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It’s August…back to school time. As you start planning your lessons and putting up bulletin boards, it’s also time to prepare your online school site and class site. Here are some of the steps that you will take to get ready.
- Refresh your school’s homepage including the principal’s message, announcements and links.
- Double-check that the classrooms (classes, subjects and groups) on your site reflect your current year’s programs and that the associated staff is up to date.
- Update your schoolwide calendar and clean up your online files (keeping forms and files you still need and deleting last April’s hot lunch order form).
- Teachers: refresh your class, subject or group page. Updating your class calendar, announcements, welcome message and spotlight let’s your families know the new school year has begun.
- Delete or disable accounts of families that no longer attend your school.
- Remind your new families to register and to activate their email and phone alert settings.
- Remind last year’s families to change/update their email and phone settings. With students in new classes last year’s families will need to change their settings to reflect that their 4th grader is now a 5th grader!
Two special notes; last year’s announcements, spotlights, calendar events and homework events do not automatically disappear. You can leave this as an archive of what’s happened in the past at your school or they can be individually deleted. Finally, if you had students loaded into your school’s site or you used grades & attendance last year please contact us so that we can coordinate the steps that will archive last year’s grades & attendance and will promote/graduate your students.
How to guides for these tasks are located in the Help section of this website.
Schoolyard Community users we have an enhancement on parent alerts. You’ve asked that parents will automatically receive alerts for home page announcements including principal messages. Our default settings for parents will now ensure that they are alerted to your most important news. Parents will continue to set their email alerts for other notifications such as sports and class specific news.
Parents tell us they love knowing when new information has been posted and schools tell us their saving money by reducing paper usage.
Websites, emails, letters mailed home….we know that you actively communicate with the parents of your students. But what about the communications that are truly urgent? They don’t happen often, but when they do you want to be able to reach your parents immediately – in a way guaranteed to get their attention. Our Schoolyard Alert service is designed for those urgent communications.
There are other companies that provide this service, some at a cost of $1500 per year, whether you send a single message or several. We’ve priced our product so that you pay only as you use it. With emails and Twitter messages priced at FREE and text and voice at 6¢ per message your urgent messages just became much more affordable.
St. Francis Elementary School in Sacramento has recently taken us up on our offer to save their school money while still being able to access the capability they need in an emergency.
Checkout a demo of our product on our webpage today!
Teacher gradebooks and student report cards have been around nearly as long as there have been classrooms. Schoolyard Gradebook, the next building block our services for schools, connects parents and students to the teacher gradebook in real time – from any computer.
Schoolyard Gradebook is being activated at Saint John Vianney, Saint Mel’s, Saint Vincent’s to name a few.
Teachers love it! Schoolyard Gradebook is easy to use. Teachers enter assignment scores for their students and grades are calculated. Schoolyard Gradebook is flexible. Teachers can create their own grading scales, set category weights and define penalties for late work. Schoolyard Gradebook is comprehensive. Sometimes the score on an assignment doesn’t give the entire story; teachers can easily add comments to student scores.
Parents love it! Schoolyard Gradebook gives parents (and students) real time visibility to their child’s progress all on one page just like an end of term report card – and it’s secure! Parents receive an email notification that grades have been updated or added, they login and they can see the progress report card for their child.
If you’re a current user of Schoolyard Communities you’re going to love this next building block. If you’re new to Schoolyard community now is the time to check us out! For more information click here.
By James Siebens
Collaborative Methods is proud to announce that one of our members, Principal Teri Cullen, has written about CM Schoolyard for the February/ March edition of the National Catholic Education Association’s “Momentum” magazine.
The St. Dominic School of Benicia, CA, led by Principal Cullen, joined Collaborative Methods (CM) Schoolyard Suite to create a customized, affordable system to meet all of their technology requirements without buying costly equipment or going through intensive training.
In her article, she describes her school’s motivations for seeking help with modernizing their administrative, communications and community outreach systems:
Here are the main deficiencies we discovered: 1) our Web site was outdated and was not capable of two-way communication, 2) only some of the teachers were available by email and even those were not in the habit of checking it regularly, 3) we could not post grades or assignments online in a confidential manner, and 4) we had no way to notify our parents quickly of an emergency at the school. Furthermore, we learned from our parents that they thought a 21st century school should be able to do all of those things. (Cullen, page 18)
Principal Cullen eventually decided to implement all of the services offered through CM Schoolyard. She instituted a new custom made website to improve her school’s online presence and keep parents informed of school events, like fundraisers and parent- teacher conferences.
The new website would save the school countless dollars in administrative time and materials. She moved the St. Dominic School to an online grade book system to share progress reports between parents and teachers, and post upcoming assignments and report cards confidentially and electronically.
Her school also implemented our Schoolyard Alert emergency notification system, which provided them with a means of instant parent notification, school closing notification, and fast alerts to school officials and emergency management professionals by phone, internet, text and twitter.
As part of their customized service, St. Dominic School was able to implement each feature one at a time, according to their own priorities. “We could start with what we considered to be the most important need now, and add on as we wanted. We could also contract for only one service if that was all we needed and not have to pay for things we didn’t want.”
“By the end of the year, Saint Dominic School had entered the 21st Century much to the amazement and delight of our parents.” (Cullen, Page 20)
Click here to read the full Momentum article by Teri Cullen, and contact us for more information about how to join CM Schoolyard.
Our membership is proud of the progress they are able to make with our help, and that’s why they are eager to share that experience with their peers.
James Siebens is a writer for Collaborative Methods. He writes about business, technology and education issues. He also writes about media and American culture.
Cullen, Teri. “Adopting 21st Century Technology for 21st Century Parents,”Momentum Feb. /March (2010) : 18-20 (.pdf)
We’ve added schoolyard Groups to the current Classrooms & Subjects module. You can download an overview of the new functionality or you can read on.
Download the PDF here
Groups are an online meeting place for all of your extracurricular needs. Post announcements & spotlight current accomplishments. Keep your parents involved with extracurricular activities.
Schoolyard – Groups Functionality
To add a Group, please click the “Administration” tab, and then “Classroom and Groups” on the left side.
 
Clicking “Add New” brings up the following page
You can create Groups like you create a classroom currently. Once a Group is added, you will see them listed on the “Classroom and Groups” page
You will also notice that the second tab on the top now says “Classrooms and Groups” instead of “Classrooms”, Clicking this brings up the classroom menu
Clicking on a Group name brings up a space just like classrooms
You can post Events, Announcements, Spotlight to the Groups.
If you need help, please contact us at support@schoolyardapp.com. Multiple people monitor those messages and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.
In the mean time, check out our help pages by clicking here!
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