We’ve made some big changes in the past week, and now that they’ve rolled out on all our platforms, I wanted to take a little time to tell you about them.
First, you may have noticed the Classes section of your dashboard looks differently. Your classes are now organized in rows to help accommodate the new “Invite Co-Teacher” button. A co-teacher is able to assigned docents to a class, edit any assigned docents, and grade assignments. We had this as a private feature for our pilot in NYC, and we’re excited for it to be public. Yay collaboration!
Speaking of, you can collaboratively edit your docents with your co-teacher now that docents update in real time. Try this out and let us know how it goes and how we can make it better with the feedback tool (the star button under the toolbar).
Docents updating in real time also has cool implications for how you use DocentEDU in your classroom. Ever have a student point out a typo during class? Now you can fix it, and that fix will get sent to all your students without them needing to refresh. You can also add follow-up questions on the fly based on in-class discussions.
And while we’re on this theme of real-time updates, the Grades section of the dashboard also updates in real time now. This should help with monitoring student progress.
Finally, I want to talk about what we’re calling Lesson Links. It was brought to our attention that a docent shared to Google Classroom won’t open in the DocentEDU app on mobile devices. To address this problem, we’ve created Lesson Links that will be shared to Google Classroom instead. If you have the browser extension, a Lesson Link will seamlessly forward you to the docent. If you’re on a mobile device, a Lesson Link will have a button that will open the docent in our mobile app. For now, Lesson Links are only used when sharing to Google Classroom. In the future, we’ll increase the ways you can use Lesson Links to make things simpler with other LMSes as well.