Posts Tagged ‘virginia’

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.

Depot’s long-awaited support for state standards is almost here! Soon, you’ll be able to index Content Enhancement examples online by standards, in addition to subject, grade level, and routine. This is a big feature–a major reason we had to rewrite the Content Enhancement Library and introduce Depot in the first place–and we’ll be rolling it out gradually. Read on to learn how this will work and how you can get involved.

The first batch of state standards we’ll be adding to Depot will be the Virginia Public Schools Standards of Learning. Here’s how it will work: Designates from the Virginia CLC project will be given additional privileges, allowing them to identify the standard or standards to which an example in Depot applies. From my understanding, these selected examples will (at least initially) be ones created by teachers in the CLC project itself.

From there we will open the new state standards options to other states. At this point, we’re keeping it flexible–you give us the standards, we’ll enter them in our system, then you indicate examples geared toward those standards using your own criteria. People viewing examples will be able to see which standard(s) are met by the example, or click the new Standards button in the navigation bar to view lists of examples per standard.

I want to make the state standards functions available to Depot users by Friday, March 28. That’s just over a week away! Things are mostly ready but I still need to do some minor interface tweaks and finish entering Virginia’s standards in the database. After that we’ll further explore how to best use these new features in Depot.

Do you want to use Depot’s state standards features in your state? No problem–just give me time to get the kinks worked out and then I’ll be happy to add non-Virginia states to the mix. In the meantime, leave a comment below or e-mail me if you’re interested.