials and more time doing what you love: teaching!
Sign-up is free and fast, it allows you to create a document. Then browse or search by topic or exam. Select,
arrange, and format questions the way you like. All it takes is just a few minutes and you have created beautiful
classroom materials.
I created a document called Math, it asked me what type of content I would like to browse and I chose
mathematics and give me an array of different math materials.
I scrolled down to graphing points and lines. On ordered pairs and clicked on Points on a line.
Chose the questions I would have liked to have on my materials.
Went to the arrange tab where I could change the order of questions on the worksheet. Then went to format
and could change my template, headers, font, or multiple choice questions.
Then you are able to view your worksheet and print them or save the worksheet to your desktop. It also gives
you the answer key to the problems you selected. A great tool in the math classroom!!
If you have used this in your classroom what are your opinions of using Problem-Attic? Did it go well? How did
you use it in your classroom?
Reactions:
Created by Trever Reeh at 7:00 AM
Labels assessment, classroom, educators, free, generator, materials, math, problem attic, teaching, test, web
2.0, worksheet
1 comment:
Michelle Burton November 26, 2012 12:43 AM
What a great resource! Thanks for sharing. It is very easy to use and I've already made 5
worksheets/quizzes for my class next week!
Reply
http://new-to-teaching.blogspot.com/2012/11/problem-attic.html
Design a Test: Easy to Use State Test Question Bank
http://herlantecheducationblog.blogspot.com/2012/09/after- reading- severaleducational- blogs.html
After reading several educational blogs over the past week, it was exciting to
come across a website called Problem-Attic at: http://www.problem-attic.com.
This website is incredible, because it offers over 45,000 NYS test questions
that teachers of Science, Math, English Language Arts and Social Studies can
use to review and create sample tests or quizzes. Teachers can pick questions
based on topics, but also they can use full exams from different years that are
available. The best part is that problem-attic makes the questions and the
creation of quizzes or tests easily configurable as well as easy to save and
print.
The process of creating a quiz or test for students is simple to do and takes only
a few minutes. First, sign-up for free on the website. Second, create a new
document from the menu bar and choose your subject area and topics. Third,
read and select the questions you would like to use then you can preview and
save as well as print if necessary.
As you can see from the figure above, the topic is identified in blue the sample
question is below that then you have the options to add it into your document, get
more information as to when this question was used in other years on a state test
and you can flag a question that you feel is wrong, difficult to see or is in the
wrong topic area.
Problem-attic is great tech tip and solution for teachers who are looking for ways
to create differentiated quizzes and tests that students can practice so that they
become better at their subject knowledge.
Tens of Thousands of Proven Test Questions Available to Teachers Free of Charge With Launch of Problem-Attic
New Site Developed by EducAide Software, Based on More Than 20 Years of Experience Developing Question Banks and
Teaching Tools
VALLEJO, Calif. (PRWEB) October 01, 2012
Today EducAide Software put tens of thousands of high-quality questions for personalizing learning at the fingertips of
teachers around the country, for free, with the launch of Problem-Attic. More than an item bank, Problem-Attic allows teachers
to find questions by topic, select them individually and format them using Problem-Attic’s online tools to create and output
tests, quizzes, worksheets, flash cards, overheads and problem-of-the-day calendars with ease.
“For more than two decades, EducAide has been bridging the gap between instruction and assessment,” said Dan Levin,
president and founder. “By developing Problem-Attic, we are contributing to the education community by making a large and
growing number of questions available for free to support teachers as they personalize learning for their students.”
Problem-Attic launched with over 45,000 New York State Regents Exam questions. These questions come from 30 years of
past exams, covering mathematics, science, social studies and English. They are high quality, challenging and rich with
graphics. While they are primarily for high school teachers, many are useful down to sixth or seventh grade, especially in math
and science.
In his widely read blog, “Free Technology for Teachers,” Richard Byrne said, “Even though I live and work in Maine, one of my
former department chairpersons was a big fan of using old New York Regents exam questions as essay prompts and review
activities with his students. In my travels and work with teachers in other parts of the U.S., I’ve talked with other teachers who
also like to use old exams for the same purpose. If you like to use old exam questions as review materials, Problem-Attic is a
service that you should try.”
Over the weeks and months to come, tens of thousands of new questions – including many that support the new Common
Core State Standards – will be added to Problem-Attic.
Initial response to Problem-Attic from educators is enthusiastic, with high praise for the site’s extensive question bank and
ease of use. In an email to Problem-Attic, Lisa Meschutt, a middle school science teacher at Oneonta City (N.Y.) School
District, said, “Thank you! This site is amazing! I just made up a test in 10 minutes! I’m sharing this with all of my colleagues.”
Echoing Meschutt’s enthusiasm, David Knuffke, a teacher from Deer Park, N.Y., wrote, “Love the program. The notion that
you are giving it away is amazing. Great work.”
For more information, visit http://www.Problem-Attic.com/.
About EducAide Software and Problem-Attic
For more than 20 years, EducAide Software has provided schools and districts with high-quality, standards-based materials
and a publishing system that goes beyond tests and worksheets. A product of EducAide, Problem-Attic is a large and growing
database of proven, well-constructed, high-quality questions, organized by topic, individually selectable and easy to format.
With Problem-Attic’s easy-to-use tools, teachers can create personalized learning materials by selecting and formatting
questions to create all kinds of documents: tests and quizzes, worksheets, flash cards, overheads and problem-of-day
calendars. For more information, visit http://www.Problem-Attic.com/.
Contact Information
Kay Lindenberg
L. Wolfe Communications
773-227-1049
http://www.prweb.com/printer/9959985.htm