Stratepedia Services archives

I’m done with the Learning Labs updates that were scheduled tonight. Sort of. I hit some snags along the way and need to revisit this task at a time to be determined down the road.

The Learning Labs will be offline for an hour or so this evening, around 9:00 CDT, for maintenance. Sorry in advance for any inconvenience.

I meant to get this out to you earlier this week, but you know how it is when you’re trying to get a funding proposal out, right? Anyway, that’s behind us, so I can get back to other matters like this one: I want to get a big update to Depot out the door by the end of the year.

Here’s the deal: I’m about to get started on some big, under-the-hood changes to Depot. I know, I know–the big reason moving from the Content Enhancement Library to Depot was for big, under-the-hood stuff. But Stratepedia’s web development platform of choice (OK, my web development platform of choice), Ruby on Rails, underwent some pretty big changes between when Depot was started and when it was finished, and especially between then and now. The long and short of it is I need to make some changes and want to get your input along the way. In that spirit, I’m offering this post as an open forum on what you like, what you hate, and what you’d like to see in Depot. Now’s the time to tell me!

I’ll get things started by telling you about two things I’m already addressing in this change, plus a possible bonus item:

• First, I know Depot sometimes gives weird error messages without telling you what’s going on. Most of these, I’ve found, are due to people not being signed in when trying to do something. This is exacerbated by our current policy of not requiring people to be signed in to browse public groups, but needing to be signed in and a member of said group to download from it. What are your thoughts on this policy? Right now I’m inclined to close things off a bit and tell people they need an account to do anything, even poke around the joint. By and large, people don’t even come across Depot until a PDer has introduced them to it during Content Enhancement PD, anyway. This will make access control settings much easier and therefore much less error-prone. Let me know what you think about this possible policy change.
• Second: Keyword search. I get asked for this a lot. It wasn’t feasible at all in the CE Library. It’s sort of feasible in the current Depot. It’s very feasible in Depot 2–I’m just trying to figure out the best way to do it. My current plan is to incorporate keywords as a filter (like we do now with subjects, grade levels, and routines). To one-up this, I’m looking at adding saved filter sets–so if you want to be able to easily find, say, every Unit Organizer about Ancient Egypt for middle school, matching the keyword “pyramids,” you can save a filter set and quickly pull up anything that’s been shared with you. What do you think–useful? No?

And now, the bonus: The long-promised single sign-on system for Stratepedia is making progress. This isn’t exclusive to Depot, and is technically a separate project, but will ideally be released simultaneously to this updated version of Depot. This basically means that, eventually, you’ll have one username/password combo for Depot, for the Learning Labs, for Coaching Calendar, for Depot, and for whatever we come up with down the road. It’ll also be the username and password you’ll use for anything at something-dot-kucrl-dot-org (like, say, an online version of Stratedirectory? Whisper, whisper).

OK, now it’s your turn.

Tell me what you think about the two items I mentioned above, or anything I missed. I know there are things that drive you nuts about Depot–tell me about them! Leave a comment below. If you want your comments to be anonymous, make up a name. If you’d like to keep your thoughts private you can e-mail me at help@stratepedia.org–but this will be a much more effective process if we can get a conversation going here.

Have at it!

I pushed out a few updates to Coaching Calendar today. Nothing major, but this update does address a few requests I’ve received from the Virginia schools:

• Improved behind-the-scenes handling of enabling and disabling individual time slots in a day (this wasn’t broken; I just found a way to do it more efficiently).
• Coaches can now manage their own time slots without asking a site administrator to do this for them (so, if a coach needs to take a morning off, he or she can mark this time as unavailable directly).
• Coaches for each day are now displayed on the school’s master schedule.
• On a site’s main page, the coaches listings for dates coming in the next four weeks is now a little cleaner.
• On a site’s main page, the list of coaching dates coming in the next four weeks now properly displays today’s date if today is a scheduled coaching date.
• Moved membership key management away from a site’s main page, onto a separate page, with some additional tips about the membership key reset process. Hopefully this will help clarify why we do things this way.
• The dates shown when viewing an individual membership’s details look a little prettier.
• Error messages displayed by ACL (”Access Control Layer”–what determines what you can or can’t do based on who you are and your role within your school’s coaching program) are a little more verbose.

Jean Piazza has announced this year’s reading list for StrateReaders:

• The 6 Secrets of Change: What the Best Leaders Do to Help Their Organizations Survive and Thrive by Michael Fullan (also an upcoming CRL Learns read)
• Influencer: The Power to Change Anything by Patterson, Grenny, Maxfield, and McMillan
• The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell
• Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High by Patterson, Grenny, McMillan, and Switzer

Links to purchase each book on Amazon* are provided at StrateReaders, along with a discussion board to talk about each book before or after the scheduled conference call. You just need a Learning Labs account to participate–if you don’t have one yet, sign up for free.

* Of course, you can buy the books elsewhere if you’d like.

I’m happy to begin taking the wraps off of Stratepedia’s latest project: Coaching Calendar. For the most part, Coaching Calendar is exactly what it sounds like it is–an easy way for teachers to schedule instructional coaching appointments.

Coaching Calendar is a significant overhaul to the previous version, which was limited to two schools in the Virginia CLC implementation project. Now based on a more solid framework, teachers and coaches can view customized schedules and record session information privately and securely. Site coordinators can quickly schedule coaching dates with time slots custom to the school, and have access to coaching histories for both the site and individuals.

Since this is a pre-preview and not a full-on demonstration, I’ll share one image with you:

We began rolling this new version out last week, migrating two schools from the previous version to this new one. Next we’ll be working with two other schools, who have never used an online solution for coaching scheduling. My personal goal is to work with these schools over the course of the school year to make Coaching Calendar as useful as possible, then make it available to other sites beginning in Summer 2009.

When time allows–hopefully in the next few weeks–I’ll sit down and do a more thorough, video-based introduction to Coaching Calendar. In the meantime, let me know if you’d like more information.

You now have yet another way to keep up-to-date with the latest news from Hello (the somewhat official name for this here blog). Follow Stratepedia on Twitter, and receive notifications whenever we post new articles here.

By the way, I’m using a free service called Twitterfeed to automate this. You can, too. It takes a few minutes to set up, particularly if you don’t have an OpenID account, but after that it’s smooth sailing.

I’ve got to do some work on Dossier’s server this evening which may require me to shut down the site for a bit, starting around 6:00 CDT. I’ll have things back up and running as quickly as possible.

Sometime this week, I’m going to shut down the S.O.S. (that’s “Stratepedia Online Support”) section of the Learning Labs. I thought providing a level of peer support was a good idea, but it never really caught on in this case and I think confused more than it helped. Not to worry: Our Stratepedia Guidebooks are still online, and you can always e-mail your questions to us at help@stratepedia.org.

If you have any questions about this transition, drop me an e-mail or leave a comment.

In other support-related news, Amber and I are in the process of revisiting and revising the aforementioned Guidebooks to make sure they address the kinds of questions we find ourselves answering more often than not. These new Guidebooks will be rolled out as we get them done and will be available for free in both web-based and PDF formats. The latter is suitable for printing, if that’s your liking.

We’re using a great new application I found a few weeks ago called ScreenSteps. It’s great for creating how-to guides for anything to be done on a computer, and can be exported to blogs (if you’ve been following my series on Goodreads you’ve seen ScreenSteps in action), straight HTML, or PDF. I think Depot’s Guidebook will be updated to this new format within the next few weeks; other guidebooks will follow.

But that’s not all! Keep following Hello (the blog you’re reading right now) for tutorials, case studies, and anything else that might not fit within the context of our guidebooks. If you’ve got tips or success stories to share with others, let us know and we’ll showcase your work within Hello’s virtual pages.

To recap: S.O.S. is going away, the Guidebooks are staying put but will be getting a significant facelift (and PDF versions), and we want to showcase your tips and successes on our blog. Thanks!