Messaging your Student

Within the week we will release the Message Manager in the Teacher Manager. Teachers can send a message to one or several students or the whole class. When students first open their data file, they see the message. They can reply to it or delete it. A great way to compliment students who are doing well, or encourage more work from slower students.

[KLThompson]

I like the messaging feature, and have found it helpful. We have just begun using the Skillbuilding Mastery software, and the students and I both love it! It's definitely been a great time-saver for me, and that's the part I love best. I just have a couple of suggestions that would be helpful for our setup. I don't know if these are practical or possible from your end, but here they are:

Can you set up some type of alert that lets me know if I have a new message when I log into the teacher manager (something like AOL's "you've got mail" :lol: ).

In the class profile report, it would be very helpful if it showed the date of last activity in one of the columns, like it does when you view the class list. We have many students here through special programs (GAIN, EDD, Dept. of Rehab, etc.), and we have to do progress reports for them. I do like the feature that shows the hours spent and lessons complete, but that additional info. would be very helpful.

Finally, I wish I could view the text from a student's timing after they've completed it. I like to diagnose concentration issues, etc., by viewing their work. I do have them print the text of their 5-minute timings for me, but it would save a lot of paper if I could just view the past week or two's work in the teacher manager program.

Thanks for "listening," but mostly thanks for all you do. You've got a great product!

[DJ]

First of all, thank you for all the feedback. We have been discussing the ideas. We appreciate hearing ideas from instructors--it helps us to make a great product.

1. Alerts for when messages are received: We can see this being a great idea. Essentially each class has its own inbox, and each class may have different teachers. They best solution we seem to come up with would be a listing of the classes with new messages; if we put a simple alert of 'new mail' it could be for any number of classes that different instructors could be teaching. We are afraid that this just wouldn't be too helpful.

2. A new column showing the date of last activity on the class summary report: We agree, this would be a nice piece of data to have on the class summary report. Look for it before the fall school year begins.

3. Saving the text that student's type for review by the instructor: This is a good idea also, we have had this request before, and it could easily be done. The only problem is that saving all the extra data would inflate the student data files considerably. Right now our programs and data files are extremely efficient for Internet bandwidth needs, and we are afraid that tripling or quadrupling the data file size to hold this timing data will prove too much for some school bandwidth limitations. If this were simply a network program without the bandwidth concern we would already have this functionality.

Again, thank you for posting your suggestions. We appreciate it.