Transcript NCDPI/Home Base Schoolnet Webinar The Student Experience 1/8/2015 Dan Urbanski: This webinar recording will be posted onto a Vimeo website later on this afternoon or tomorrow, and then once I have the link to that, I will make sure everybody who is registered and attended, or just registered for this event, we will make sure they get a copy of that link so they can watch this to their hearts delight at some future time. And as I always write in the email that I’ll send to everyone afterwards, please share this with colleagues that might not have been able to attend here today. So yes, we will do that. We will also provide you with a copy of all materials we use in our session here today. PowerPoint and things of that nature, so we are good to go there. At any point in time if you folks do have questions, you will notice in your magic little box from the go-­‐to-­‐meeting company powered by Citrix, I believe. There is a chat box, excuse me, a questions box. We don’t really use the chat box too, too much. But if there is anything burning, much like Martha and the Vandellas were just describing in their song The Heat Wave, so if there is anything burning that you have, please type those burning questions in our questions box and our presenters here today will do our best to answer them for you in a timely manner. All right, as I have previously mentioned, we do have a rock star and all—star panel. I actually believe that at last year’s Grammys, our presenter here today was nominated for three separate categories. I am so interested to hear from this person. But ladies and Gentlemen, please help me welcome, all the way from region 4, we have our digital teaching and learning lead, from region four—Julian Nichols. Julian, welcome. Julian Nichols: Good afternoon everyone. It is a joy to be here with you and thank you Dan. Mr. Urbanski: You are very welcome. Showing up on the screen here today, it looks like you have a good chunk of things to share with everybody here today. We are going to be looking at our landing page from a student perspective, is that correct? Ms. Nichols: That’s correct. Mr. Urbanski: Awesome, so we are going to be looking at assignments and results of tests and a lot of other stuff. This is great. So why don’t you hang in there for just one second. I want to flip the screen because I know there is always somebody in this room here that has come for the very first time and I welcome you. If you have never seen Schoolnet before, you’re thinking to yourself, you are saying “Self, how do I log into Schoolnet? How do my students log into Schoolnet?” Because we know here at DPI, not every district or charter school has turned on Schoolnet as of yet. And I am going to do a very brief, three slides maybe, oh it’s two, I am not one to count, but I am going to do a very brief click path here that will demonstrate how it is that we eventually will get to PowerSource, or Schoolnet. Everybody when they first log into the system, whether teacher, staff, students, or everybody in between, will have a Home Base login page. It should look similar to this. This might be a little outdated, but this is roughly what people will log into. Putting in your username and password will then lead you to a landing page that may or may not look like this depending on which version you have. Students, hopefully, if it’s has been turned on properly, at the bottom of, bottom left hand corner navigation menu, you will see a Schoolnet link. Clicking on Schoolnet link, I wonder what happens here next. Takes us to the landing page for Schoolnet. Now we will be teaching live without a net in just a few moments, when I do reintroduce Julian with us here again. But I wanted to demonstrate just briefly here today that in our training site we have a few things that are different from what our students are actually seeing live today in their live sites. What I have on the screen here is mostly what a student should see as they first log in. With the exception of course of that red reset button in the middle of the screen, students are not able to reset the entire instance of Schoolnet, although they might want to, come around midterm time, but this is just an idea here. So you will see some icons that might be a little bit different once Julian starts getting this puppy up and running. So did I say up and running and did I mention the word puppy? We are now going to go to Schoolnet live. And when I do that, I am going to turn control of our wonderful meeting over to the incomparable Julian. Where now you have control of the meeting Julian and you can take us through your portion of the session. Ms. Nichols: Well, thank you, Dan and, excuse me, good afternoon again. It’s a joy to be here with you and I hope that I am not too loud, if I am, please let me know in the chat window and we will make adjustments. What we are looking at today is the student landing page and I will review some of the resources that are available here. And then pay close attention because you may have a test afterwards so I encourage you to listen intently. Some of the things included on the landing page, are the upcoming assignments, the student workplace, workspaces, indicated here. And what I want to do first is look at the upcoming assignments segment. If you notice there is a due date indicated right here; January 16 for the first one, January 16 for the second one, and the 23rd for the third one. And I want to take a moment to examine Measuring Rainfalls more closely. So if we click the open button, a card opens up that a teacher has prepopulated with information. And within this card you will find a welcome or instructions that the teacher has designed, and then you will see a link to an attachment. When you click the resource, it opens in a new window and the student is able to review the resource. In this case it’s one that has been published by another company. And once they finish, what I like is that they can close the window and then go back to the assignment card and then when they finish with that, they can close that as well. And then now they are back to the landing page. That is wonderful. Also in this segment, you will see—View Assignment Calendar. So it is good to have this because students that are willing to plan in advance have the opportunity to see things right there on one page and together in one space. But if you notice here, there are no assignments for the week of January 4th. Now I am sure that would make a lot of students happy, but guess what. If you scroll down and you notice the calendar on the bottom left, there are bold face numbers which indicate, that yes, there are assignments to come. The best way to review those assignments is to go to this button and it takes you to the next week. And then you are able to see the assignments that are coming up. Now I’m going to use my home button, which is right here at the top and go back to the page I just left. And I am going to make sure that you are still with me. So in order to do that, let me share this with you. Let’s check your knowledge. I need your response in the chat bar, in the chat bar okay. So how do 2 we return to the start page? There are two words. Can you enter the answer into the chat bar for me? This is just a test to make sure you are hearing me. The first one that answers is the winner. Can anyone guess? No one? Mr. Urbanksi: Those answers are flooding in now. Ms. Nichols: Wow. I guess they are waiting for the teacher to give the answer. Okay, the first, when you are on the website and you finish looking at the assignment and you need to get back to where you started, you click the home, what, button. Thank you for that answer. Let’s try another one. There were three things mentioned that the students can review on the landing page. I have given you clues. The first clue is two words and starts with the letter D and the second word starts with the letter D. And the answer is…that’s right, Due Date. Another thing that students can review are the instructions and the last thing we examined, that started with the letter C and ends with the letter R, is, do you know Dan? Mr. Urbanski: Um…Calendar? Ms. Nichols: That might do it. Thank you, thank you for your feedback. I will give you your prize a little bit later. So now that we have checked that and made sure that you are listening and able to follow along, let’s go a little bit further. Mr. Urbanski: You might be interested to actually click on the questions box versus the chat box. That is where I have instructed people to post questions. There are thousands of responses. There’re with ya. Ms. Nichols: Well thank you Dan. You guys are just wonderful. So let’s go a little bit farther. We are going to scroll down. Mr. Urbanski: Before we move on to that, there’s a question that popped up that somebody said ‘Are these Schoolnet resources that were assigned for the students?’ Ms. Nichols: Schoolnet resources? Mr Urbanksi: These resources; Measuring Rainfall, Accurately Weighing Pennies. These all came from Schoolnet didn’t they? Ms. Nichols: Well Dan, what’s your answer to that? Mr. Urbanski: Absolutely Ladies and Gentlemen. Let me close down this box, I know I am having so much fun here today. What else do you do when it is 20 degrees right? If you notice here right now the little R, the icon over to the left hand side of the page. That is a resource within Schoolnet. This mock teacher has simply assigned a resource in this example that would be student facing. In this example. They may or may not be student facing. But this is how teachers can assign assignments to their students. And the students can obviously check it out, read it, and then respond however it is the teacher asks them. So good question, thank you Julian. Ms. Nichols: Wonderful, wonderful, thank you Dan for providing that feedback. Are there any other questions before we move forward? 3 Mr. Urbanski: So far we are good to go. Ms. Nichols: Okay, then let’s go a little bit farther into the page. So now we notice the student profile. And under the student profile, there are two tabs. Benchmark Tests, and Classroom tests. The benchmark test tab, if I click it, opens up and shows test names, and in this instance, we’ll see that we have been able to have the Advanced Assessment Mathematics. If I click that, the student gets feedback concerning the test. You’ll notice a total score of 78, which means they didn’t get everything correct. But this gives them the opportunity to examine what they did and sort of decide how to do better the next time. Just looking at this page, does not give the deeper information that you can get about the question and how you answered it. So if you want more information, you can go to the question number and notice that they are linked. And then click the number, and it gives feedback. It gives you the question, and the standard associated with it and the actual response that I did as a student. And then it gives me the correct response. So I can reflect upon it and decide how to do better next time. So I’m going back to the home page, clicking the home button. And there were two tabs. So the second tab goes with Classroom Tests. And here again, you have the opportunity to review the test that you’ve taken. And they’re listed by name and most recent. So let’s go to—where’s my genetic test tab? Dan? Genetic Test? Mr. Urbanski: Were you looking for, I know we’ve used math in the past. Are you looking just overall. You can pull up one of these. Ms. Nichols: Right here. Let’s do this one. Mr. Urbanksi: Oh, there she is. Ms. Nichols: Okay. Okay so if I open the Genetic Traits Test; this again shows me what I did on the test. Which questions I got correct and the questions that I had a little bit of trouble with. There is also an indicator of the question type and the points that I received. Now if I go to, let’s try this one, and get a review of what happened. I answered the question incorrectly of course as the student. And this key tells me, exactly what the little indicators on the left mean. Of course we are very familiar with the red X. It would be nice if it were blue or purple Dan, but anyway, the red X means I didn’t quite get it right and the green check means that this is the correct answer. So that gives me a chance to reflect again and decide how I can do better or how I may have missed it the first time around. This is an excellent online study tool for future assessments, and teachers should encourage students to use this to go back and make changes within themselves. So again, to get back to where I was, I go back to the home button. But before we go a little bit farther, I’m going to test Dan again, and maybe someone else can help Dan out. So, what two types of buttons were available for tests? Can anyone type the answer? We might be giving away prizes, I think Dan, didn’t you purchase some somewhere? Mr. Urbanski: I did, and I am going to be virtually sending them to all of the winners. I have answers from several people, talk about classroom participation. People really want those. We have people saying Benchmark and Classroom all over the place. Excellent. 4 Ms. Nichols: Very good, very good. So we know you are still with us, thank you so much. Let’s try another one and let’s see who can get the answer first. How do students review their test results by question? When reviewing the test, they may click the what? of a test item to review their answer? I know that’s a hard one. Mr. Urbanski: Starts with an N. Ms. Nichols: And ends with an R. And the answer is number. Who said number first Dan? Can you see that? Mr. Urbanksi: The very first person who got number is Mary Warren. Ms. Nichols: Very good Mary. Very good. And then finally, we’re going to go back to the website and see what else we can glean. So we checked the Upcoming Assignments, we’ve checked the student profile. And now we are going to— Mr. Urbanski: The computer loves popping up that dashboard, doesn’t it? I keep seeing it pop up, wow. Ms. Nichols: Yes. So what other kinds of interactivity can student use within this setting? We’re going to look at taking a test. So over to the left, here is the option to Take a Test. Guess what, you cannot just go in and decide that I am going to go in and take a test. The teacher, when he or she designs it, also assigns a passcode that goes with the test. In this instance, let’s see, you may also make it available so that upcoming test are indicated. So here we have a test coming up January 5th. Something may
be wrong with that date Dan, but it’s okay because tests in the future could also appear here as well. And probably if a teacher is getting ready to do a pop quiz, he or she would not choose the option to have that date show here as an upcoming test. So let’s take a moment to review the process of taking a test. You would enter your passcode. In this case it is ve5ga8d. And it’s not case sensitive. I tried it both ways and it worked for me before. Click go, and we’re going to start the test. Mr. Urbanksi: You know really quick, in case some folks are new to creating test or assessments in Schoolnet, that is a randomly generated passcode. Only one will ever be generated. Once it’s used once it is never used again. The system spits out that big long number, but teachers can actually override that if they wish. Ms. Nichols: Can teachers create their own passcode? Mr. Urbanski: Yes, but it can only be used once. So if I put Dan is really, really, really cool. The reason I said really, really, really is because last time I used Dan is cool, then Dan is really cool, and then Dan is really, really cool. And after a while, my students just give up on me. Ms. Nichols: And they just gave up on the test right? So let’s practice taking a test here. So, what will happen to all my other questions Dan? Am I going straight to question 9? Mr. Urbanski: Oh, the last time I played with it, I left off at 9. So since I didn’t submit to, guess what, that’s where you’re at. Ms. Nichols: So Dan, if I take a test and I submit it, may I go back and take it again? 5 Mr. Urbanski: No, once it’s submitted, you are done as a student. It will give you results, so you might want to click on test summary from this point. Ms. Nichols: Have you completed this test Dan? Mr. Urbanski: No, I have not. I was playing with it right before we started, but if you click on Test Summary, it will give you a little dashboard that will tell you. Have you answered all the questions? Have you not answered the questions? Are there any that are flagged that you need to go back and look. But I would click on question 1, and then you are more or less starting from the beginning again. Ms. Nichols: Okay, and so I can go back and change my answers and then hide. Mr. Urbanksi: Love the hide feature. We get more feedback on that, than almost anything else in assessments believe it or not. Ms. Nichols: Please tell us more about it Dan. Mr. Urbanski: Well, it’s interesting. When I grew up, back in my day, you know before wireless, and we are talking wireless radio, not Internet. We would have distractors, and we would have to stare at the wrong answer or the potential wrong answers forever. Here, if you know that 24 square units is not the right answer, you can actually hide that so I can focus on the other three remaining answers that I might want to put my attention towards. So that is a neat little thing. And you can always just turn it back on, isn’t that cool? Ms. Nichols: Very good, so now Dan, if I have not submitted my test, may I go back and change my answer? Mr. Urbanski: Yes, Ma’am. At any time, students can go forward, backwards, upwards, sideways, and down to Tuesday if they want. Just go to that View Test Summary page or Next. Ms. Nichols: Okay. I am going to Next. And I didn’t like the answers that you chose initially, so I am going to go through and choose my own. Okay. Mr. Urbanski: We are going to see how you score than. Ms. Nichols: Better yet, I am not reading, I am just clicking because I like clicking. Okay, all right we’ll keep that one. And of course we will continue to cycle through the test. I like your answer there and I am going to go to Next. And continue to go through—seven notice he chose C. Eight, okay you answered that one, Nine, I am having trouble here. Okay, did you not know the answer—you knew the answer to that one too. And then I notice there is something going on right here with number 4. Mr. Urbanski: Oh my gosh, I wonder if it’s a red flag. I wonder what that could mean. Let’s click on it. Yeah, what’s that up there? Ms. Nichols: Okay, so with number 4. Well do you know that I can imagine that if I am so involved in this test, and I come to this question and I am not sure of the answer, but I want to come back and review it again later; I can click the flag, to remind myself to come back? Is that correct Dan? 6 Mr. Urbanski: You are absolutely correct. Good job Ms. Nichols: So when I finish and again I get the reviews and there’s the flag showing. And I did go back and check to be sure that I have the answers like I want to. I can go back to my summary and decide that everything is great and I’m just truly smart. Then I will submit my test. And you get more than one chance to make sure you are submitting it. And guess what Dan, you have so many questions not correct. Mr. Urbanski: And ladies and gentlemen, that’s why I am on the radio. Oh man, well you know. Ms. Nichols: Okay. So once I have completed it and I’ve closed the test, I can review it. Correct Dan? Mr. Urbanski: Look at that, scroll back down at that left bottom area, there is that post—test that you just took. Gr 3 Math Area. Right at the top. Look at that. Ms. Nichols: And then I can review it. Mr. Urbanski: Yeah, so what is really cool about this is, now this is just exactly what you mentioned earlier but look at how immediate it is. If the teacher said yes when they created the assessment that they would like the scores to be displayed immediately. And they would like to have the students review their test immediately. That is one of the options when you create a test. Look how interesting this is. They can take it and immediately go back and go aww, or they can go yeah! If it’s mine, it’s probably an aww for every other student in North Carolina, I am sure they do far better than I do. Ms. Nichols: So, can a student take a test more than once? Mr. Urbanski: Well in that case. For this one here, no. This one is already taken. They would have to be reassigned a new test, or the teacher could then create like; the teacher could create another version of this test to give that student. Ms. Nichols: Very good. So one more chance with the PowerPoint. I know you enjoyed these exams. To take a test, the student must first enter the what? Mr. Urbanski: It looks like pancake. Ms. Nichols: All right! Passcode, okay. We have an answer. Mr. Urbanski: Yes, Laurie Monk got it this time first. Ms. Nichols: Good Laurie, very good. So now I am going to make you, or give you a chance to stretch because as you know in a classroom situation you don’t want students to just sit and be lectured to all the time. This is your chance to get up and stretch. So feel, mood and kiss are words with double letters. Use the clues to guess the word with consecutive double letters. Enter your response in the chat. Here’s an example. ‘The best part of waking up’? According to one advertisement is what? Oh very good. Mr. Urbanski: A lot of people coming in right away, you bet. Coffee. 7 Ms. Nichols: Let’s try another one. Body graffiti is—Remember there are two sets of double letters. Tattoo, very good. Mr. Urbanski: Oh Laurie, I think it is a tie between Laurie and Anna on that one. Ms. Nichols: Wonderful. Okay a masked mammal is a—WOW answers are quick. Mr. Urbanski: Flying in. Ms. Nichols: You guys stretch really well. School office money recorder is called a…what, this is a trick, oh my goodness! You actually beat Dan. I had to tell him the answer. Very good. Thank you. Mr. Urbanski: I was hungry; I thought that said burrito. Ms. Nichols: Wonderful. Thank you so much for tuning in with us. I am going to pass this back to Dan. Mr. Urbanski: Did your sound just go out? Ms. Nichols: No. It’s back to you. Mr. Urbanski: Hey ,all right! Your sound, sounded like it just went out there for that last little part there and great. I am now taking control of the magic screen. There were a couple of areas that I wanted to focus. Now folks, do you remember, thank you for your participation. Isn’t that interesting, oh, what do you call it…all the participation, I absolutely love it. And I am going to, hopefully to find where I last logged in—here we are. So I am logged in now and again and remember at the very beginning when I mentioned that the screen that you are seeing here on our test demo site is going to be a little different than what our student sees today. Because in this demo and in this training site we work on, some of the things we use, we kind of train and test new areas. One of them, let me see. I’ve seemed to have just closed it, knuckle head me. I want to make sure I have it. There it is. I want to go to our—there we go. So we had before. One of the icons that I’d mentioned before that the students can see is going to be our EBSCO research center. You will see it in the upper left hand corner. Does everyone see that, Julian can you see that? Ms. Nichols: Yes, I can. My Urbanski: All right so this might be familiar. For those of you out there, we have the connection with the NCWISE owl portal and link. We are able to go out and conduct some research or our students have. So we have actually placed that on the student landing page so they can conduct some research. So they will see, even though it’s not on our training site here. I am showing a site that has it. The link looks hopefully—figure if you can read this—it says student Research Center as powered by EBSCO and NCWise Owl. Our students have the option. There are two versions of the Research Center. There’s the K-­‐5 level, so that backdrop and web page looks a little bit more user friendly for younger students. And the 6-­‐12 is just a little bit different looking. So I am going to look at that one. And just like what we do in NCWise Owl, if the student wants to conduct some research, or gather some articles , journals, books, encyclopedia references, or what have you for other projects. 8 They can just type in for instance; I was just creating a Ecosystems course in OpenClass earlier today so I am going to type in, under ecosystem. And I am going to search. And this just takes you out to the same EBSCO link that you, All right. I have to login to my local Internet. I don’t know why I can go into this Internet, but not that Internet. So this should look familiar. It should, for those of you who have used the WiseOwl portal before for a lot of research items; we are then able to search. And just by typing in, as you can see. This is a wonderful tool for anybody working on research projects or anyone looking to conduct some research. Here I have 38,000 articles, references, magazines, journals, newspapers, books and what have you. And then the students can go and conduct about their research. If I have set up an account and logged in, which I have not. I can actually, and this is very important because you how kids are today on the Internet. They are so focused, they click on one area and they never leave that one site— well maybe it’s just my 13 year old daughter. If you are that focused or unfocused student or unfocused researcher, you can always add, for instance, life history that I have on the board here that my mouse is hovering over. I can add this to my folder so I can go back and save it and use it later for my research. I took a lot of courses online, and I teach a lot of courses online. And when I was doing some of my online research, this tool was so fabulous for me personally, because I was able to go back and say “what was that book? I never could find it again” and here it is. So hopefully this is a benefit that is being used by your students in your classrooms across the great state of North Carolina. All right, so we’ve seen that. Ladies and Gentlemen, that icon is on your students screen today. They should be able to click onto that. I know some of you are saying “But Dan, are you serious that this student has an attendance. What’s our student number oh what—it’s Jeremiah? Okay, so Jeremiah has been actually in this class for 406 straight days. Yes, you can tell that this is a training site that has been locked in the year 2012 probably for the last 2 years, but attendance is not turned on right now in our training site, nor is it turned on in live Schoolnet site. So you may see something that says attendance is zero, absence is zero. We just know that some of the information that was coming over from the authoritative source which is PowerSchool. That information was not showing up 100% correctly in our Schoolnet instance so we’re working on making sure that’s perfect before turning it back on. The last thing we here at NCDPI want to do is frustrate people out in the field, so you might notice that the attendance feature in your own world is not turned on as well. And that’s more or less the reason. All right so, I am going to go back to our training site that did have this new feature. As Julian mentioned, as I have mentioned, there is this really cool feature coming up. Here is back to the page that Julian was working from here. And I wanted to demonstrate this briefly for you here today. And in this area you’ll see, the upper left hand corner area that is called Student Workspace. Nobody has access to this just as of yet. So those of you on the line, all 16,436 of you are now able to see for the very first time, live without a net, the Student Workspace area. And in essence of brief, the Student Workspace area is a place where students can create portfolios where they can archive some of their work. Whether it’s a file, an uploaded file, an image, a document, a sound file, a video file; they can start uploading files into a specific portfolio that is just their own in the Schoolnet environment. So I am going to give you a little dog and pony walk-­‐through of that here today. I am clicking on the magic button and I now am being taken to, this student’s workspace area. And you’ll see what I do just to demonstrate and populate a little bit so you can see that there is something in here. I have that the Workspace area tells a person’s name, I can filter it by the various classes that I have set up because these portfolios can be linked to certain classes. I can create a portfolio or I can review the existing 9 portfolios. And I just happen to have a couple set up here right now today. The student has an elective called ‘Team Sports’ so if I click on that one, this one I chose to upload some images. So you will see it is very easy to create a work item. I click on the create work item button, I give it some descriptions that says what do you want to do with it Dan, and I say I want to upload a file. Great. To my knowledge, almost all file types work here that are transferrable documents. Audio Files, video files, text files, Microsoft office files. I’ve even put some Mac/Apple files in here. So those types of files can be uploaded into the student’s portfolios. So now think; this is the evidence of student learning. They can put some of their best work in a portfolio, if they so choose. So there’s images. Under math, I choose a little bit different. This file now I click on it to see what’s in here. I have a keynote file. Now I don’t have keynote loaded on my Microsoft based computer. This is just to demonstrate that yes you can put Apple based files or Mac based files on the system. You’ll see here when they put in some text. I highlighted this area here so folks can kind of get an idea of what students can do. The student can actually put in some basic text. I can put text that describes what this is. I can also put a link to a URL— so while this does not hold, this does not link out or is not connected to anything I can put, if I had a google doc, I can put a link out to my google doc here. And I can store links into that. This is a very simple text editor, it is not an html based box, so it doesn’t actually have the URL links, but you know what; back in the old days when I was teaching Julius Caesar, in his, the original by the way, not the guy that invented the salad dressing. When I was first teaching old Jules, he would have to copy and paste this into an actual browser, believe it or not. So at least for right now that’s the world we live in. And you can also think about, well maybe I want to add some references and citations and things of that sort, so I can post those in here. If I were to actually have Keynote loaded onto my system, clicking on that would automatically populate it into the system. Right now I believe it will probably say “Hey Dan, you little fun bunny, you don’t have Keynote on your system. I don’t know how to use this.” And here’s that good old window file when it doesn’t know how to open it, it asks for help and I can’t help myself either. Last but not least, in my other portfolio area, I am clicking on the ELA. I have uploaded a Microsoft office document. So as the student, I create portfolios, I add files. Now you know what’s very cool about this. You are thinking to yourself, “Wow, this is kind of neat, I have my kids doing binders like crazy, are you telling me they can maybe use this for archiving some of their work?” Well in a way, yes. It might not be as fully robust as a learning management system or collaborative tool like our collaborative tool here, OpenClass—which is part of Home Base. But, notice this little area in the upper right. In the upper right tells me section name and my teacher. What I have done here is linked this portfolio with my teacher. So I can choose to keep this private or share it with my teacher. And so here, my basic title; what is it about? It’s about ELA. And I am able to then choose, in this case I only have the one section to choose from, but I am able to add, if I want say my math and my team sports teacher to see this portfolio. They can. So, I am going to go on a— this is so fun right now, I hope you are really ready to do this because I know I am. I am going to do something dangerous. I am going to try something live. I’ve never done before without testing in the audience and so of course it’s going to work. Ms. Nichols: Of course it is. Mr. Urbanski: Well, do you remember the Sound of Music last year when they did that live on TV around Christmas time? 10 Ms. Nichols: Sure. Mr. Urbanski: I am going to log in as that teacher that created this, or the teacher that is in charge of this section. I’m going to go into that teacher account. Hey, look how the teachers landing page is a little bit different. I’m going to hover over Classrooms. You do not have this yet ladies and gentlemen, but you will. I’ll talk about that in a moment. Here’s where you will access the Student Workspaces. Right there under the Classrooms portion. Click on Student Workspaces. Which course? I just happen to know I am teacher number blah blah-­‐blah-­‐blah-­‐blah, teaching the English 2-­‐8a. Check me out, this is going to be really cool when it pops up the system now will show me all of my students, in that one section, and the various portfolios that they’ve created. And there he is ladies and gentlemen; I know I’m going fast, I hope you didn’t get dizzy. There is number student 842, that’s the one that Julian was first looking at. First logged in at. There is one portfolio shared with me. If I were to click on that right now, it says it’s ELA, clicking on that magic link again, I say yes. Sounds good, and, I love it. What you will see in a couple of seconds—
what you will see in a couple of seconds. Hey ladies and gentlemen, did I tell you we’re having a heat wave here? There it is! Ms. Nichols: Now Dan, we do have some questions in the question box. Mr. Urbanski: All right, I anticipated that. So what you now see from a teacher perspective. The teacher and the student are now tied through Schoolnet as never before. And so this document, I can go ahead and open it up and find out well what did the student send to me? The student, Timmy, sent me the file. It’s a document and I can open it, and then read it. Do, do doodle do. Wow, check that out. So hey, you said that there were some questions. Let me go back real quick, because I wanted to point out just a little bit. You can even comment back to the student. Thank you young Timmy, I appreciate your document and may the force be with you. So we can do that type of fun in our actions. So now, all right. Sometimes I get so excited about these new features I forget to look at that questions box myself. So I think that it’s a great time to take a couple seconds here. And it says, wow! Will the students be able to download an archive of work when they graduate for a true portfolio? Jonathan, that’s an awesome question. Let me go back to our page here. Minimize my little thingy area. I am logged in as a teacher, but I want, actually I can do it right here. I don’t have to go all the way back to the student. If I want to export, I click on export. I am now being told that the export is being created for me. This system will create in this portfolio, a zip file. All the documents, mp3 files, video files, you name it. They will be put into that zip drive and then I can download that onto my what have you, somewhere else. Flash drive, computer, icloud, whatever you might want to store it in. So great question. That’s a really neat thing. I am going to go back as Timmy, real quick. I called it Timmy just because, well, I can. And I want to talk a little bit about some of the features I have just shown within the Student Workspace area. This student was able to create a portfolio. Let’s talk a couple of minutes, besides being able to create the portfolio just for himself or herself. Remember how I had mentioned, don’t know if it’s going to populate or it needs to think. Okay, so I don’t have any other classes to align it to. But right here should have a little drop down that says all the different courses that the student is involved in. I can teach, I can align, excuse me, link it, link a portfolio to one or all of my classes or none if I choose. The neat thing about it, if it’s active, I can link them to, as you’ve seen, back under my Workspace home. I can 11 link it to, this one happens to be linked to math. This one’s linked to my team sports teacher. And so on. Once a student leaves this teachers class, these portfolios remain. They can always have access to this whether they leave this teacher, and another teacher teaches the section. Remember everything that comes over from PowerSchool tells us, course codes, teachers’ assignments, things like that. That’s all outside the little Schoolnet world. If a new teacher takes over, it still stays in this course. If I go to another course next semester, I still have access to my prior portfolios. So imagine that I am English 1, and now I’m English 2, and I am going to English 3 honors; I am just making this up. I could pull something from English 1 and could put that into my English 3 honors course. Of course, totally pretend example there. But, not only that, if I am still within the ecosystem of Schoolnet, I can go from one school to the next school and my portfolio will be available for me. So there are students that sometimes do switch schools. They move up. The system will maintain that in the student profile. So imagine going from elementary school to middle, middle to high. As I progress through, my portfolios will still be available for me. So that is something really really cool. Yeah, all right. So we’ve got a couple of questions that are all answered there. Let’s see, so, filter by All Classes. Hey check it out. If I want, I can filter that by my current courses that I’ve created the portfolio in. I can sort it. Now imagine I am a student that started in middle school with Schoolnet and now I am almost, I’m a senior. I’ve got at least 14 years of, oh wait that was me. Not the average student. We now have middle and high school years that could in essence be populated here. I can filter by the last updated, the newest to oldest, oldest to newest, maybe the one that has the most work items in it, because maybe I have a big collection that is huge. You can put unlimited amount of files in there. Or I can sort by the title A-­‐Z. And I know one of the questions; you can go ahead and stop typing right now if you’re out there in typing land. Some people say “Well how big of a file can you put in there Dan? Because this would be great for my, oh my gosh, my living arts or my visual arts course.” You can, you’re limited right now today to a 6MB file. So almost any image, PowerPoint, Word document, Excel, Keynote—all these different files will upload more or less easily into here. When you start having to go to larger files like say a video file that’s 200 GB; that I would probably, the system won’t take it. That’s when you might want to put it up into google docs, google drive and then link it out into this comment box area. But, this is kind of exciting. To me this is almost getting in the way of student and teacher collaboration. Not getting in the way, but it’s leading us to true student and teaching collaboration in here. So I am welcoming this change. Me personally, I am excited to share it with you here today. So hopefully that’s a neat feature that you folks would welcome in your classrooms as well. And if you do, please type that into the questions box. Say “Yeah! Yeah” or “Nah”. I’d like to hear back from you. Let’s see, I believe that is it. It’s fairly intuitive. I can create, I can also, when I look under actions, I can delete if I did not like that Team Sports portfolio. Say that I have no use for it anymore. I need to get rid of some of the things because my portfolio is getting a little bit cluttered, I can go ahead and delete it and get rid of it. It’s really kind of fun. All right, all right. Deep inside the system I am going to click on that HB. What was that HB you were talking about there Julian? I forgot. Ms. Nichols: HB? Home Button yes. 12 Mr. Urbanski: Whoops, I already logged out. It’s been so long that I logged back out, then logged back in. There you go. The student comes back to his or her main student screen. Also, hey, you know I just thought I would mention. I’ve been clicking on this and maybe I didn’t mention it. Student can sign out at any point in time, or they can just close down this box to go out there. Once it’s either signed out or the X is closed, on for instance my google, once I close it out, there is no way the next person can come in and actually log in again. Boom, it’s gone! But— sign out—,help. Help’s a neat feature because that’s where all the user guides are stored. In your version, the training site’s not uploaded, but in your version of Schoolnet this is real helpful. A tip, that actually you Julian and I were just talking about today, a little bit earlier. The help button is a contextualized user help guide. So where ever you are within Schoolnet, whether it’s a district administrator creating a benchmark, or maybe creating curriculum units; whether you’re school leadership and I am looking at my teachers lesson plans, or whether I’m a student, as we are looking at right here today. Whenever I click on the help button, it will bring up the most pertinent information related to whatever page you are viewing. So clicking on this right here would bring up how students would navigate, the user guide for students, and how they would navigate the student landing page. So I wanted to point that out for you. All right, at this point we are nearing, we are getting close to that bottom of the hour time. And I’d like to hear from you if you’ve got those questions. We see a lot of great feedback popping up in here. Thank you so much everybody for sharing those thoughts. Wow! Julian, they really liked your presentation, oh, nobody said anything about mine. Ms. Nichols: It’s the heat wave Dan, it’s the heat wave. Mr. Urbanski: It must be. It’s over 20 right now; I hear we have tripled our temperatures here in Raleigh from what I’ve been understanding. It’s crazy. It’s called winter, ladies and gentlemen, winter. All right, so with that, I’m going to do a couple of clicks right now, but I do want to ask for any questions because we do have about 10 minutes left in our session here today. Any burning questions related to the student landing page here within Schoolnet, please type them into our chat box. While you are typing I am going to switch back to our magic PowerPoint and I am going to do a real brief recap; and you know , Julian you can even read these with me. We want to make sure to check for understanding and you had all that covered earlier. Check this out, why don’t you take the first part. Ms. Nichols: The front part? Mr. Urbanski: The first page right here and I’ll go page two. This was you. What did we learn today in Schoolnet, Students can… Ms. Nichols: I don’t see it. Mr. Urbanski: You don’t see it! Ms. Nichols: I do not. Mr. Urbanski: Oh, my gosh, ladies and gentlemen! I hope everyone sees my screen. PowerPoint? Ms. Nichols: Okay. 13 Mr. Urbanski: Maybe it took a few seconds to switch over. Ms. Nichols: Okay, okay, there it is. All right, so now what am I— Mr. Urbanski: We’ve got to change the batteries in your Internet. Ms. Nichols: Or in my glasses. Okay. All right, so what am I doing, Dan? Mr. Urbanski: The top four points. Oh my gosh, this is just so unrehearsed. It’s great, ladies and gentlemen. Isn’t it? Ms. Nichols: So we are reviewing upcoming assignments, take an assessment online, review results of previous tests, and search EBSCO so remember we looked and we saw the different areas and how they could pop open according to the links. And then taking the assignment, you had to have a passcode to get it. Not everyone can take it. You may also see upcoming assignments underneath according to whether or not the teacher enables that function. And then review previous tests, which is wonderful because you can use it to help develop your future knowledge. Mr. Urbanski: Isn’t that awesome? In addition, we did look at the EBSCO which most of us, hopefully, have actually seen before so that wasn’t new, but at least the link to it was new. Last but not least, we just covered the Student Workspaces and here are the key points I’d like you all to walk away with here today about the Student Workspaces. They are unique to that student and stays with their profile more or less. They can create these portfolios and add in, basically shows their knowledge, their understanding and their aptitude for the subjects or topics you are talking or discussing and teaching your classrooms. They can put, and this is the fun part, man I tell you, if you could only get in my brain and figure out how I think just for 30 seconds you would, people would just be laughing on the floor. When I was typing this up, this bullet point was about file types and I’ve yet to put in one at least of their average, exchangeable work type document and MP3 file what have you, file types they do in the work up here. There is a 6MB limitation for that and we are hoping they bump that up a little bit. And we are working with Pearson on that. Or at least asking them. Evidence of their learning. And when I wrote down evidence of their learning, I keep going back to some of the other trainings that have been happening over the last year with our ASW group. And for those of you that, I can actually see through the magic Internet, and some of your have left your web cams on and I see your heads nodding. Wow, Debra, you have, nice, yeah, nice outfit today, cool. So anyway, when they start talking about ASW; I am from San Diego and evidence of learning has nothing to do with ASW in my mind. Or those of you from San Diego, you might know it’s a small navy town. When we say ASW in San Diego in front of a navy person, you’re thinking that is Anti—
Submarine Warfare. And so I am thinking, cool, we’re going to blow stuff up. Julian, you just had, you were so polite earlier today. She let me down folks. She said, “Dan, that is analysis of student work.” I’m like Oh man! So that would be tied to one of our standards that professional educators here in our state of North Carolina follow and work with every day. ASW is something, a project we are working on to actually gather and present some of that analysis of student work. And I believe this would help that teacher and that educator with their students to capture some of this ASW or artifacts of student work. So it was a neat thing. I am sure exactly what standard it is, I don’t have my standards in front of me. Was it 14 6? But, kind of a nifty way how this ties into your professional standards. Sorry, didn’t want to be the buzz kill but we can tie in a lot of things here today. All right, so I am going to be looking in a moment at some of the questions. Some people are asking, “Hey, Dan, When do we get this?” That’s the big fun part. Once we update our Schoolnet system, our version to the next version. Right now we are version 16.0. We will be updating, we are skipping 16.1, we are going right to 16.2 and once that happens, we are waiting for this round of benchmarks to complete. And that’s, I’ve been told, at least the bulk and majority of the charter schools and districts out there will occur in the February timeframe. Maybe early March. So once we are sure that a majority of the schools have given benchmarks, we’ll then look to make sure everything is still stable and working. We’ll look to upgrade them. We don’t want to upset any apple cart while things are working smoothly at present. So look for that coming soon in the February, maybe early March time frame. That’s what we’re working towards. All right, updates and support ladies and gentlemen. We are here, the whole purpose why the national, the national, the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction exists is to serve you. We champion our teachers and serve our educators and so we do have a lot of support. Hopefully, this is one area for that. We would love to give updates on what is going on. As I mentioned, I will be emailing you a copy of this PowerPoint, so if you want to write this down, great, otherwise you can click on this when you receive this PowerPoint later today or tomorrow. That is the link to our Home Base website. It has a wealth of information there for you. You wanna hear what’s going on within Home Base? Whether it’s Schoolnet, Power, PowerSchool or anything in between; we can sign you up for the Home Base Biweekly Newsletters. Every two weeks the newsletter goes out and this link right here will be the place you go to sign up to get that sent to your email box. And for support questions, comments, concerns, ‘Hey, man, this is really strange. I’m not too sure if it’s me or if it’s the system?’ If you have a Schoolnet challenge, I’ll call it. If you have a challenge within Schoolnet and it’s not a training issue, it’s just that something looks funky, I’m not sure what it is. Contact your data manager or your PowerSchool coordinator. Whoever that person is, whoever the main point person is at your school and or your district, contact that person. Because if you are experiencing something funny possibly someone else is as well and they have already brought it to that person’s attention, then wow, you might have an answer right away. That person, for those data managers and PowerSchool coordinators on the line with us today, here is the phone number you call and here is the email you send things to. Send it off to that email and phone. The folks there, the good folks there, they work every day before school opens, and after school closes to help meet your needs. Go ahead and send them a note. Maybe even send them a note of appreciation. Thank you for the last time you helped me, because hopefully they helped you. Last but not least, let me, well not last but not least, we do these every Thursday at the same bat time and same bat channel. 3:30-­‐4:30. We do cover Schoolnet primarily and we do throw in OpenClass here and again. So this link here tells you about the schedule to sign up and register. You’ve all seen them. Some of you are getting the email from me saying, “Don’t forget to sign up.” These are also listed, of course, in the Home Base Biweekly Update as those come out (every other week). So that’s the link to sign up for future webinars. And at the very bottom you will see yes, barring any unforeseen circumstances with technology, we will record these webinars and post them onto a Vimeo based website. And that is the link you can find all the archive of all the webinars. And I know what you’re thinking; you have probably already gone there in the last couple of seconds because you saw that. Yes, it is right under construction. We are making sure we can get these all populated perfectly so look 15 for it in the very next short while. The last month or so of webinars will be populated very soon. Very soon. All right, I’m now going to switch over to questions. And while I’m looking at questions, I‘d like you to look at this. Because this is ladies and gentlemen, du, du, du, duh. This is where I live and breathe, and I know Julian as well and everyone else who works hard to produce, direct, act star, the musical band we heard from earlier today. This is where we live and breathe because we want to know how we did for you. Ms. Nichols: Yes, we do. Mr. Urbanski: We do. We would love to know your feedback and thoughts on the webinar here today. So I’m going to hopefully, this is going to be a little bit of magic. I’m going to take and copy this and paste this link. This is me copying. This is me—where’d my webinar dashboard go? I’m going to paste this into the chat box. And I’m going to paste that for the entire audience, so you can click on that link. If you could please take this real brief webinar, I’m one of those who likes to give you (like) two or three questions to answer and that’s about it. But take a moment to share some of your feedback with you. What you liked, what you might like to see improved. And from there, we incorporate that feedback into our upcoming future webinars. So, with that, I am now going to be letting you take some of that, and I’m going to be going over some of the questions that are in our question box. For those of you that have no questions and you’re good. I am happy and excited to say thank you very much. Julian, she is going to say thank you very much. Aren’t you Julian? Ms. Nichols: Thank you very much for joining us. Mr. Urbanski: Wow, that was awesome, cool! Not even scripted. But I’m going to, oh darn there are no questions here so that means that everyone just loved it and we must have covered everything. Well thank you all very much. Take the survey if you could please and otherwise we will be seeing you next week where we will be talking about creating district benchmarks. So stay tuned for that. I will be hanging out there for a few minutes and so will Julian, if there’s anything, any other burning questions, just to see if we can help assist you. But otherwise, thank you so much for your participation. Thank you so very much for your support of Schoolnet and Home Base in general. Bye, everybody! Ms. Nichols: Bye-­‐bye. 16