America+North

= = Friday 7/20 11:30 - 12:30 America North (ballroom/dining room) Mark Sargent & Jackie Christensen
 * onRecord**

Helpful takeaway from yesterday's session: What can we do in Podium today to help the transition and get teachers ready?
 * Mirror one of your portal views -- create an academic portal
 * Try putting the content (schedules, grading, grade book) in the same location that we have it in "My Day." This will get teachers accustomed to finding that stuff in that format. It won't be as much of a leap when you make the real transition.

Notes:
 * Slide deck will appear here on the Wiki as well... including screen shot of "My Day" as well as an example in Podium with SIS today.
 * onCourse (Academic/Athletic groups, etc). can stand alone...But when teachers log in, they will arrive at an Activity Stream instead of the My Day screen.
 * Coming: a side bar panel for important forms, etc.
 * Key content of activity stream? Pull in content, news, events, content added to website, media content, downloads. Schedule/attendance will show if you have onRecord.
 * The tabs cannot be renamed. The philosophy behind this is that it's a web app -- with design theory. We want to simplify and cut down on an excess of choices -- we want it to be ready to use right out of the box for the everyday user.
 * Note from Kelsey (WhippleHill): Understanding the Activity Stream content -- it's what is currently shown on the Portal. We've now listed it chronologically, but it's the same information... in a new format.
 * How do Community Groups fit into the "persona" scheme? A "persona" is essentially a combination of roles. So the settings for role-based permissions still apply... people's personas can consist of more than one role. Ex) teacher & coach = faculty persona. So if a person is a teacher and a parent, their "parent" stuff won't show up when they are in the "teacher" role.
 * One concern: less clutter is good, but a lot of stuff is not posted to the parent role...it's posted to specific community groups. If it pulls in all community groups, then we're back to being overloaded. Maybe we should consider which roles should be pulled into personas. For example, should content from Parent Community Groups appear in the activity stream for people with a parent persona?
 * You can go to the activities and get specific group information, and the Activity Stream is a conglomeration of info from all your groups.
 * Can you publish to different groups? Yes...
 * Right now a "Faculty" persona includes Staff, Teachers, etc. Thoughts... maybe there should be a stronger distinction between Faculty and Staff
 * Is "Activity Stream and Resources" a bit long? "Stream" is good... Maybe we don't need all of those words. Would just "Recent Activity" work, or is the word "Activity" appearing too much? "Content feed" perhaps?
 * On a Facebook wall you can comment, etc. This is more of a feed... a place for info & messaging.
 * On the Topic detail page, there will be room for comments, thoughts, reactions... Students and teachers can post about the content.
 * We want it to stay streamlined and organized. We want teachers to be able to choose which topics they want to enable comments and discussion.
 * How does the Topics content interact with the other channels? We want the Bulletin Board to be strictly housekeeping/general information, and Topics to be strictly about the learning resources. Assignments WILL be able to link with the content of the Topics section. Ex) Here is the assignment; and you need to watch this video.
 * Topics are good for a flipped classroom.
 * Technically there isn't a limit to what you can add to Topics, but you may want to chunk it out/organize by lesson, etc.
 * The entire topic gets a publish date and expiration date.
 * Where is the best place to post a video? Jackie says under Topics. The Bulletin Board would be a great place for more general info such as newsletter info or a brag page. It's more like a "What's New." Meanwhile, learning resources that have to do with assignments or in-class work belong more in Topics.
 * If you're not a teacher, as of now the Activity Stream is your "home page" when you log in. Kelsey: that is something we are still working on. Activity Stream is our idea at the moment.
 * As a manger, you're probably going to be working mostly in the products persona. In Real Life you roles as faculty, parent, etc. But dropping down under that you can select to view by each tool/product. We want to optimize it so whatever comes up first is the most helpful to that person.
 * What's going to happen to the Platform Manager role? Users would like to have the ability to control what goes into each persona, so you can decide what roles combine, and how.
 * On the backside currently, teachers have to roll over existing content from year to year. The mass of info is piling up... Jackie is working with Ryan Szepan on this issue, which we are aware of. We want people to go to town with topics, build them out, perfect them, enhance them... If they can't roll that over it's not as helpful! Teachers don't like having to do it all over again, even though the context exists it is such a tedious challenge to add stuff in again channel by channel.
 * Can you create a default landing page for what you'd like to see when you log in? That's something we haven't done. Maybe it could be done through cookies. Currently "teacher" persona is prioritized.
 * Concern about repetition. Are people going to go on there and not know where to look for what they need to find? Usability -- going well; will continue to be tweaked. We've taken what you would have found in the My Groups and put it on top as tiles so you don't have to filter through. "My Day" is more task-based.... it currently lives under "My Role" in Podium, and we've tried to slim it down for easier accessibility.
 * When you click on classes, there's no "home page". You have to select which section you'd like to go into.
 * Has anything changed in the way that an administrator would be able to view teacher rgreades? Currently the manager roles haven't changed. That would be the next step after we focus/prioritize on Real Life roles. Kelsey: a lot of the focus has been on re-writing the real life roles and tasks. IN the guture admins will be able to take advantage of the organization structure in an enhanced way.
 * If you're a manager and you log in, you'll arrive at your real-life role and then you can switch over to another role (onRecord, etc.)
 * Podium tasks are going to get reorganized into our new structure.
 * Currently, in Podium if you have a lot of manager roles right now there is this monster list and it's overwhelming...
 * Now you have to build Portals... we want to take it to the next level
 * P3 does not include the left hand menu of Portal. It's gone, for all roles/personas.. forever!
 * Will people have access to tweak color settings, customize, etc?
 * Losing the left-nav is taking away some schools' space for color branding, etc. Where's another place this could happen? Yes there is a way to create a 2-color custom gradient. However the front-end page is really the opportunity for that....this is the web app.
 * What will happen to the left-hand nav on the front end site? We think that the only thing that would change is the log in location. Everyone will get the stand-alone log in page as well if people don't want to go to the full front end website before logging in.
 * Where is the calender/assignment calendar? right now it's still bridging over to the old Podium calendar, but changes are on the horizon. the podium master pages are planned to live in the "My School" section. In the future we'd like the school calendar events to show up in your personal "My Day" schedule.
 * Important: everything you can do in Podium today you'll be able to do in P3.
 * Teachers would like an option to remove the sensitive content from the home page, which could appear in front of students (Say, when a teacher is taking attendance on a smartboard... we don't want to show the class grade %s). An option to collapse, and/or remember preferred settings, would be great. Roster has been moved for that same reason. Same with comments.
 * How does it calculate school days? Weekends/holidays? It's true days...not school days.
 * Why not add a dashboard for the teachers with data?? How many parents are logging in? Etc.? Put the analytical stuff in its own place...
 * We want to make the Dropbox more obvious, and easier to manage. We've added access to it right from the Assignments management page. There's a tile that will let teachers now when assignments have been submitted. You can tell who has done it and who hasn't. You can expand from there and get access to the documents. We haven't worked through the student role (submit vs. save) but we will.
 * What about a message board where kids can post and see each others' posts? For student interaction, we are working on a Discussion Thread (again, a teacher could choose to turn that on or off per topic). You can add a note/comment, photo, video, media... allowing students to interact and generate content.
 * What about pulling in SchoolPress blogs? Where should it live -- bulletin board? Topics? We may need tighter integration between the blog & the classroom/content.
 * Now we are offering a blogging service, which you can buy through WH .. SchoolPress. Both students and teachers can both create blogs.
 * Early Adopter program is going to be available in early October. We're looking to make this available to sell in about February. The bulk of our existing schools will be able to run this for 2013-14, if they want to/ are ready.
 * Will this still have a sort order, or is it always going to be chronologically based on most recent? What are the organization options? Bulletin Board is chronological... Whereas topics have more structure. There will be a drag and drop feature so you can move the content around. We needed more than one link channel, and that's where Topics comes in. Teachers can create as many as they want..they get a blank detail page and can choose they types of content they want to add.
 * Within the persona, can a teacher see all the links and downloads they've ever posted, so they can cross-post? It has been discussed... like a master materials library, but we don't have that yet. We are hoping that by letting teachers create topics and being able to copy it over to next year... that will help with the ease of re-use a bit. What if there's a certain word doc you want to add for each topic? Will you have to do it manually for each one? As of now.. Yes. What about the "add existing" button? That works but could be a pain for some scenarios, because you can only do it for one topic at a time.
 * Jackie & Ryan are working on a COPY OVER feature.
 * Teachers can set a publish date if the topic isn't ready or they don't have any links/content for it yet. They'll be able to view "active" topics, "previous" topics, and "future" topics. They just click on the topic picture or title, and then they are brought to a topic detail page. If there's nothing there they will be brought to a blank page. That's just for a teacher to see, and if it's not published yet it won't be visible to students etc. The topic won't show up until you want to publish it after adding more detail. And if you don't add an image it will have a generic gray default image. But one good thing is it will resize nicely and whatever image you choose will look pretty :) What about a default picture set you can choose from? (3 standard pics... ) Can you build a library of commonly-used images? Maybe for your whole school?
 * What about allowing teachers to share? Within your school? Within WhippleHill? --- could happen in the future. We do have a cohesive community of schools with many similar goals. You can share content within your own courses though.

Activity Stream vs. Bulletin Board

Personas/Roles (real life; admin)

Topics

Enhancements