Early sneak peek at summer changes for Coaching Calendar

With the end of the school year already here for many and coming soon for many others, we’re taking some time to refresh many of the services in the Stratepedia toolkit. We’ve already unveiled the new-look Learning Labs; now I’d like to give you an advance screening of what’s in store for Coaching Calendar. Look for these changes sometime late in June 2009.

To start, the front page banner has been given a little more color than the previous version, which I admit came out a little more drab than I’d originally imagined. As Amber told me yesterday, “it looks like the dust bowl.” So we still have windmills, but now things are a little more modern and cheery.

Also, the banner has been streamlined a bit on pages that aren’t the front/login page, in order to give more screen real estate to functionality.

Here’s something I think will be very useful. I’ve been worried that, as we move from school year to school year, locating available coaching dates would involve a lot of scrolling. As a replacement, I’ve gone with a familiar calendar format, highlighting the days on which coaching activities are scheduled.

Throughout the site, buttons are now a little sleeker, in an effort to remove clutter and make links to important functions easier to find.

Finally, for those of you who’ve been wanting to use Coaching Calendar: I intend to make the service available to the SIM Network at large by this summer’s conference. There will be some catches that I’m still ironing out–for one, you’ll be required to complete a short software training activity. This will probably be in the form of a one-hour webinar. For another, the service will be provided as-is–if you have ideas for improvements we’ll take them into consideration, but at the end of the day we need first and foremost to make sure it works for the projects paying for it. But in return, I’m hoping to keep the service free for you to use. Keep watching this blog for updates about when Coaching Calendar will be available.

Related posts:

• November 20, 2009 -- 5 things to look for from Stratepedia in 2010
• October 23, 2009 -- Stratepedia services unavailable Monday evening, 10/26
• October 13, 2009 -- Updates to Coaching Calendar: Speed and interface improvements
• September 29, 2009 -- Coming this week: Record unscheduled coaching in Coaching Calendar
• July 20, 2009 -- Minor updates to Coaching Calendar