By: Monique Muldrow
March is swiftly approaching and the Breakthrough Technologies team is enthused! We all know that March is the third month of the year, has 31 days and brings the first day of spring. Yet, did you know that it is named after Mars, the Roman god of war, and (except in leap year) March begins on the same day of the week as February and November, and ends on the same day of the week as June? Most notable to us though is that with March comes the ATP conference.
The Association of Test Publishers (ATP) 2015 conference will be held this year in Palm Springs, CA March 1-4 at the Westin Mission Hills Golf Resort & Spa. Breakthrough's Managing Partner Doug Wilson and Kate O'Connor, the Business Development Manager for Assessment and Education, will be presenting two breakout sessions.
Monday's session, "The Power of Community: Leveraging Open-Source Solutions for Item Banking and Test Delivery" will be held in Celebrity Ballroom F at 11:30 a.m. Doug and Kate will be co-presenting alongside University of Alberta's Mark Gierl to talk about the state of the industry and TAO on the university level, while lending their insights into the value of open-source and its various applications. The University has completed several exciting pilots using TAO as an assessment platform for higher education. Kate and Doug will be reviewing the current state of open source technologies in the US K-12 assessment industry.
Tuesday's session entitled "Implementing an Open-source Multi-State Assessment Platform for a K12 Consortium - A View from the Trenches," will take place at 1:15 p.m. in Celebrity Ballroom G. Doug and Kate will focus on Breakthrough's work with CTB/McGraw-Hill and their creation of a customized open-source testing platform for The National Center and State Collaborative, designed for U.S. K12 students with significant cognitive disabilities. They will be showcasing the project to date, discussing successes and challenges along the way, and talking about next steps for the current school year and a look ahead at 2015-2016.
We hope to see you there!