The temporary issue we reported yesterday in which Building Account users were experiencing a redirect to the Free Account interface has been resolved. Thanks for you feedback and patience!

This is a notice to our Building Account users. Over the weekend we published a new module - which we will be sending the details out on soon - and, unfortunately, as a result you may be temporarily experiencing a redirect to the Free Account interface when when you sign in. If you are, you can access the correct interface by typing in the following URL:

http://staronline.bercgroup.com/UI/Home.aspx 

We apologize for this and will have this resolved shortly.

I guess we gained some experience last week. Thank you to those of you who promptly contacted us regarding the Lesson Planner glitches.

It came to our attention last week that there was an issue with the Lesson Planner timing out during long sessions and, in some cases, losing data. We are very sorry to hear that this has been an issue and wish to apologize to all who have experienced difficulty with the system and especially to those who lost data. We did not catch this issue in our testing process.

This was our highest priority issue as soon as we learned of it. We immediately put our development team solely on this issue and are happy to report that a fix was released by the end of last week. Please let us know if you experiencing difficulty with timing out and/or data retention. Meanwhile, we will continue to work on an even more robust auto-save feature that will ensure you can have a lesson plan in editing mode for multiple hours, should you need that much time, without losing data.

Out of these discussions with users, who were primarily teachers, we also learned some new things, as always, about the Lesson Planner in general and how it can best serve teachers. We plan to incorporate this feedback into our development going forward. If you have any thoughts about the Lesson Planner or STAR Online, please share.

Another small update while we brew up some bigger things. Stay tuned.

• Accounts: Added the Re-Send Email and Edit Email Address options for District Administrators as well

[joke via academictips.org]

All we can offer at this time is the ability to search for other users.

Although this post is coming in a bit late, we still wanted to update you a little update on what happened.

Is it possible, then, to have a good adventure as the result of sound planning? Anyway, some updates to the Lesson Planner and other features and fixes for you.

Over the last couple weeks we have released some pretty significant updates to the Learning Walks module. We realized that the original Learning Walk functionality was not allowing the entire staff the opportunity to observe and reflect online because only administrators had access to that functionality. We've remedied that by adding two new types of learning walks. 

The three types of Learning Walks are now : Learning Walk (Collection), Learning Walk (Live), and Learning Walk (Virtual).  Each of the types allow you to safely observe instruction and reflect on your own practices. The differences are: 

• The Collection type is only available to administrators and funnels data to the reports on the Home tab so that administrators check progress against your SMART Goals and share out findings
  
• The Live and Virtual types are available to all staff members and do not funnel to the building reports
  
• The Live type is meant to be used in any situation where classes are being observed live, on-site or off-site (or from memory) and so does not have the Class Details panel
  
• The Virtual type can be used in place of live observations as you observe a classroom clips for each observation

On the Learning Walks module landing page, select the type of learning walk you want to go on via the Learning Walk drop-down menu and then click Go to load it. The list you see may differ from the image below depending on your role.

See. Talk. Apply. Reflect. Enjoy!