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Gwen: Hi everyone, and welcome to the monthly MBC Trainers Update webinar for Thursday,
March 29th, 2012. Merleen Johnson introduces today's participants.
Merleen: I've got here with me Holly Chambers, Michele Hatfield, and Ryan Bond, all waiting
to respond to whatever questions you have.
I have pretty much an open forum for today and I see some of you already have some questions
queued up.
Let me cover a few things real quick. On your screen you should be seeing the iOS app update
that went out about a week ago.
We've got version 2.0 out there with a number of improvements, trying to close that gap
between the website functionality and the iOS app.
The Android of course is following closely. Ryan, about how far behind do you think the
Android app will be?
Ryan Bond: We have a beta version available now. People are testing.
Merleen: So, if you're interested in the Android, we've got the beta out and people are testing.
Can they still jump into that beta for the Android?
Ryan: Yes.
Merleen: If you're interested in that, just post inside MBC Trainers, or directly with
Ryan Bond through My Big Campus. You can reach him and tell him that you'd like to participate
in that.
You can see we've got the Yes's on posts so you can see who Yes'd things now.
Being able to upload directly to Your Stuff is the biggest one probably, as far as being
able to get from your camera roll and video, being able to actually initiate those things
inside of the My Big Campus app now, so you can actually take a picture inside the app
and upload it directly to Your Stuff.
Being able to have schoolwork filtered by your groups and so on, mirroring the latest
release on the website pretty much.
Also being able, now, for notifications, especially for you teachers who get different kinds of
requests to be followed, or folks wanting to join your group, you can now get those
in your notifications.
The Search field. In additional to library items you can find people now.
And there's some other miscellaneous improvements to help with stability.
Another new addition, that I was actually working on this right up to the minute here,
on creating. As a result of us having made those Flipped Classroom webinars, I have put
a brand new group out there for Professional Development Credit Opportunities.
If you want to find that you can go to either my page and look at the groups I'm in or search
for that. It's Professional Development Credit Opportunities (http://mbcurl.me/4SD)
I actually finished putting one up right before the time for our webinar today and I'll get
the other one up later on today.
So, you can see here that we've got the archived recording of that first session. It's really
the "best of" those two days.
Gwen was nice enough to go through and edit those two days together and do a nice one
hour recording, and we actually created ten assessment questions for that. You can take
that and then if you get a score of 80% or better, we will present you with a certificate
of completion that will be adequate in many cases for you to be able to pass on to your
administrator, so that you can get an hour of credit for having sat through that.
As I said, part 2 I'll have hopefully later today.
Holly has been working on some digital citizenship content that she's thrown into the MBC Orientation
Center.
Go to Pages, and "Help your Students Learn about Digital Citizenship"
This is really directed at you as teachers, obviously, as it's in a topic for staff only,
so it's not something the students go to.
It's got a couple of videos that our MBC Coaches have made, as well as some real classroom
examples, things teachers have shared with us that you can go to. Then a bunch of resources,
you probably have access to many of these already.
And then we also even have adjustments that you may need to make for your AUP when you're
using My Big Campus. There's some examples and some templates there to help guide you
with that.
Last thing on my list of things to cover today is Summer Academy. Those of you that have
been accepted to attend our summer academy, just following ISTE in San Diego, you've been
notified and there's a little bit of housekeeping. Holly, what are you hoping will happen next
here?
Holly: Well if you haven't already emailed me with your tentative arrival and departure
dates, at the very least if you can let me know you'll be there so I can note that you've
RSVP'd with me. And as soon as you do have those dates in mind, if you could let me know
so I can make sure to have your hotel room reserved.
We also are going to definitely need to get the e-rate form from everybody before we can
have you stay overnight.
And we'd like to have the admin approval forms, the coach agreement, and your W-9 turned in
as well, as soon as you can get those to us.
Merleen: So we really want to just open it up now and allow you to have the floor.
Tony is looking for other Muscogee folks in the audience. Jana (Reese) is here, and Kerri
Mann, Jackie Sizemore, we got a nice Muscogee crowd here.
Ryan, Peggy's looking for a way to be able to reorder sub-pages. There's not currently
a way for them to do that. Is there anything thought about? I know that's been asked for
before.
Ryan: Yes, I think it's on our feature request list, but we're not currently working on it.
Merleen: So we don't have an ETA for that yet.
We do a lot of workarounds to manage that. Holly, you've done quite a bit of that, you
end up doing that all the time in the Orientation Center, trying to reorder pages, and you've
got a kind of a workaround.
Holly: It takes a little bit of time but if you need them in a certain order, what you
can do is open, in a new tab, your page, and copy what's in the sub-page whose information
you want to move.
Plan ahead the order that you want, because as you add each sub-page it will add it as
the next one below. So, you can create a new subpage, copy and paste the information into
it.
If you plan ahead the order you want, and go in and start to add the pages in that order,
copying and pasting the information over, then you can delete the ones that are out
of order, as long as you've already copied the information over. That tends to work.
It took a little bit of playing around with it to figure it out but I was able to get
it to work that way.
Merleen: So Peggy, your contact is Holly.
Holly: Email me, Peggy, and I'll help you.
Merleen: Some more questions here. When students view an assignment in schoolwork that has
an attachment, a separate window opens and the student has to go back around to the assignment
to then put answers. Is there a plan to change that?
Ryan: We're actually planning a total redo of assignments and quizzes to bring them up
to snuff. And make them so they're less kludgy and more intuitive. That's on our current
roadmap.
Merleen: Is a document preview part of that?
Ryan: Document preview is part of that.
Merleen: I think that will go a very long ways in helping with that.
Muscogee has had quite the deployment here over the last couple of months, rolling it
to, I don't know how many schools, but it was several schools a week there for a little
while.
Anyone from Muscogee want to share? It would be interesting since you're such a large district
to hear from someone there maybe Jana or someone else who would like to share with the larger
group what it's taken to deploy in Muscogee.
There's sixty-five locations and you're about halfway through. Would you mind just sharing
a little bit? I know you had a whole project team working towards deploying and now you
started out with some pilot schools, did you?
I know I've been working with Muscogee since the middle of last fall, and had an excellent
team of people working to make this rollout before mid-year. I know that's not always
easy when you have thirty-six thousand students I think.
Let me follow up. I did hear from Jana, she says "they are super excited at Muscogee and
are working on an AUP policy in addition to training, lots going on but it's all good."
Thank you for that, Jana.
Peggy Clore is asking, "what would be great is a way to annotate or markup on a submitted
assignment, PDF or MBC Docs."
Right now I think the only way to accomplish that is by actually taking the assignment,
downloading it, opening it up, marking it up just like you would any of the tracking
changes or the regular Word sorts of functions and then saving that and then re-attaching
it to the assignment.
Libby, you have a question, let me find you and unmute you real quick.
Libby: This question is for Ryan. Thank you so much Ryan for taking the time to work with
NBC Learn. They have amazing videos, and I like the idea if we could do that single sign-on.
Is there an update on that? I saw a lot of emails going back and forth.
Ryan: Well, they turned it on but the problem is anyone else that uses them, basically it's
going to say they're from Wayne Township because they're basing it off www.mybigcampus.com.
Libby: OK. So what I need to do is be able to use our login and keep that within only
the courses that our students will be in.
Ryan: The only way you could really do that is they'd have to have the URL to every one
of those groups. It isn't easy. So, we're going to have to talk about it and see if
we can come up with another plan.
Libby: OK. But it is working for us at this point then, so I can test it. OK, that's all
I needed to know.
Merleen: Gwen has suggested that I show the work she has done on the MBC Sample School
website for not only giving us a sample of what our new school websites look like, but
also making it an actual tutorial. So if you can navigate over to mbcss.mybigcampus.net,
you can take a look at what she's begun doing here.
As I said, she's got it so that you can actually see how it's pulling content from our Sample
School here on the Staff page, and it's got the emails that it's pulling, and whatever
title they had in addition to that.
And if they have some public groups, when you click on that you get the About Me and
whatever public groups they have created that you can navigate to straight out of that district
or school page.
This shows some resources that were added from the new school page that we have, the
Calendar. So that's a good source for you to be able to check things out.
Next, how's Google Docs integration coming along?
Ryan: It's coming along pretty good. We've got the ability to integrate your account
to all of the docs, and we're just finishing up the UI stuff. It's tied to another release,
so probably we're looking at end of April, most likely.
Merleen: Anything else, Ryan, of particular relevance that you want to share, that you're
working on now?
Ryan: We do have another iOS update that should be out pretty soon, 2.01, which is pretty
much just bug fixes. We're hoping that it will be available maybe this weekend or early
next week.
Merleen: You can always follow up with any questions. Our MBC Trainers group is a very
active one, so discussions in there are always being monitored by our staff here, as well
as your peers throughout the country.
Again, to look at the sample website, it's MBC (for My Big Campus) SS (for Sample School)
mbcss.mybgigcampus.net. I'll go ahead and post that in our Trainers site. I'll put it
up there on the home page so you can link to that directly.
As to us being able to share assignments and that being in the works, that'll be part of
what we're doing.
You probably heard in our last webinar we were talking about "Bundles" and being able
to share assignments and quizzes as well as all your resources like you have been in collections,
so that you can swap those outside of district boundaries and across schools or across the
hall.
Yes, that is in the works. We'll have a couple of phases of development to make that all
happen, but we're hoping within another 30 to 60 days to have at least that in beta for
you to be able to play with. That is in development right now.
Here's what you get if you finish one of our Professional Development videos and assessments.
Holly already awarded one to herself it looks like.
And as I said I'll get that other one up there. I'm not sure how many of you are able to get
professional development credit through recorded webinars, but we want to continue to offer
those. Libby and I have some more ideas for some more webinars to come yet. The nice followups
to this flipped one, it's been a very busy season for us otherwise, but we do want to
commit to providing those on an ongoing basis.
Peggy, you're looking for a chance of this being available in My Big Campus. Just being
able to generate a certificate inside of My Big Campus?
Certainly I can think of a workaround, if you wanted to create an MBC Document of your
own but I hadn't thought about it in terms of you being able to generate those for your
group.
Let's talk about that, shoot me an email if you would and maybe we can. Really thinking
about My Big Campus training that you do, and you want to be able to give them credit
when they complete their course with you. Yeah, let's talk about how we might be able
to do that.
All right guys. I'll just wrap it up and turn you loose and let you get on with your days.
Again, anything you think of after the fact, go ahead and post in the My Big Campus Trainers
group and I'll get the URL to that sample website out there for you too, and that last
flipped webinar and assessment.
Thank you everyone, have a great day.