January 6, 2014
The license agreement for Accelerated Reader explicitly prohibits allowing students to take quizzes from home. There are two main reasons for this: one is to protect the integrity of quiz results and the other is to maintain the security of your Renaissance Place (RP) site.
Keeping data valid
To maintain the integrity of quiz results, we require schools to give access to Renaissance Place only within the controlled environment of a school. This gives you confidence in the reliability of your quiz data. Students taking quizzes at home may be subject to external influences, either from parents or peers who wish to help them or from distractions which may hinder them.
Quizzing at school also enables the best mechanisms for effective feedback to be put into place as a matter of course. The immediate feedback provided by the TOPS Report in Accelerated Reader means that results can be discussed with every student straight after they have completed their quiz. It will inform which books they borrow from the library next, allowing teachers and librarians to make effective decisions in response to the quizzes students have taken. This ensures that the right book is in the student’s hands right away.
Keeping Renaissance Place secure
We strongly recommend that shortcuts to your school’s RP site are held on computer desktops and not on VLEs or school websites. Linking to RP in these ways is likely to lead to your site appearing in search engine results which could expose it to attempts to breach security. In addition to keeping shortcuts to RP local to the school network, we strongly suggest that schools take the following steps to keep their RP site secure:
- Logins from students should be restricted to your school’s network IP address. Multiple IP addresses can be added if your network uses more than one. Read full instructions on how to do this.
- Logins from students should be restricted to certain times of the day only, normally during school hours. Read full instructions on how to do this.
- If you do choose to link to your RP site from a public website or VLE, the “Forgot Your User Name” option should be removed from students’ login pages.
- Log into Renaissance Place as the administrator
- Click the Renaissance Place tab
- Click on Product Administration
- Click on Set Security Options for Students
- Tick Do Not show
Links to Home Connect can be included on school websites and VLEs, and distributed widely to parents and students. Access to Home Connect allows parents to be kept informed of their children’s progress with Accelerated Reader without allowing them to influence the data held in RP.