Home Base Goes Back to School

New Year Brings Improvements

Home Base enters its fourth year with a number of improvements and successes that we wanted to highlight. Among them:

• The migrations of hardware for hosting operations are complete – all hosting hardware has been moved from CenturyLink to RackSpace, providing additional capacity and faster hardware; more bandwidth and additional security and protection against malicious attacks.
• Performance tuning continued through the summer, and PowerSchool instances were reconfigured for optimum performance.
• Additional monitoring tools have been employed, and PowerSchool Group, LLC, now can more easily identify pages that are slow to load or are causing performance issues that would affect school operations.
• Home Base User Group Meetings – renamed Home Base Meet-Ups – take place on a bi-monthly basis across the state and include users from Schoolnet, Performance Matters (formerly TNL) and PowerSchool.    
• The purpose of the Meet Ups is to gather feedback from users of the Home Base applications to inform direction and next steps. They’re also intended to support collaboration and showcase school districts’ use of Home Base to improve instruction.
• The first round of Meet Ups was held in September to hear from Home Base users, talk about successes and challenges and re-emphasize the new format and structure.  The overwhelming feedback was:  “Start of school was much better than last year” and “Thank you for not introducing anything new as part of the start of school process.”

Workshops Focus on Results from 2016 NC Teacher Working Conditions Survey

What do 101,800 educators who participated in the 2016 North Carolina Teacher Working Conditions Survey have to say about education in their schools, districts, and the state?

The Department of Public Instruction and the New Teacher Center (NTC) will be hosting two, three-hour interactive workshops in each of the state's eight regions to assist school administrators with understanding results for their schools and districts, facilitating dialogue about teaching and learning conditions, and using resources for school-improvement planning. 

Discussion will focus also on how beginning teachers’ experiences may affect decisions on retention.  We ask that each administrator bring an electronic device to access data at www.ncteachingconditions.org  and a colleague/teacher leader.

Here are the workshop dates for each region:

• Northeast: Nov. 29
• Southeast: Nov. 18
• North Central: Oct. 19
• Sandhills: Nov. 14
• Piedmont-Triad: Oct. 28
• Northwest: Oct. 27
• Southwest: Nov. 1
• West: Nov. 3

If you are interested in attending this workshop, please click HERE to register for your preferred location and date or use this link: http://bit.ly/2016NCTWCTraining

Note:  Each region’s three-hour session is repeated in the afternoon to provide flexibility for attendees. The content for each morning session is identical to the afternoon session. If you have questions about these sessions, please contact Dr. Cynthia Martin at cynthia.martin@dpi.nc.gov

Fall Principal READY Begins Soon

NCDPI is partnering with stakeholder organizations for the fall PREADY series to share information about several initiatives relevant to the current needs of school leaders. 

Please attend to hear from NCDPI consultants, the Friday Institute, the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, and the New Teacher Center. Sessions include information about the state’s Digital Learning Plan to support administrators in transitioning to digital-age learning, national research on how nationally board certified teachers can be better used as teacher leaders, and the 2016 analysis of data from the North Carolina Teacher Working Conditions Survey. 

In addition to these sessions, Service Support Teams will offer regional-specific content based on evaluation surveys. Please click HERE to register for your preferred location or use this link: 
http://bit.ly/FallPrincipalTraining

Register for 2nd Fall Session of Instructor-led Online Courses 

Mark your calendars! Our second session of facilitated online courses will be open for registration Monday, Oct. 3.

Below is the list of instructor–facilitated online courses being offered by Educator Effectiveness, NCDPI for the Fall Session 2. (Unlike these facilitated courses, our self-paced modules are always open for enrollment.) Our facilitated courses provide the opportunity to interact with peers and an instructor along with high-quality professional development.  They combine the flexibility of working from anywhere at any time, and the benefits of working with a cohort of peers.

Fall Session 2 courses will start Monday, Oct. 17. Registration for these courses will open Oct. 3, 2016. Registration is limited to 35 participants per section. Register here.