Welcome to the brand-new OnCourse Systems blog! My name is Tre Gonzalez, and I joined the OnCourse team in 2008. I'm one of the new guys here, but I was quick to realize that this is a group of enthusiastic, innovative people working together on a terrific set of education tools, and I'm ecstatic to be our representative here on the blog.
In this area, I'll be able to pass along all types of information from inside OnCourse HQ. I can give you sneak peeks into new features, and since I use OnCourse all day long, I can even pass along some pro tips that will make you the OnCourse Guru at your school!
Ok, well maybe you don't want to be the Guru, but I'll do my best to help you get the most out of your OnCourse Tools, and to save time and effort. For example, if you are using the OnCourse Gradebook:
Did you know that if you teach the same class in multiple sections, you can simply copy your Gradebook page from one section to another? The 'Copy Gradebook' button is on the left sidebar of the Gradebook page.
I've got some great tips for you, but I promise that this blog will not be all boring software stuff, because...
We are here for YOU!
The OnCourse tools exist to support our fantastic community of teachers and administrators, and this is where the really great stories are.
If your school has had success using OnCourse, or if you've found an innovative way to use one of our products, we would love to hear about it! I'll post those stories here, so that we can all grow together as an educational community and learn from one another.
I'm a teacher advocate, so its my job to be a point-of-contact between you and your colleagues on the front lines of education, and our team of technology specialists working to bring America's educational system into the information age.
I've had the pleasure of meeting many of you already, through phone or e-mail, but if we haven't had the opportunity to meet yet, this is a place where you can always reach me if you'd like to send over your stories, or even just regular questions or comments. I look forward to making your acquaintance.
We Grow Together
It is this living relationship that makes the OnCourse software suite so special; we allow our program to grow organically by placing an extremely high value on feedback from our users. This way, no matter how much it grows, it will always be user-friendly because its built on your ideas.
You won't ever call our support line and get forwarded to another country. My number is 1-800-899-7204, x111, and I'm in New Jersey. We are small enough to be attentive to your needs, but large enough to have schools nationwide, down to Texas and all the way to California!
And We Work Together
As the school year winds down, we here at OnCourse go into build mode. While all the teachers are powering down for the summer, we are taking all of their suggestions from the year and building them into our Tools like our Lesson Planner and Gradebook.
Over the summer break, we also do product launches for our newer products, like the highly-anticipated Student Stats Data Analysis Tool.
Next week I'll give a rundown of all of these great new features (click the picture to the left if you just can't wait!), and maybe I'll even touch on how some of our tools hook in together to share information.
To give one example, look at how much the education process is enriched when a school plugs the Student Stats tool into the Lesson Planner:
The administrator can pick a class and use Student Stats to illuminate a collective weakness of the students in that class; maybe its a bad average score on some specific area of the assessment tests. The teacher of that class receives this report, and they can then plan and create student groups with this in mind. Administrators can even corrolate the weak areas with Power Standards for the teacher to target when writing Lesson Plans.
Utilizing these two tools together on the school or district level will result in a much more efficient targeting of school resources, and a consequent increase in the efficiency of your educational system.
The tools just go fantastically together. Like sweet chili sauce and sweet potato fries. Seriously, try it.
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