Accelerated Reader in Australia
The Australian home of Accelerated Reader - the world's most popular reading management software for K-12 Schools
The quiz team have released 700+ quizzes this month.
Some of the highlights to draw your attention to include -
Download the Quiz Release as PDFWe released our latest newsletter today. You can view on the online version by clicking the image below
Accelerated Reader is about to receive a major facelift. The student and teacher user interface has been completely redesigned to help students find books, see the different quizzes available on that book and ultimately a much clearer way of communicating results to students.
The key points for you
The quiz team have approved 500+ quizzes for release this month.
Some highlights from this release
Download the Quiz Release as PDFWhen taking a quiz in Accelerated Reader, the student clicks on [Yes] to confirm he wants to take the selected quiz but the quiz does not start. Instead, the browser displays, “You are currently taking a quiz. Please switch back to that window”. If the student logs back in and chooses to take a quiz again, a message in the browser tells the student he has previously started the quiz, but answered no questions yet.
When choosing to “Take a Test” in STAR Reading, nothing happens when the student clicks on the [Start] button.
Google Chrome’s inbuilt pop-up blocking settings are preventing Accelerated Reader Advantage from successfully displaying the Accelerated Reader Quiz or STAR Reading Test.
You must be using Google Chrome v23 or later
Download the Instructions for your IT TeamThe quiz writing team have worked away over the summer break producing a huge list of quizzes for release in January and February 2013. The total across January and February is nearing 1000 quizzes. There is specific theme to the release this time round, but some highlights to draw out for you
There are really too many for me to try and pull our my highlights, without giving away too much of personal reading bias.
Download the Quiz Release as PDF
In April 2012, Renaissance Learning in the USA made some decisions about the future of the Desktop Version of Accelerated Reader, STAR Reading and Accelerated Maths that will impact us here in Australia and New Zealand.
Renaissance Learning announced the end of life on the desktop versions of Accelerated Reader, STAR Reading and Accelerated Maths. This is a common thing that all software companies do from time to time, so that is not out of the ordinary. This decision though means that EdAlliance too must announce alterations to the support and products we can supply to Australian and New Zealand schools across our region.
In simple practical terms this means:
The following versions of the desktop products were sold in Australia and New Zealand between 1999 and 2009 and are now discontinued:
From 1 January 2013, you will not be able to purchase quizzes or redeem quiz vouchers for the desktop version
to purchase student expansions for any of the desktop version
Renew your support plan
It is now time to move to the Accelerated Reader Advantage version of the product.
Or simply request a quote
Our final Australian Accelerated Reader quiz release for 2012 sees us cross the 25,000 quiz barrier. That is a huge milestone for our small Australian market, having the team process that many books and write those quizzes is a great achievement across the years.
In this specific month’s release:
Download the Quiz Release as PDFOur monthly quiz release was delayed in October and early November.
We were simply tying together the loose ends in the non-fiction releases from early in 2012. So this month we see the final set of non-fiction releases that we started earlier in the year – plus some great fiction too.
Download the Quiz Release as PDF
Through out 2012 I’ve been a very proud member of the volunteer committee of the Young Australian’s Best Book Awards (YABBA) that runs the children’s choice book awards in Victoria. This fantastic committee enthusiastically works hard to bring student voice to the Australian Children’s Books Industry. Through EdAlliance I agreed to print and distribute the 2012 Shortlist Poster which 1,000 schools around Australian received for free.
If you requested a poster I hope that it helped bring these Australian books to the attention of your students. As an Accelerated Reader customer you will notice I have some work to do with the Quiz Writers to get a bunch of them quizzed ASAP. I’m addressing that right now.
On 7 November 2012, the YABBA Awards in Victoria announced the 2012 winners at a star-studded gathering attended by 250 students and 60 Authors, Illustrators and industry professionals. This was the very first YABBA Awards Ceremony that I’ve personally attended and I was just blown away by the energy, excitement and most importantly the high quality interactions between students and the people that write and illustrate books just for them.
I’ve produced an A3 poster showing the winners and encouraging students to think about the books they’ve read this year.
Download the A3 Poster Here
This month we have 200+ new Reading Practice Quizzes, and a few quiz updates.
Just a few quizzes to highlight for you:
You can get the download here
This idea was submitted by
Denise Stephenson from Calvary Christian College in Carbrook Queensland
When promoting specific AR books with Years 4, 5 and 6 students involved with the AR program, I link fiction with non-fiction titles e.g. Polar the Titanic Bear with books on the Titanic, Tonkin’s “To the Goldfields” with fiction set in the same era, Crew’s “I Saw/Did Nothing” with books about endangered animals.
The popular AR non-fiction books include biographies, books of strange facts, general interest books especially sport, war stories and natural and man-made disasters. The My Story fiction series are a great way to introduce the non- fiction books. Too technical non-fiction is not popular with our AR students as they want to browse these books and not be quizzed on facts.
AR non- fiction picture books used for discussion lessons are displayed on a table with fiction and non-fiction, topic linked from the AR shelves. Topics discussed include Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement, Two World Wars, Ancient Egypt, Heroines, The Gold Rush, Science Fiction and Space Travel, Animal stories (Dewey/fictional cat stores). As I pre-read books, I tag interesting or exciting parts to read extracts and also use audio tapes and YouTube for information or book trailers. Students share books they have enjoyed and interesting facts they have found. New AR titles are promoted in the Library and on handouts which include the picture, title and blurb for each. This sheet is emailed to teaching staff – many use the non-fiction in class and the whole class take the quiz during computer time.
During one of our early Quiz Production meetings this year I decided that we needed to release more Literacy Skills and Vocabulary Practice Quizzes. The team have been working on getting these quizzes produced, this month we have released the first batch of new LS and VP quizzes.
I work with a couple of schools to trial a new process of using the Vocabulary Practice quizzes. We are experimenting with the idea of looking at the Vocabulary quizzes from their spelling program. We are just in the early stages, but over the coming months I’ll keep you informed of our developments and how this new idea might work.
The July release sees more than 250 quizzes released across the entire book level range a all age groups. So there should be something for everyone in this month.
The highlight of the releases are the new Rangers Apprentice quizzes.
When I advised the fantastic people at Forward Learning, the Australian distributor of World Book products, that I was about to release 300+ books from their catalogue they wanted to help us launch these quizzes with a bang.So they’ve very generously decided to donate a set of the Inventions and Discoveries series to a worthy school.
But how do I pick a worthy school? I came up with a little challenge.
All you need to do is tell me in 250 words or less how you use non-fiction titles with Accelerated Reader at your school. The entry judged as the most interesting use of Non-Fiction with Accelerated Reader will win the books.
During a recent road trip visiting many customers over a two week period I was repeatedly asked about Non Fiction titles with quizzes. At at the office I reviewed the current collection and agreed we haven’t released many non-fiction quizzes recently. So I asked the quiz writers to fix that.
They responded this month with more than 500+ quizzes on Non-Fiction books.
We still have more non-fiction quizzes to come, but this is the first batch. The coming months will see a few more non-fiction titles trickling through.
After a little delay in normal production during March and April this year we are back on track. There are 350+ quizzes in the May 2012 release.
The highlights from vantage points are:
We are returning to our normal quiz production for the year from here on. Sorry for the delays in March and April.
Imagine the excitement you’ll generate when your eager students can take AR Quizzes and receive their quiz results on their iPhone®, iPad®, or iPod touch® at school (students can not quiz from home). The newly released Accelerated Reader Student App can now be downloaded free from the App Store® or iTunes®.
can download and use the AR App completely free of charge and will require an active Accelerated Reader Advantage subscription.
We have just released the 23,000th quiz in the Australian market! I know it’s not all about the simple number, but this does excite me. For a small market like Australia I am very proud that we keep in producing great content. I know that we have some gaps in series to fill, and I am lobbying very hard to ensure that we get them completed. But just for a moment I’m going to admire this huge effort.
Enough admiring… Now back to work.
The quiz writers slowed down a little over the recent summer which meant there was no December 2011 release of quizzes. With my huge workload at the start of each new academic year I simply forgot to publish the January 2012 quiz release list. The actual quizzes appeared on the quiz store and in your hosted Accelerated Reader Advantage site.
This month you will see I have combined the January and February release notices into a single PDF.
You can download the PDF here
After a little break last month the Quiz Writers have started off with a small 130-odd quizzes released this month.
I had a quick look down the list and noticed a couple of Christmas type books.
Due to holidays and a change of systems we didn’t release any quizzes into the Australian market in October this year.
The normal production schedule will resume in November
This month sees us release 139 quizzes into the Australian market.
As I was looking down the list of quizzes released these things just popped into my head:
A series that stood out for me in the list was the Oliver Moon series.
You can download the list here -
The month of August sees more than 400 quizzes released.
You can download the PDF of the list here
Back in 2003 Dr Lyn Wilkinson from Flinders University presented a keynote address at an education conference in South Australia. Her keynote, Teachers as Theory Builders, appeared to me an academic storytelling exercise. The story was underpinned by the things we expect from academics; research, interviews and conclusions. The end result was a great description of how Accelerated Reader is simply a tool that teachers can use with great effect once they have applied the theory that they inherently possess.
This article makes for great reading. Since that keynote the article has appear in a few academic journals, but this is the version that I personally prefer.
The releases for June and July reflect our move from filling gaps in the collections to a focus on recent books. I hope to keep this focus going over the remainder of 2011 and into 2012. The latest quiz releases have been updated on the AR Advantage sites and into the Desktop Quiz Store.
The combined June and July releases included 700+ new quizzes in the Australian AR system now.
You can download the PDF’s here:
The Quiz Writers have been very busy throughout May this year, this month sees more than 400 quizzes released.
The biggest news, for me anyway, is that Diary of a Whimpy Kid – The Ugly Truth has finally been released as a quiz. Can you let all those students who have been emailing me each month that this quiz is now available. It is always exciting to hear from students, and even more exciting when I can deliver on the requests.
The other big highlights are the additions to the Artemis Fowl, Young Samurai and Alex Rider Series…
In late 2010, Alex Rayner from Lord Lawson of Beamish school in the UK contacted me with the general idea of setting up a collaboration between his school and one in Australia. By absolute chance that very day the Australian cricket team was announced for the upcoming Ashes series between England and Australia.
So I got to thinking, here we have an English school wanting to collaborate with an Australian school, the Ashes are about to be played in the upcoming Australian summer… So the AR Ashes were born!
The next step was to find an Australian school that wanted to play in the AR Ashes. Seeing this was the very first time we had constructed such a competition I needed to keep the competition pretty small and decided to invite only a few schools to play so that it didn’t become too big!
I sent off a few invites hoping that I might find one school to play. Well, every school that I contacted decided that it was a great idea and we ended up with 6 schools playing in the AR Ashes.
The competition was very simple:
We awarded prizes for the following categories:
You can view all the details here – www.ARReadingChallenge.com.au
Here is some feedback from the schools that played:
“Gave our normal program a different focus and added interest and motivation”
“The classes involved were highly motivated and excited about reading which was great to see”
“Our students were very disappointed when the competition ended.”
I have a plan to run an Australia and New Zealand competition in Term 3 this year. If you want to play or more details complete the form below:
Our quiz writers have focused on filling some gaps in collections, this might be a series or an author’s collection, so these 280+ Reading Practice quizzes might be a little older than we normally release. But I think filling in the gaps is a really useful idea – I hope you do too.
We also continued our release of Vocabulary Practice Quizzes this month, with another 200+ VP quizzes released into the Australian market. This latest Vocabulary Practice quiz release takes us over the 800 quizzes in this exciting new category.
Just a reminder that all the VP quizzes already have an RP quiz on the system
This month our quiz writers have split their efforts between the standard Reading Practice Quizzes and the new Vocabulary Practice Quizzes. We released in total 500+ quizzes this month. Now before I get 100+ emails, the latest book in the Diary of a Whimpy Kid series is coming in April.
This is the Reading Practice Quiz list:
The Vocabulary Practice Quizzes are here:
Just a reminder that all the VP quizzes already have an RP quiz on the system
This little guy is meant to help you explain Accelerated Reader to your students.
You see Cosmo was a little worried about selecting a book in the library, but realised that he had just completed his STAR Reading test. So he selected a book within his reading range and ended up getting fantastic results on his latest AR Quiz.
The bookmark and the poster are basically the same, just different size of course.
The bookmark is 250mm x 55mm, whilst the post is A2 size. Both are full colour and a nice glossy finish.
This is the bookmark
Click through to complete the order form
All of our training and support services are provided to customers with an Annual Support Plan.
For $250 + GST per annum schools are covered for all technical and support services. This fee allows a school to access the following benefits:
The order form is here:
This month we have 350+ quizzes added to the Reading Practice list for Australia.
The quiz writing and release team have been busy over the summer with another 750 quizzes released this month
We added 750 Reading Practice Quizzes this month
This month we have added another 112 Vocabulary Practice Quizzes.
If you missed the information on the release of Vocabulary Practice Quizzes and how to use them, the article can be read here.
Accelerated Reader Advantage now includes Vocabulary Practice Quizzes to explicitly develop and assess students’ vocabulary from the books they read. Students regularly using Accelerated Reader complete lots of reading practice which can now be extended to explicitly teach new vocabulary.
Over the coming months we will release more than 1000 Vocabulary Practice quizzes. The first 216 Vocabulary Practice Quizzes are active now, you can download the list here
I have put together these details instructions on using VP Quizzes. You can download and email to your teaching staff.
This presentation will also explain the details on the VP Quiz structure and how to use them.
Explicitly Develop Student Vocabulary
I think this is the last of the Gap-Filling project that began this year, meaning this is a strange group of quiz releases. Look out for the latest Conspiracy 365 books, even the September one was released this month.
A few years ago the fabulous Ms Del Merrick the Support Teacher at Rangeville State School in Queensland designed a reading log book for Accelerated Reader. You can download these PDF’s and print your own Reading Log in a small booklet format. They look fabulous and have a small set of great reminders for students when they read.
This is the outside cover -
This is the inside cover, print on the back of the outside cover -
This is the first page of the inside pages, print one -
This is the actual log book pages that students print out, print one on the back of the First Inside Page from the previous step -
Now I suggest that you print 2 more double sided pages of the the Inside Pages so that you can make a nice booklet.
I have been really slow in getting these PDF’s put up on the website, sorry for the delay.
The really big Gap-Filling process started this year has been hugely successful. We have over 17,000+ quizzes in the Australian store now. We have released so many quizzes each month that I have had to separate them into Lower Years (LY – for K through Year 4), Middle Years (MY – for Year 5 through Year 8 ) and Upper Years (UY – for Year 9+).
The June Releases:
Lower Years (K- Year 4) -
Middle Years – (Year 5-8) -
Upper Years – (Year 9+) -
The July Releases:
Lower Years (K- Year 4) -
Middle Years – (Year 5-8) -
Upper Years – (Year 9+) -
The August Releases:
Lower Years (K- Year 4) -
Middle and Upper Years -
Many of you will know that EdAlliance bought the online version of Accelerated Reader to Australia in 2009. AR Advantage is the name of this online, fully hosted and integrated package of software.
We have developed a new website that will explain the new version if you are interested in upgrading.
You can visit the site at www.ARUpgrade.com.au
The massive “gap-filling” task that we embarked on at the beginning of this 2010 is now really taking off. We have release more than 2,000 quizzes in the past 6 weeks. These quizzes are all gaps in series that were started over the years and not completed. There are also lots of new titles in amongst this all to.
Considering the number of pages this release has stretched to, I contemplated the different ways I can make it more readable. So the end result is splitting it into the various sections based on Interest Level of the quizzes.
So here are the quiz release PDF’s for this month:
The Lower Years (K-4) -
The Middle Years (5-8) -
The Upper Years (9+) -
April has seen us release 1000+ quizzes into the Australian market. I had originally added the release, then heard that we had one more batch to publish, so here is the 2nd release for the month.
I am getting very excited about this release process, we are really moving ahead in filling the gaps created over the years.
EdAlliance has developed a simple, straight forward no fuss method of implementing Accelerated Reader in your classroom. This two hour seminar introduces you to the basic concepts of Accelerated Reader and together we develop an Action Plan for immediate implementation in your classroom.
The concepts we address are:
Once a school has the basics in place with their Accelerated Reader Implementation it is time to think about the use of the data to truly motivate your readers.
This two hour seminar extends the basic concepts of Accelerated Reader from simple reading books, taking quizzes and reviewing TOPS reports into a core part of your reading management system.
The concepts we address are:
At the end of this session teachers across the school will have a detailed action plan on how to extend AR into a reading motivation system. They will have the necessary data to support their professional judgement about students’ reading.
This process of filling in the gaps is series that I flagged a few months ago is really producing some great material.
This month we have released 700+ quizzes. There are such great series represented here:
Lots of good things happening with quizzes this month and over the next few months to.
A heap of great authors and some exciting new books released this month.
The highlights of the authors might be:
| Author |
| Abela, Deborah |
| Aiken, Joan |
| Bradman, Tony |
| Brown, Dan |
| Dahl, Roald |
| Deary, Terry |
| Dhami, Narinder |
| d’Lacey, Chris |
| Gaiman, Neil |
| Hawes, Alison |
| Horowitz, Anthony |
| Meadows, Daisy |
| Meyer, Stephenie |
| Muchamore, Robert |
| Powling, Chris |
| Rowling, J.K. |
| Sparkes, Ali |
| Waddell, Martin |
| Zucker, Jonny |
You will see some new books from Anthony Horowitz, the completion of the Twilight Series and the Daisy Meadows books.
A long time ago I wrote this short eBook on using AR to motivate students to read. The eBook is bascially a collection of the celebrations I have seen in schools over the years of training on the use of AR.
The ideas in the book are all based on the use of AR points to motivate students. Remembering that AR points are a unit of measure and nothing more. The higher the points for a book the the longer that book. By setting each student in your class an AR Points Target you can really focus on increasing the Quantity of each student’s Reading Practice. The ideas in the book are focussed on the % of a students target that they achieve, thus allowing all students in the class to compete equally regardless of their reading level or capability.
I hope you can use some of these to motivate the students reading practice in your classroom.
The process that I highlighed last month of filling in the gaps that have been created over the years has started. This month we have relase 300+ quizzes, as the first installment of our planned Term 1 2010 relase of thousands of quizzes.
I can’t really pick the highlights in this list. So I will let the release speak for its self.
We have added 260 quizzes to the Australian AR Store this week.
There are so many new quizzes, I am struggling to find the highlights due to there being so many, but let’s go with these as a starter:
- The Diary of a Whimpy Kid Series
- Lots and lots of books by Erin Hunter
- A few more of Colin Thompson’s stuff
The highlights of this month’s release are the following authors
| Pierce, Tamora |
| Pilkey, Dav |
| Pratchett, Terry |
| Simon, Francesca |
| Stine, R.L. |
| Usher, Frances |
| Wilson, Jacqueline |
2010 will see us fill the gaps that have been created over the years. During Term 1 2010 we will release 4,500+ quizzes. Most of them have been written are in the final stages of approval for realse. I hope that we will release all of these quizzes during February, March and April. So by the end of April 2010 we will have 15,000+ quizzes available in the Australian market.
Visit the AR Upgrade Website
