Posts Tagged ‘coaching calendar’

Per request I’ve added a field to Coaching Calendar to let teachers specify the room in which they’d like to meet for coaching. Teachers can also edit previously-scheduled appointments to add this information. Let me know if you see any problems.

Speaking of Coaching Calendar–I know I owe you all a couple more updates. Those will be coming soon.

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.

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.

I’m taking the calendar offline briefly this evening to install some requested updates. It will take roughly 45 minutes to complete–the calendar will be unavailable during that time but none of the existing data will be lost.

Update 5:24 PM EDT: Updates in place. Everything looks fine. Let me know if you have problems with the system.