Districts and Schools That Are Administering ELPA21 Assessments With Chromebooks Should Continue Testing the Speaking Recording Function

In last week’s Administrator Connection, you may recall that the American Institutes for Research (AIR) had identified an issue with Iowa ELPA21 speaking recordings on certain HP, Samsung, ASUS and Dell Chromebooks running Chrome OS versions 54 and 55. It was expected that Google would fix the issue with the release of Chromebook OS version 56.

An updated version of Chrome OS 56 was released last week. However, the released version of Chrome OS 56 did not include the fix for ELPA21 speaking recording that was included in the preliminary version that AIR tested in the lab. AIR has been in touch with Google and is asking them to release the code that fixes speaking recording. In the meantime, Chromebooks that were unable to be used for recording ELPA21 speaking responses while running Chrome OS 55 will have the same issue when running Chrome OS 56. The Department of Education continues to recommend that all schools that use Chromebooks take a practice test on the Chromebook and confirm that ELPA21 speaking records correctly before administering an operational test to students on a Chromebook. Although it is being worked on, there is no information on when the fix will be available from Google.