Teacher’s Corner

Not sure how I missed this myself but a friend recently told me he heard our name on the weekly radio show Net @ Night with Leo Laporte. I thought I’d share it with the rest of you, it’s always fun to hear how the general public perceives SchoolRack.

Play the snippet here, it’s only about a minute and a half in length and well worth a listen!

Howdy everyone! We’ve been working on a highly requested feature for the past week or so that we’re very proud to announce is almost finished! Many of you have asked about password protected private websites, and we’re finally just a day or two away from releasing it into the wild! Below is a screencast where I showcase the functionality. Enjoy!

Be sure to view it in full screen!

Welcome to the new release of SchoolRack!  I’ve been meaning to write a walkthrough of all the new features we offer in SchoolRack V5 after launch, and now that things have settled down I’ll jump right in.  It’s so exciting to see our users take advantage of these features, but for those that aren’t as familiar, here’s a quick overview of what we added to the service two weeks ago:

1. New Student & Parent accounts feature (for access to discussion boards, private messaging, assignment collection, and more)
2. New text editor for editing your website posts
3. New calendar feature
4. More themes for both Free and Plus accounts
5. More clip art to choose from for your SchoolRack website

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1. One of the main feature additions to SchoolRack is the new section in your Dashboard called Students & Parents.  These features offer a communication platform between you, your students, and/or your parents.  The premise is simple: you create a private group for either students or parents to join (you are given a code to hand to them), you have your students or parents register their own accounts on SchoolRack with the code you provide, and you now have access to all the group features offered in the menu:

Groups, where you will be able to manage all your different student or parent groups.  For example, if you want to create a group for your first period class.  You can also create a group for a club you manage at school, there really is no limit to its usage.  After you’ve created a group, you can then use all the features available to your in the list above.

Assignments, where you can post assignments to any of your groups.  After you post an assignment, students will be alerted of the assignment posting and will be able to view the details in their private accounts (none of this information is available publicly).

Discussion Boards, where members of your groups can reply to any topics you place on your website.  You have the option to make discussions private or public, even to approve all posts before they become active.

Private Messaging, for members of your groups to send you messages and vice versa.

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2. The SchoolRack text editor has had a major facelift too.  You’ll notice the biggest addition to the text editor is the “Insert Image, Media, or File” button where you can easily grab images or files from your account, or embed a YouTube video or other widget directly into a post.

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3. The calendar feature now comes standard with the Free account and is available in the list of your account tools.

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4. Enjoy more single-click themes in your account, check out some of the new ones we offer.

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5. We’ve added to our directory of clip art for you to use on your website.

Technology has certainly changed the way we communicate with each other.  Rather than sitting down and handwriting a letter, nowadays almost everyone sends an email.  Problem is, sending emails to a group of people can be a chore, and remembering to type every person’s email address can be a difficult task.

To make sending emails to large groups of people easy, SchoolRack has incorporated a simple email system for emailing groups of students, parents, or both at the click of a button.  The feature is called the Mailing List feature and is available to all SchoolRack users.

Each email list can maintain up to 100 recipients on a SchoolRack Plus account (Free accounts allow 30 recipients).  You can organize your email lists by course or category.  For example, if you are a math teacher and teach algebra and geometry, you can have one list for your algebra students and another one for geometry students and send messages to them separately.  Another way to organize mailing lists is to have one list for students and another for parents.

However, if you have not already created list, SchoolRack certainly makes it very user friendly. To get started, simply start by:

1. Click on the Mailing Lists link in your SchoolRack account
2. Click Create Mailing List
3. Give your mailing list a Title, Description (will appear on your website), and input any email addresses you may already have (optional, later students/parents will be able to sign up for your mailing list on your website)
   NOTE: You can add email addresses to your list manually whenever you want, but once your mailing list is created, visitors to your website will be able to subscribe to your mailing list on their own.  This way you don’t have to input all email addresses by yourself, you can have your visitors do it for you!
4. Once you are satisfied with the number of subscribers in your mailing list, you can send your emails by simply clicking the Compose button on the mailing list page.
5. Then fill out the simple form with your subject and email and click Send Message.
   

That’s it!  As you can tell, on SchoolRack, the responsibility initially is with the student/parent to sign up to one of your mailing lists.  The easiest way to establish and maintain one of these lists is to create one and then inform your students to ’subscribe’ to one directly on your website!  Here is what it looks like on a user’s class website:

Well, have a great time communicating with your students and their parents!  Let me know if you have any questions below!!