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Hi everyone, and welcome to the monthly MBC Trainers Update webinar for February 29, 2012.
In this webinar, Merleen Johnson and Steve Landwehr will introduce the new hosted school
and district web sites, and then they'll be discussing what's on the product development
roadmap for this spring and summer.
The first person we'll be hearing from is Steve Landwehr, a web software developer for
My Big Campus. After Steve's presentation, Merleen Johnson will introduce the product
roadmap.
Steve: One of the first things I want to show is the school page that we are bringing back
to My Big Campus.
Much like a user has a profile page, and a group has a home page, a school is now going
to have its own page in My Big Campus.
Before I go any further, let me first specify that I'm showing this on a development server,
so this is actually what we use for all of our internal testing. So that's what I'm going
to be showing you today.
For example, here's Mr. McMillan's profile page. You'll notice under his name here, in
his header, is the name of the school he is in. In this case, it's the Development School.
You can now click on the name of the school to go to that school's page.
On the school's page, the first tab here is Announcements, so we now are going to have
school announcements.
This works just like user wall posts or group wall post announcements, where you can type
in a message here, you can attach something to the message, it posts, and that will make
a school announcement that goes out to all students and staff in that school.
You can see that I have a couple of announcements in here already, for some testing we're doing.
The next tab on our school page is Resources. Resources works just like the Resources tab
on a group page. You can have folders, and you can attach items to your Resources.
Click on a folder to go into that folder. You can put stuff in that folder, and it works
just like Group Resources.
Anyone in the school has access to come to the Resources tab and view the Resources that
are on this Resources page.
The third tab here is Calendar. This works just like the Calendars you see on your user
profile and the Group Calendar.
The reason I wanted to show you the school page here is because one of the things we
are doing with the hosted sites is actually pulling some of this content onto the hosted
school website.
So, let's go ahead and click on Administration here.
On the Administration side of this, you're going to see a new tab here called Hosted
School Websites.
You'll notice it has a little "Beta" badge above that. We're still actively working on
this feature.
We click on Hosted School Websites. Depending on what kind of administrator you are, you'll
see a list of schools here.
Because my account is a District Administrator, I'm going to see all the schools that are
in my district. If I was a school administrator, I'd just see the school that I'm in.
When you click on one of these, you'll see some options here. For example, the Development
School, if I click on that, I'll see some options to manage the school website for my
school.
I can disable the website, I can edit the settings, manage the pages, change the theme,
and I can actually view the website with this link here.
When I click on View Website, this is an example of the hosted site for my school.
You'll notice that these two schools here have checkmarks on the Website Enabled column,
indicating that the two schools do have a website turned on and active.
For example, the Next Gen Test Ryan school that we have here does not have the checkbox
checked. When I click on that school, I only see one link, to Enable it.
When I go ahead and click on Enable, I see the popup that says "Please wait while we
enable your site."
We're actually doing several things behind the scenes here when we enable a site for
a school. One of which is, we actually go through and automatically create some top-level
pages for the site, pages like the Home Page, the Staff Page, the Calendar Page.
We automatically will populate those pages with some content that the user can decide
to use or not to use.
Now you'll notice that it's finished. I now have a checkmark next to that school, and
I now have the options to manage the site for that school.
I'm going to go ahead and use the Development School for our example here to walk through
all the features for the hosted web site for the school.
I'm going to start with the Edit Settings option. On this page, you'll see that we have
a few fields here to edit: One is the Host Name. This is where you would put the website
address for the school.
Underneath that, you'll see we automatically give the site a sub-domain, and because I'm
showing this on a development server, you'll see "development" here. But on the live site
you would not see Development, you would just see the sub-domain for the school such as
"DS" for Development School Dot Mybigcampus Dot Net.
This would actually be the address that you would post the CNAME record for your site
to get all that working so that when you actually went to your school's website address, you
would see our hosted website.
If you have Google Analytics tracking set up, if you'd like to use that, you can put
in the ID for it, and it will populate that code on your hosted website. You can manage
your own Google Analytics account.
You can enable or disable the site with the check box here. It does the same thing as
the enable/disable link from the first page we were on.
If you want to upload your logo, you can upload it here. I have not uploaded a logo, so it
just says the logo has not been uploaded, and will instead use the name of the school
on the hosted website.
The next option we have over here is Manage Pages. And those top level pages I was talking
about earlier, that automatically get created for the site when it's first enabled, are
these pages that are over here, fully justified to the left, such as Home, Academics, Athletics,
Staff, Students, Information, News and Calendar.
Those top level pages are reflected over here in this top level navigation on my site. Academics,
Athletics, Staff, so on and so forth.
These top level pages cannot be deleted or renamed, but they can be unpublished. So for
example, if you don't want to display the "Information" page on your website, you can
turn that off by unpublishing it.
You can tell a page is unpublished by the color of the bar here. So for example, this
page Curriculum is unpublished. It's gray, the text is grayed out, and there's a little
stop icon here that says unpublished.
Whereas these other pages are blue and it has a little globe icon to indicate that it's
published and live on the web.
These top level pages, you can edit them, and you can add sub-pages underneath them.
So for example, my Academics page here ,I can edit it, and I'm presented with several
options for my Academics page.
I can give the page a description, I can choose whether or not it's published, I can choose
the number of columns that I want this page to have, and I can choose several Widgets
to display on the page.
What we're doing with Widgets is this is what's actually going to control the content that
is on your page.
So, let's take a look at the Academics page. You'll see here we have -- let me back out
here really quick and show you the sub-pages under Academics.
The sub-pages we have under Academics are Graduation Requirements, Advanced Placement,
Educational Support Services, Curriculum which is unpublished, Technology, and Our Principal.
You can see those sub pages are over here in this left navigation menu.
Now I'm going to go back and edit the Academics page. This is the page that we're going to
be editing. The Widgets are reflected with this content in the middle of the page and
my column over here.
Column 1 and Column 2 is what we refer to those as.
So, for example, under Column 1 in my Widgets, I have two Widgets: I have one called Academics
Info, and I have one called Helpful Documents. Those are reflected right here. So this is
the first Widget I have, and the second Widget here is called Helpful Documents.
Let's go ahead and edit Academics Info.
You'll see I have a Widget Title, and I can choose whether or not I want that title to
display on the page above the Widget.
Then I have the Widget itself, and this Widget is just some text. It's a text editor where
I can put any text I want in here. I can format the text any way I want,
I'll go ahead and just edit this text.
And let's go ahead and turn the Title on for this Widget and click Edit Widget.
And now when I come back and refresh my page, I now see the Widget title and there's the
text I just added to the Widget.
You can drag these Widgets around so that the content on your page can be put in any
order.
So, if I wanted my Helpful Documents Widget to be above my text, just drag it into the
position that you want and click Save.
Refresh the page and now my Helpful Documents Widget is being displayed above my text
The same thing applies to my second column over here. You'll notice I have one Widget
in my second column, a list of college s that's right here.
I can edit this Widget, same thing, it's a text Widget. I can turn this title off or
on, and I can also add more Widgets by clicking the Add Widget link
The Widgets that we have right now are the ones that are in the popout menu, and again,
because it's in beta, we're still actively developing Widgets for this.
These are the ones that we currently have. So if I wanted to, for example, put School
Announcements on my page, I click School Announcements, and choose whether or not to display the title
with this Widget.
With this Widget I can choose how many announcements to show. Click Add Widget and now there's
my Widget
Again I can drag it into whichever position I want. Hit save, refresh my page, and now
there's my Widget on the page showing announcements that are being pulled from the school announcements
tab on my big campus.
So now any time someone goes onto my school announcements page and makes an announcement,
it's going to automatically show up here in this Widget on this page.
You'll notice the sub-pages are listed here under Academics. When you edit the Academics
page, you'll be able to control the order of the sub pages.
So if I want this Principal page to be the very first page in the navigation menu, just
drag it up, click Save, and you'll notice here's the Principal link.
It was at the bottom. Now I refresh the page and Principal is at the top.
To unpublish the page, simply uncheck the box, hit Save, and you'll now notice that
Academics is grayed out, has a little stop light icon, and now when I come back to my
page and click Home, Academics is no longer showing up in that navigation menu at the
top.
So if I actually went to that page's URL I would get a 404 page, page not found, because
I've unpublished it.
However, any of the sub-pages that are under Academics, while they will not be published
in any navigation menu, I can still get to the pages individually by typing the address.
So if a page was linked to from somewhere, or even in search results, that page would
still be reachable.
Let's take a look at the Curriculum page.
We can go ahead and publish this.
One of the options that I have on this page is to change the parent page, so I can change
which page the curriculum page falls under.
Right now it's falling under the Academics page, but I can change that if I want by clicking
this link here.
Select a different parent page, and basically just get a tree view of all of my sites's
navigation. For example, say I want to put it under Athletics, just click Athletics,
click Save, and now when I go to the Athletics page, thereās Curriculum.
So it's real easy to change which pages fall under which parent page. So you can change
the order of any of these pages just by changing its parent page.
Let's take a look at the Change Theme page. We don't have a whole lot of layouts or themes
right now. This is one of the things that we're still developing.
It's really easy to change the look of my site just by clicking on the theme that I
want.
So for example this is the current theme we have selected. You'll notice it has a blue
square or blue box around the theme that's selected.
Let's say I want this Purple theme up here, just click that, click Save, refresh the page
and now my site has a different theme.
The View Website here is just a little quick link to open up the site in a new window for
you.
Another option we have on the pages here is the Preview Page so you can make changes to
the page to your Widgets click Preview, and you'll be able to get a snapshot of what the
page looks like before you actually save it.
That's pretty much what we have right now for the hosted school websites.
Merleen: What's next? I'm going to have you help me out here, Steve, on the roadmap.
For March, you guys are going to be working on easy way to be able to gather up stuff
for lesson plans and share it, right?
Steve: Right.
Merleen: And what do we mean exactly, what are we thinking about for integrating with
Google Docs. Can you explain that?
Steve: I think we're going to tie into Google accounts and be able to actually pull in your
Google Documents into your account. Much like the way My Big Campus documents are listed,
we'll be able to display your Google docs in line with that so you can actually manage
the Google docs from within My Big Campus.
Merleen: Our concern with Google docs prior to this has always been what can go into the
Google docs that we're not aware of and it kind of breaks our security and safety rules
a little bit.
Our workaround for that, to still maintain our safety and security as far as sharing,
is that a school can decide they want to integrate with Google docs, but they can't share a Google
doc outside of their school.
That kind of contains any issue that might come up.
And then, we're going to make a way to share lesson plans. If they are creating things
in Google docs and they want to share those in the content containers, that will be able
to cross district boundaries, then we'll have some sort of import tool or something so they'll
be able to bring in the content, at least, from the Google doc to those lessons.
Then in April, we're going to be hitting *** the schoolwork, the ease of use sort of
things. Do you have a top priority list for that yet?
Steve: No I think that's something that's still being worked on right now.
Merleen: And then we'll hit *** being able to import ExamView tests, That will require
a lot of additional question type creation within quizzes than what we have now, and
then the import tool itself be able to drag those in.
Does that include the test banks as well, or just importing from ExamView?
Steve: I think it will just be a straight import from ExamView.
Merlene: And then in May we'll be creating that community portal. And that's really all
about the parent access for the most part. Can you elaborate on that a little bit about
what the current vision is?
Steve: I think the current vision is to restrict that to SIS created parent accounts.
Once a parent account has been created, the parent will then be able to log into My Big
Campus and basically see reports for their student.
So they could see assignmnents that have been assigned to their students, see what grade
the student received, and make sure the student has turned assignments in, stuff like that.
Merleen The tie-in with the SIS is to make sure that only the people that are OK to see
it are seeing it?
Steve: Right.
Merleen: And then the other part of that is being able to grant students who graduate
access to their e-portfolios, or things they have created that they can use in either college
or career going forward.
And then early summer to mid summer we're looking for the mobile device management integration.
That's all about iPads and being able to manage that and push down to the teacher level some
of the management tasks. That's going to be a big deal.
Then we have our Apps for both iOS and Android. We want to get those caught up as far as their
feature set with the website as best we can.
That is where we're at with what the roadmap is, at least through midsummer.
We're going to have some more input from folks through the Design Conference and different
things.
We'll be talking with people face to face between now and then in late June.
Joan, did you have something to add?
Joan Roehre: Well I did. I just threw it in the question as well. I'm looking to see if
admin options and capabilities will be added to the iOS app?
Merleen: Any discussion on that?
Steve Not that I know of.
Merleen: I've not had any requests directly for that sort of functionality inside the
app, but that's something that we'll have to look at.
We'll certainly be working on scoping that out with our trainers group when we get close
to making our decisions and prioritizing that.
Joan: Thank you.
Merleen: Thank you so much for joining us, and we look forward to next time.