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.

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.

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!

Sometimes you have to take a step back to see where you're at and where you're going. After the big push recently to publish the new reporting features, that's exactly what we needed to do. This week and next we'll be evaluating the next phases of development to see where we go next.

What's on the horizon? Some features we're looking at are a digital journal to capture notes and organize reflections, expanding team functionality for more robust sharing and communication, learning walks functionality that is purely for personal and PLC reflection (the data does not feed into the school and district reports) that can be conducted using videos or offsite, and integration of the common core standards into the lesson planner. STAR Online, as an online tool for implementing Powerful Teaching and Learning, has been helping teachers transform their practices and we're very excited to continue providing and improving it!

What would you like to see? Leave some comments down below or send us a message if you have any thoughts.

"Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childhood days, recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth, and transport the traveler back to his own fireside and quiet home!" - Charles Dickens

We hope everyone took time to enjoy some holiday! We sure did, so news has been light the last couple weeks. We're getting back into the swing of things this week and will be back on our weekly publishing cycle starting tomorrow.

Even though we just recently launched this blog, we went ahead and retroactively published updates through August 24th, 2012 so that you can get caught up on recent updates if you're interested. As always, contact us with questions.

This just in from the Help Desk. We're going to start regularly publishing updates to keep you all posted on what's new in STAR Online (we're always building) and what's been fixed (unfortunately, bugs are a reality we have to deal with). Straight from the Help Desk to you.

Thanks for using STAR Online, thanks for hanging in there through some of the rough bumps in the road, and an especially BIG THANK YOU to all you users who've provided feedback to us. As always, STAR Online is for you. It's provided to help you in your instructional practices and the more we hear from you the better it will be.

We have enjoyed building this system and working with you all!