Getting Started with Harris Digital Learning: Local Teachers

00:00:00 Speaker: Hi, let's learn how to use Harris Digital Learning's LMS, called eSchoolware, as a local CAOLA teacher. Today, you will learn how to access the LMS and how to view the course content. You will also learn grading procedures and methods to communicate with your students. Finally, we will cover some best practices for being a local CAOLA teacher. To access the LMS, first log in to Genius. On the left-hand side, click Go to LMS. From there, click Harris. If you do not see an LMS available, it is likely because you do not yet have any enrollments. You will not be able to access the LMS until you have students enrolled. If you are unsure of enrollment timeframes, please contact your district administrator. Let's talk about viewing the course content. To view course content, click on the course icon card and then click on the magnifying glass for the course part that you wish to view. Here you can view the course content in a read only view, so that you can understand what your students are working on. This will help you to guide your students and support them for any troubleshooting that they may need. It's important to be able to communicate with your students. There are two main ways to communicate within the LMS: Messages and announcements. Messages go to individual students or set groups of students, while announcements are posted for the entire class to see. Let's take a look at both now. We'll begin with announcements. To create a new announcement or edit announcements that you've already posted, click on the course icon card and then click on the pencil and wrench icon. From there, click announcements and then to edit or delete a current announcement, you can click the pencil icon or the delete button. To post a new announcement, click create. From here, enter the announcement subject and the content of your announcement. Then fill out the indicators for how often you would like this to display. A sticky announcement will keep the announcement continuously posted. You can enter a date range or have the announcement post for just a single day. Or you can select for it to be a course intro announcement, which means it'll pop up as soon as the student opens the course for the first time. You can indicate which courses you would like to have the announcement posted for and then click create. Let's return home. You can view announcements by clicking View More on the left hand side, or by clicking the megaphone up at the top navigation bar. That concludes announcements. Now let's discuss messages to view, reply and send messages, click the comments button at the top navigation bar. You'll always have an indicator whenever you have new unread messages. From here, you can read new messages from your students, and you can reply to these, as well as print them off. You can also create a new message to reach out to your students. This is a great way to communicate with your students. You can copy their advisor and their parent or guardian. However, this is a closed messaging feature, which means that it will not communicate outside of the portal. It's not going to send to their attached email address. It stays within Harris Digital Learning. Let's discuss grading. For grading, we'll have indicators by the course whenever you have new items that need to be graded. You can access these by clicking on the exclamation point for items that need to be graded, or you can access the overall gradebook by clicking the open book icon beside the course part. This will open your grade book. From here you can do many things. You can assign grades to unscored activities, and this is also where you can assign retries or exemptions. For example, if we want to assign a retry to this eighty percent for lesson two, we can click on that score and we can click delete to clear that attempt. This would automatically provide a retry for that assignment. If we want to provide an exemption we can click Edit, Exempt, and click save. That will exempt the student from that assignment. Returning home, If we need to clear out items that need to be graded, we can click on the indicator and that will bring up a list of the items that we need to grade. We can click on the object and then we can provide a score. We can see the sample answer and the linked object so that we know what we're grading. And then we can provide our grade or assessment feedback. Here's an example of what the student's work should look like. And now we can view the student's attached organizer. It looks like the student forgot to attach the correct assignment. In scenarios like this we'll give a score of zero. And then we'll give some feedback. And then we'll click save. We'll go ahead and click save to submit our assignment feedback. Now our student can go back in and they can resubmit that graphic organizer with the correct assignment attachment. The calendar indicator lets us know what courses have met their end date. Courses that have met their end date need the final grades to be submitted for those students. We can click on the calendar indicator to see which students need to be closed out. We know that this student needs to be closed so we can click the gradebook, find that student and click the rubber stamp, and then we can select which grade we want to send through. We can click the send the total grade which would send the grade as is. Or we can submit the non-running total which would apply zeros to the remaining assignments. Then we'd click submit for approval. This will click the final grade to the advisor. They can either accept the grade as is or they can reject the grade and allow the student to continue working in the course. Finally, the comma indicator means that there's new comments on the forum post within the course. You can view these posts by clicking on the comment indicator and viewing the threads here. Finally, let's talk about some best practices as a CAOLA teacher. First, create a grading schedule- a grading schedule ensures that students receive quality feedback at a time that they can apply it for their assignments. Delayed feedback can create inconsistent work for students. Hosting office hours at consistent times can allow students to schedule and plan to attend office hours. Finally, giving quality feedback that is actionable can drive student work and progress. This tutorial is meant to be a high level overview on Harris Digital Learning courses. If you have more specific questions on how to operate the system, please contact your CAOLA administrator.