Master Event Calendar
On the Teacher Home Page navigation menu is an option called “Calendar”. This menu option leads to a master event calendar you can use for all your classes. You can schedule an event for a specific course and a specific class period. Students have a corresponding calendar on the course page for each course they are registered for. When you schedule an event, that event is visible on the course page of each student in your class. The event is denoted by a blue dot on the date of the event on the student calendar. Students can see the event details by clicking on the date.
To create and event simply click on the day of the event. An event form will pop-up. Fill in the details of the event and click the “Add-Event” button at the bottom of the form. Six colors are available for color coding similar events. While the color code is visible on the master event calendar all events show up on the student calendar as blue dots. However the color code is visible on the student event detail pop-up that appears when the student clicks on the event date.
To delete an event click on the event in the master calendar. Then click the “Delete” button at the bottom of form.
Student Calendar
On the Course Page for each course a student is registered for is a student calendar. This calendar is linked to the master event calendar of the teacher teaching this course. The student calendar serves two purposes:
- A “read-only” event calendar.
- A student practice log.
The student calendar functions as a “read-only” event calendar. A blue dot appears on each day that the teacher of this course has scheduled an event. To see the event details simply click on the day of the event.
The student calendar also functions as a practice log for this course. Students can record the number of minutes they have practiced on any particular day by clicking on that day. This brings up a form with a field for entering the number of minutes practiced on that day. A green dot appears on each day for which there is a non-zero number of practice minutes recorded. Students can see which days of the month they have recorded practice times by simply observing which days have green dots on them.
When a student clicks on a day that has an event scheduled the pop-form displays the event details. Below the event details is the field for entering the number of minutes practiced for that day. Students may change the number of minutes previously recorded for a day by clicking on the day and entering a new number of minutes for that day.
Reports
Several tools are provided to help you monitor student progress. These are the Student Progress Report, and the Practice log. Both reports are constructed as “master-detail” tables. The “master” table is the initial table displayed. Click on any row in the first column of the master table. A detail table will open for that row in the master table.
The Student Progress Report
The Student Progress Report tracks student progress in viewing and practicing with the videos for a particular class. To generate a report first select the Course, the Class Period and the Lesson that you would like to view, then click the “Run Report” button.
The data shown in each cell of the master table indicates the percent of total video play time that has been watched for each lesson and for each student in the class. Each row in the table is one lesson. If you click on the lesson name for a particular row, the detail table for that lesson is displayed. Each row in the detail table indicates a particular video in the lesson. A row in the detail table indicates the percent watched for that individual video.
Thus a quick glance at the master table in the Student Progress Report gives you an indication of a students progress through the lesson on the CMI Online Learning Site, while clicking on a particular lesson shows you a students specific progress within that lesson.
Checking the “Show Detail” check box before you run the report will show both the master and detail tables for all Class Periods and Lessons that you select.
To view all of the data in a particular course simply select “All” for the Class and Lesson options, and click the “Show Detail” checkbox. If you have a large class this combination of options can take close to a minute or more to retrieve and download all the data so please be patient while the data downloads.
Once you have generated a report you may download the report in CSV format by clicking the “CSV” button at the top of the report.
The Practice Log
Using the student calendar, available on the course page, students can enter daily practice times as explained above in the “Student Calendar.” section of this page. The Practice Log collects and presents this information for each student in your class.
The master table of the Practice Log contains a row for each calendar week. Selectors at the top of the table allow you to pick the range of weeks shown in the table. The number in each cell of the master table is the number of days that week that a student has practiced.
Clicking on the date in the first column of any row opens the detail table for that row. Each row in the detail table contains the practice times for that day for each student in the class.
By checking the “Show Detail” check box before you run the report you can produce a report that has the master and detail information combined for all students in your class.
All reports can be downloaded in CSV format by clicking the “CSV” button once the table has been generated.
The Individual Student Progress Report
The Individual Student Progress Report allows you to generate progress reports on a student by student basis. You can either generate a report for an individual student in your class, or, by selecting “All” in the Student drop-down selector you can generate individual progress reports for all students in your class.
To generate a report simply select the Course, Student and Lesson from the drop-down selectors and click the “Run Report” button. You can also chose to display both the master and the detail tables for all students in the report by clicking the “Show Detail” check box.
Once you have generated a report you can print the report or save it to a file in CSV format by using the “Print” and “CSV” buttons at the top of the report.
To print a report, first generate the report, then select the “Print” button. This generates a printable version of the report by removing all the option selectors and page header information. Next, please use your browsers “print” feature to print out the report.
Custom Video Playlist
Teachers can customize the youtube video playlist for each course they teach.
To do so simply go to the course page, then click the “Custom Playlist” radio button. This will open a form that will allow you to add and delete videos from your playlist.
To add a video, first go to www.youtube.com and find the video you want to add. Next copy the URL of this page from your browsers address bar and paste it into the field labeled “Youtube Video URL”. Finally, in the “Video Title” field type in a title for this video and click the “submit” button. That’s all there is to it.
Be sure to copy and paste the URL from your browsers address bar. If you use the URL from the “Share” link on the youtube page the video will play but you won’t get the nice video thumbnail in the “Related Video Clips” display on the course page. Instead you will get a generic, plain grey image for the thumbnail.
To delete a video from the playlist just find the video and click the associated “Delete” button.
If you want to restore the custom playlist to the default playlist for this course just click the “Reset to Default” button. This will overwrite your custom playlist with the default list for the class.
Clicking the “Default Playlist” radio button will keep your custom playlist intact but will display the default playlist for this class. You can switch back and forth between the default playlist and your custom playlist by selecting the appropriate radio button.
