The OnCourse Suite of web-based educator tools has helped schools to improve accountability and collaboration in more than 30 states, and this year I have had the pleasure of visiting a handful of our partner schools in Louisiana, Texas, New Jersey, and most recently, Georgia.
Our team is always grateful for the opportunity to visit the front-lines of education to discuss how the OnCourse tools are being best utilized, and also to collect information about how we can continue to innovate and make improvements. On a personal note, it’s extremely gratifying for me to meet with teachers who have found that they were able to make broad improvements to their classroom environment by utilizing OnCourse, and it’s this energy that drives us to continue to provide the most user-friendly tools on the web.
Our school trips this year have carried a common theme; almost everyone is trying to find ways of surmounting their budgetary challenges while also trying to keep a technology infrastructure in place.
During our visits, we noticed that a few of the schools we visited had purchased tools from several vendors to accomplish a litany of goals, like capturing student data for the purpose of empowering teachers with information, or creating a collaborative resource-oriented online workplace. Then, they've heaped another system on top to communicate out to students and parents. These piecemeal systems will certainly work to some degree, but the downside is that teachers are expected to learn and manage four, sometimes even five different logins and keep abreast of changes made to each of their different systems.
Many folks were pleasantly surprised to learn that the OnCourse Lesson Planner can be upgraded to include a variety of different integrated tools, like a team-oriented resource-sharing system, an student statistics reporting tool, and a power standards module, to list a few. Often, we found that schools were paying handsomely to procure software solutions that might have been more cost effective, more tightly integrated, and easier to learn by simply upgrading their OnCourse Suite. From what I’ve heard on the road, the OnCourse tools are either the leader or amongst the leaders in intuitive use, and we strive daily to keep our position at the top.
This isn't to say that there aren't great tools out there, but there are lots of hidden benefits to consolidation as well. For example, keeping resources in the OnCourse Curriculum Portal also allows linking to state standards, which directly informs any teacher who is using the Lesson Planner. A school that uses our Gradebook would find the implementation of the Student Statistics Data Analysis tool to be a snap, because OnCourse already houses information about the classes and students, making information dissemination extremely easy.
If your school or district is looking to consolidate software systems to help save money in a tough budget year, or if you have an OnCourse tool already and are looking to add some powerful upgrades, let us know and we can help to design a package that will fit the needs of your school.
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OnCourse in Austin
Tre here. Thanks to everyone who came to visit us at TCEA in Austin, Texas! A few things I learned; BBQ really IS better in Texas, mechanical bull-riding is harder than it looks, and Dueling Piano shows are a great way to spend the evening.
Special thanks to Frisco ISD for presenting the OnCourse Discipline Tracking system to other Texas schools. If you haven’t seen it before, check out the Discipline Video on our homepage; it’s a permissions-enabled, customizable Discipline Tracker that virtually eliminates the tedium of tracking discipline incidents on paper. It molds to the needs of your school and has loads of great features, such as automatic administrator notifications, discipline letter generation, parent access through the Portal, and lots more. This tool is a perfect compliment to the OnCourse Gradebook or Lesson Planner; however, if you are using a different Gradebook or SIS, the Discipline Tracker will still run beautifully standalone.
Administrator Tip of the Day
Do you know that you can now distribute your own Lesson Plan templates? I will be hosting a webinar for this in the near future, or e-mail me for details.
Build Your Own Webinar
Finally, I’ll be collecting suggestions for some upcoming free webinars where I can answer YOUR OnCourse questions. Have you always wanted to know how to put a video on your website? Do you wish you knew how to move groups of standards around together? Do you feel like there must be a better way to complete a task in OnCourse? Send your suggestions to me at mgonzalez@oncoursesystems.com, and we’ll be posting invitations on the website in March.
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