Maintenance Set for June 25
PowerSchool and the NCDPI Home Base Team have scheduled a maintenance window for Friday, June 25, from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m.
This additional maintenance is required to deploy critical state reporting updates. Currently, PowerSchool is the only known Home Base application that will undergo maintenance. All other Home Base applications will remain available.
Please begin notifying your staff and teachers of this maintenance as soon as possible.
Note: Each year, a list of scheduled maintenance windows are published by NCDPI. This is published in advance to help teachers and administrators better prepare for temporary outages and loss of access. Please review the 2021-2022 maintenance schedule and put these dates on your calendar. In most cases, the entire window is not necessary and we can return systems to service earlier than listed. If emergency maintenance is required in addition to these scheduled dates, all users will be notified in advance.
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Wrapping Up 2020-21 With Canvas
We have seen a tremendous growth in the use of Canvas LMS over the 2020-21 school year from just over 850,000 active users in March 2020 to 1.4 million active users in March 2021.
We appreciate everything that all of our public school educators and staff members have done to support students and provide learning opportunities at every turn of the road.
Canvas will continue to be available all summer. It is not impacted by the end of year processing for PowerSchool. Please note that your local district/charter school determines dates for pausing the PowerSchool sync with your Canvas instance. Once the sync resumes, you will see your courses for the 2021-22 school year. Please check with your local Canvas Admin if you have any questions about the date for your district.
Self-Paced Courses to Launch July 1
NCDPI has four free, self-paced, mini-courses on Canvas topics that will launch for the 2021-22 school year on July 1 in NCEES. Search the professional development page for “Canvas” to see the courses, and the content will unlock on July 1. Each course is designed to take one hour to complete and is recommended for 0.1 CEU credit for Digital Learning Competency Credit.
June Canvas Release Notes
In the June Canvas Release on June 19, Canvas released a new feature for instructors - a comment library for SpeedGrader. This new functionality allows teachers to save and reuse comments in the SpeedGrader comment box. Comments are saved to the individual user so comments will be available in all courses the user has access to SpeedGrader.
To learn more about this new feature, read the release notes and watch the feature video created by Canvas.
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Schoolnet End-of-Year Reminders
As the statewide end-of-year process draws near, we wanted to remind PSU Schoolnet leads of a few details. These are common questions we’ve received:
- Schoolnet enrollments are entirely driven by the school and class section enrollment dates in PowerSchool. When a term or school year ends in PowerSchool, the class sections in Schoolnet are no longer current or active. Teachers can still access reports for their concluded class sections by navigating to the Reporting Dashboard and setting the “Results Reflect” drop-down at the top right to “All Students” as shown below; however, they cannot assign additional tests or otherwise have students complete work.
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- Keep in mind that because Schoolnet relies on PowerSchool for student data, it is not available for student use over the summer because we do not use PowerSchool for summer school grades and attendance.
- Teachers may continue to access Schoolnet over the summer. They can view reports for any past course they taught within their current school, and they can build draft assessments for the upcoming school year. However, it is not possible to schedule, assign, or administer a test until the 2021-22 school year begins.
- Schoolnet EOY will begin concurrently with PowerSchool EOY on June 30. The system may be unavailable during this time. The training site will remain available throughout EOY processing.
- The Schoolnet integration with PowerSchool will not begin pulling 2021-22 rostering data until after EOY. As in previous years, the Student Workspaces feature will be temporarily disabled after EOY to prevent students from previewing next year schedules. We will re-enable the feature in early August.
- Remember that teachers who are leaving a PSU may be owners of co-authored assessments or shared item banks. If other teachers at the school will need these items next year, be sure the departing teacher adds appropriate co-authors to tests and/or grants management rights to shared item banks.
Schoolnet Training Site Updated to 23.0
We’re excited to announce that the Schoolnet Training Site has been updated to version 23.0!
See the full release notes for all the updates in this release.
Most notably, the Test Details page has been redesigned to be much more user-friendly, and teachers can more easily realign custom test items when standards are updated. NCDPI will release updated self-paced Schoolnet 23.0 training courses in NCEES for the new school year. Feel free to explore the updates in the training site, and stay tuned for details around the release of updated training courses and the upgrade of the production Schoolnet site!
Please email john.mairs@dpi.nc.gov if you have difficulty accessing the training site, are not sure of your PSU’s training site login credentials, or have any other questions related to Schoolnet 23.0.
Plan Ahead with GoOpenNC!
#GoOpenNC will be available to North Carolina public school educators all summer long! Login with your NCEdCloud credentials and save resources to custom folders for the upcoming school year.
Watch this quick tutorial to help you search for standards aligned resources on #GoOpenNC!
Self-Paced Courses to Launch July 1st
NCDPI has five free, self-paced, mini-courses on #GoOpenNC topics that will launch for the 2021-22 school year on July 1 in NCEES. Search the professional development page for “GoOpenNC” to see the courses and the content will unlock on July 1. Each course is designed to take one hour to complete and is recommended for 0.1 CEU credit for Digital Learning Competency Credit.
NCEES End of Year
NCEES End of Year (EOY) will take place Wednesday, June 30, after the close of business, 5 p.m.
Please plan to be completed with Evaluation and Professional Development Plans in the online tool prior to Tuesday, June 29. Once plans are archived by the vendor they cannot be updated or worked in.
The NCEES Tool is not taken down for EOY, which means that participants of Professional Development Courses in NCEES may continue to access NCEES and work on and complete PD.
NCDPI will communicate later the date of when the new 2021-22 plan types are available to be assigned to staff.
More information can be found in the NCEES Updates Bulletin 5/14/2021.
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DID YOU KNOW?
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