Technical Tips for CANS/ANSA Testing

In the new virtual environment, we’ve all had new challenges added to our already sometimes difficult jobs. Some of these challenges are as simple as technical barriers. Alameda County CANS/ANSA users are issued a variety of devices to use for their work. You could be on a phone, laptop, desktop, Chromebook, or iPad and all of these have large or small screens that make work easier or harder depending on what you’re doing. We also often don’t have printers available at home the way we might have at the office to print big documents like the CANS or ANSA manuals. This can negatively impact some people’s learning as well. Your goal when testing on CANS/ANSA is to pass the test and we want to support you with some suggestions:

1. Try to test on as big of a screen as possible so you can keep multiple tabs or even multiple screens available to you.
   
2. Open the manual in another screen, tab or even browser so you can reference it as you think about each item on the score sheet. You can press "Ctrl" and "F" at the same time to use the "Find" function and enter item names in order to locate those items faster within the electronic manual.  We suggest you DO NOT test without your manual available online or on paper.
   
3. Copy and paste the vignette into a word document so you can highlight or underline content electronically or print out the 1-page vignette, if you have a printer available, and underline or highlight content manually. If you have it in a separate electronic document, you can use a split screen or open it in another tab. This ensures that as you scroll through the ratings items you can easily refer to the vignette without scrolling to the top again on the testing screen and losing your place within the test.
   

A little prep goes a long way. If you don’t know how to do some of these things, like split your screen or use multiple tabs, use google or more tech savvy friends to learn how to do these BEFORE testing. We hope these simple tips assist you to test more confidently.

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