Some teachers like to allow parents to conduct Read Naturally Live cold or hot timings at home with their students. This practice allows students to complete stories at home (as homework or during school vacations).

If parents are properly trained, this practice enables students to continue making progress outside of school. However, before allowing parents to pass students, consider the following.

Considerations

• Allowing students to work over the summer may “use up” curriculum the student’s next teacher plans to use in the coming school year. The program automatically advances students to the next level once a level is complete, so a student could move through multiple levels over the summer.
• Students will have the same goal all summer unless you intervene. Students may not show good progress unless the level, goal, and story options are set correctly.
• Most parents are not trained educators and may not respond in ways that maximize student progress.
• Parents may be biased and scores may not be accurate.

Actions

Here are some actions you can take to mitigate the considerations listed above:

• Discuss your plan of having a student work in Read Live over the summer with the student’s teacher for the coming school year.
• Monitor student performance by logging in periodically and checking their reports. You may need to change goals, levels, or story options or remove licenses.
• Train parents, communicate your expectations, and stay in contact over the summer.

If you are comfortable with letting parents guide their students, you can set the parents up to be Read Live Assistants. (Depending on your role within Read Live, you may not have the ability to create new staff members; if that is the case, ask your Account Administrator to create the Read Live Assistant[s] for you.)

Read Live Assistants have the ability to conduct timings and choose remedial actions, but they cannot actually log in to see what other students are enrolled.

Ideally, for security purposes, you would separately enroll each parent and give each person an individualized user ID and password. However, some teachers find that this approach involves too much administration, and they prefer to create a single user ID and password that is shared among all participating parents.

To create a shared user ID and password for your Read Live Assistants:

1. Log in to your Read Live account in the Staff Member Module.
2. From the navigation menu, select Staff Member Administration.
3. Click the Add Staff Member button.
4. Select the role of Read Live Assistant.
5. Fill in required fields as follows:
   1. For First Name, enter Parent. For Last Name, enter Parent.
   2. Enter your own email address so the program emails you the temporary password.
   3. For User ID, edit it to read just parent.
   4. Click Save & Close.
   The software will send you an email with your Read Live account ID, the new User ID you defined, and a temporary password.
6. Log into the Read Live Staff Member Module using the account ID, user ID and password from the email.
7. When asked to change the password, set it to whatever password you want the parents to use, and then set the security question/answer as desired.
8. Click Log Out.
9. Create a template email that you can send out to the participating parents, as follows:
   1. Open a new reply to the email sent for the new User ID.
   2. Change the address so that you are sending the message to yourself.
   3. Before you send the reply, edit the password field from the temporary password to give parents the new password you chose.
   4. Send the email to yourself. You will now have a template email that you can send out to the different parents. It will contain the Read Live Assistant Read Live account ID, the User ID of “parent”, and the new password.

With this information, when the student gets to the Cold Timing or Pass/Hot Timing, the parent can click the Conduct Cold Timing or Conduct Pass Activities link and then enter the User ID “parent” and the password to conduct the timings.