August 2016 eupdate Inside This Issue New Standards General BYOC & BYOC+ Updates o Lesson Plan Updates New Plan Book view Integrated district calendar into lesson plan views Create Assignments while Lesson Planning For public lesson plans added the ability to show or not show activities Added the ability to have notes associated with Lesson Plan activities and order them Improved the layout/look of public lesson plan view New User Preferences and District Setup Options o More formatting options for classes o Added the ability to view Standards actually covered in a course to the Course Standards page BYOC+ Updates o Minor Changes to Assessment Entry Thoughts and Suggestions Welcomed The time is near. the kids will be back soon! Many of you are wrapping up your summer activities getting ready for back to school time. We hope everyone has had or continues to have a great summer, we ve enjoyed ours. While admittedly enjoying our summer, we ve also been working on some updates for you. Specifically, we have been focusing on Lesson Planning in BYOC. We have been having lots of conversations regarding Lesson Planning with districts over the past couple of years, and we have been listening. The good news is that all of this feedback proves that more and more of you are transitioning to the point of truly using your curriculum to drive the classroom. Congratulations to all of you that are reaching this point! This release wraps up a series of enhancements to the lesson planning portion of BYOC that you have requested. This portion of the system has always been a challenge to balance the simplicity of a standalone lesson planner, which teachers want, with the power of having your lesson plans truly connected to and driven by your curriculum, which administrators want. With this cumulative set of lesson plan enhancements, the ones in this eupdate and the ones in the last few eupdates, we believe we have met everything that you have been looking for. We have made a commitment to leveraging Facebook to distribute information and BYOC Hints on a timelier basis. Please Like us on Facebook to get the latest news and information. New Standards We have added and updated several sets of standards within BuildYourOwnCurriculum. Here is a comprehensive listing of the content areas that have been added or updated due to the release of revised standards. Arkansas Curriculum Framework Mathematics Illinois - Learning Standards Social Studies Kansas - Curricular Standards School Counseling-Benchmarks Family and Consumer Sciences School Counseling-Knowledge Based Indicators Kansas Finance Career Entrepreneurship-12053 Kansas Human Services Introduction to Family and Consumer Sciences - 45001 Nutrition and Wellness B - 08067 Career & Life Planning-22207 Kansas Information Technology Emerging Technologies - 10040 Kansas Manufacturing Research and Design for Manufacturing - 13998 Montana Academic Standards Career and Vocational/Technical Education Workplace Competencies Pennsylvania Academic Standards Alternate Academic Content Standards for Reading Wyoming Content and Performance Standards Fine and Performing Arts Standards 1
General BuildYourOwnCurriculum (BYOC & BYOC+) Updates The changes outlined in this eupdate will be installed the weekend of July 30 th, 2016. Lesson Plan Updates New Plan Book View In addition to the Calendar and Week views for lesson plans, we have now added a Plan Book view. This view shows plans for all courses taught by the teacher. The details shown for the plan entries are customizable via the User Preferences. Lesson Plan entries can be dragged and dropped between days and time slots. Recurring plan entries are indicated via the icon. eupdate 2 August 2016
Class Filter Viewing all plan entries for a class Clicking on the Class name in the header of the lesson plan entry will filter the lesson plan entries displayed to all entries for that particular class. We envision this view being popular with High School or Middle School teachers as it will show you all of the entries for a particular class. Selecting the View All Classes link will return you to the normal Plan Book view Period or Block Filter - Viewing all plan entries for a class Clicking on the Period or Block name in the header of the lesson plan entry will filter the lesson plan entries displayed to all entries for that particular period or block. We envision this view being popular with Elementary School teachers as it will show you all of the plan entries for a particular block, say the reading or math block. Selecting the View All Periods link will return you to the normal Plan Book view. eupdate 3 August 2016
Day Filter - Viewing all plan entries for a day Clicking on the Day in the header of the Plan Book view will filter the lesson plan entries displayed to all entries for that particular day. This view allows you to easily navigate to other days. Selecting the View Full Week link will return you to the normal Plan Book view. eupdate 4 August 2016
Plan Book Colors The colors showing on the Plan Book are controlled in two fashions. If a teacher only has one class, typically an elementary teacher, the colors shown will default to the colors assigned to each course in the class on the class setup page. If the teacher has multiple classes, typically a middle or high school teacher, the colors shown will default to the color associated with the class on the class setup page. Integrated district calendar into lesson plan views The district calendar is now being leveraged by the lesson planner so that we can proactively alert teachers to non-teaching days. In the samples shown below, we have indicated that Friday July 15 th is a non-teaching day, the reason being that It should be summer! Plan Book View Week View eupdate 5 August 2016
Create Assignments while Lesson Planning Historically in BYOC creating lesson plans and making classroom assignments have occurred on separate pages. From a teacher s workflow perspective, it seems to make much more sense to combine these two activities. So, on the Lesson Plan edit page, we have added the ability to create assignments. This list, located below the activities list on the page will display any assignments for the class where the start date is before or equal to the date of the lesson plan and the end date, or due date, is after or equal to the date of the lesson plan. Also, like activities, there is a link in the header of the assignment section to create a new assignment. Create notes for Activities associated with a Lesson Plan and control the order of the Activities If you add multiple Activities to a Lesson Plan, you can now control the order of Activities by dragging and dropping or right clicking and using the context menu the same as you are able to control the order of other items in BYOC. Once you have added Activities to a Lesson Plan, you can also add notes to the Activity within the Plan via the Edit icon located in the grid of Activities. These notes are both for teacher use and possibly public viewing if the Lesson Plan is visible to the public. Clicking the Edit icon will display a pop-up page which will allow you to insert or edit notes. Additionally, if the Lesson Plan is set for Public viewing, you can control whether a particular Activity will be visible to the public as well. eupdate 6 August 2016
New User Preferences and District Options relating to Lesson Planning Several new options were added in the User Preferences section to allow individual teachers to have greater control over how lesson planning works for them. The basic concepts of lesson planning in BYOC are consistent for all users, but these options allow the individual teacher to control what is visually represented to them. User Preferences Default View The Default View option allows the teacher to select which of our four Lesson Plan views will be displayed to them by default. All of the views will remain available for them to reference if they so choose. User Preferences Plan Book Options The Plan Book Options section allows the teacher to select what information to show in the Plan Book view for each Lesson Plan entry. In addition to choosing what information to display on the Plan Book, the teacher can also control the order that the information is displayed in. eupdate 7 August 2016
District Options Lesson Plan Template On the Lesson Plan Template, you can specify which Lesson Plan fields will show for each Lesson Plan Entry in the Planner view, if the teacher chooses the option Show Lesson Plan Fields as allowed by the lesson plan definition in their User Preferences. In order to support districts where different buildings may be operating on different calendars, we added an option to the Lesson Plan Template definition process. This new option, Tie to School Calendar, allows you to specify which calendar lesson plans and classes tied to a particular template should follow. You will notice another new option on this page, If using period based schedule, display times instead of period names. This option, as the name so aptly describes, allows you specify if the planner shows your period name, or the time range of the period. eupdate 8 August 2016
Improved the Layout and Look of the Public Lesson Plan View BYOC optionally supports the sharing of Lesson Plans with the general public. This option is turned on via the Lesson Plan Template configuration process. If Lesson Plan sharing or Basic Assignments is turned on, the Class Information option will be available in the left navigation of the district s Public BYOC Site. Once choosing Class Information you then need to choose the Teacher and Class that you are looking for. Once the user selects a lesson plan they would like to see, the details of the plan will be displayed, including any public fields specified on the Lesson Plan Template, Learning Targets, Standards, Activities marked public on the Lesson Plan, and public Attachments. eupdate 9 August 2016
More formatting options for classes More and more teachers are starting to use the BYOC Class Information page in BYOC or the Student Portal in BYOC+ to communicate to students and their parents. With this increased use came a desire for more flexibility on the look and content of the information displayed on the page. To support these desires, we increased the character limit in this area from 3,000 to 25,000 characters and have added three new tools to the Class Introduction/Overview/Greeting section, those being: A Table Editor so you can insert tables for greater control laying out the page An Image Upload/Editor so that you can insert and edit images A Hyperlink Editor so you can insert web links into the page (when using this tool be sure to select New Window as your target otherwise your links could take parents and students off of your classroom page). Ability to View Standards Actually Covered in a Course We have noticed some teachers creating custom lists of course standards that were actually the same as the default list we would have provided them. In talking to them they told us that they did it because they liked that the custom list page told them when they actually covered standards. With that idea in mind, we have added a new section on the Course Standards page so that they can get this information without the work of creating a custom list of Course Standards. On the Course Details page choose the Course Standards button. This will show the custom list of Course Standards as it always did, but now there is a new tab, Standards Aligned to Course. eupdate 10 August 2016
Selecting the Standards Aligned to Course tab will show you a list of all of the Standards currently referenced by Learning Targets in this course. Additionally, it will show you a count of the number of Learning Targets the Standard is aligned to. Finally, by selecting the arrow (>) in front of each Standard the grid will expand and show you the actual Learning Targets aligned to the Standard. eupdate 11 August 2016
BuildYourOwnCurriculum+ Updates Assessment Editing Updates At your advice, we have made a few, minor updates to the Assessment Editing process. New Error Message If you attempt to save a question without a valid answer, the system will now stop you and display an error. More Choices for Single Choice When you create a Single Choice question we gave you 4 slots to define choices. Several of you have told us that many standard tests have 5 choices. Previously you could always add more, but it required an extra step. We now provide slots for 5 choices by default. Show the Correct Answer on Quick Navigate For all questions other than Constructed Response, we are now bolding the correct response so that it is more obvious on the Quick Navigate control. Thoughts and Suggestions Welcomed As always, thank you for your continued patronage and use of BYOC. As you can see we are constantly striving to improve our offering for you. Please feel free to contact me directly with any thoughts and suggestions, our goal always is to provide you with the practical tools you need to truly make curriculum effective in your district. Chris Trina Co-Founder School Software Group, Inc. (800) 596-0734 x801 eupdate 12 August 2016