Teachers, students and parents can now communicate online about a specific subject / course via their respective portals (this includes sharing pictures and posting files). Students will only see discussions for subjects that they are enrolled in, while parents can see discussions for all their children. Teachers of course would only discuss subjects that they are teaching.
Here’s an example of the Parent Portal Class Discussion screen:
The Student version of the Class Discussion is very similar to the Parent Portal, except that the student will only see their own subjects. Features for the parent and student versions of Class Discussions include:
- The number of new messages appears on the top right of the portal. Clicking on the number icon will display a summary of new messages. Clicking on a specific message notification will take you to the new message on the “Class Discussions” screen.
- Users can view messages for multiple subjects on the same screen. No need to switch between subjects.
- Users can participate in the discussion by commenting on an existing post, or by posting a new comment to a specific subject.
Teachers on the other hand have a slightly different view:
The menu has been renamed to “Class Discussions” (previously “Teacher Pages”) for consistency. Teachers can only view and interact with one subject at a time, to avoid confusion. Once a subject is selected, all related discussion messages will appear below.
Please note that Class Discussion messages are not private one-to-one messages. Private Messaging will be introduced in a future release. Class Discussions are visible to all teachers, students and parents related to that subject / course.
If you do not see the “Class Discussions” menu, contact your school administrator. Only the school administrator can enable the module via the “Features” page.
Do let us know what you think of this new feature. We’d love to hear your thoughts on how this feature can be further improved. We welcome your feedback and suggestions.
Happy posting and commenting!
[…] http://blog.quickschools.com/2013/05/06/online-class-discussions/ […]
Really great feature! Will it be possible for teachers to view and manage class discussions from non-active semesters and for administrators to view all the discussions?
Hi Danilo,
Thanks for the compliment. For right now, the Class Discussions are only for the activated semester. You would need to activate a previous semester to view the old posts.
Also, you have to link yourself to the subject to view the class discussions. I’ll add a request to engineering so administrators can view class discussions for other teachers.
Thanks again for the feedback 🙂
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