Introduction to Changes Around the Site

What’s Going On

Repeat visitors and members of the site may notice that there have been a number of changes made to the Hub over the last month. While the aesthetics of the website have largely remained the same, I have scaled back some less essentially features, while building upon others. Below you’ll find a short video and written explanations for some of the more notable adjustments.

Bookmarks

While this feature has been up for a month or two, it warrants repeating because it is certainly one of the more useful additions to the site. By logging into your profile, a bookmark star icon should appear at the top right of all resources on the site. By clicking the icon, the resource will be saved to your profile, in a section aptly named “Bookmarks”. With this feature teachers can save field trips, lessons, powerpoints, etc. to their profiles for future use without having to search for them again. To see a tutorial video specifically about bookmarking, please visit the tutorials page.

Removed Features

Now that the Hub has been live for about six months, we’ve noticed that some features were being under-utilized – often for good reason. As such, we’ve decided to simplify the site by removing redundant or less useful functions. The casualties include private messaging, status updates, personal profile document storage, group email subscriptions, and the link directory.

Groups and Forums

With the removal of a number of user profile features, the main venue for community interaction now lies in groups and their connected forums. This will ideally lead to more natural collaboration with other teachers. Document storage now exists only within groups. Forum attachments are now also integrated with group documents, meaning any files attached to forum posts will automatically be added to the group document section.

Resource Tags

During professional development workshops, a number of teachers asked if all resources could be accessed via the tag system which existed in the lesson plan database. For instance, by clicking on a category or framework, teachers could also find other lesson plans that were also tagged with the same data. Now all resources on the site are tagged with relevant frameworks, resource type, categories, and source. With that being said, the lesson plan database and the other resource databases do not ‘talk to one’ another. This is something we hope to correct in the coming months. So stay tuned!

Questions or Comments

If you have any questions or comments about these features, changes to the site, or potential new ideas, feel free to contact Josh Jenkins at [email protected]