The analogy I often make when talking about switching student information systems is transplant surgery.  If this is something you need to do, and even if you prepare well (you are in good shape and follow all of the physician’s recommendations), it’s a painful and often messy process.  It also takes time to recover as well.  While we as a system have gotten through the surgery, we are still in recovery and rehabilitation.  This can feel slow and painful at times.  But, the good news is, we are through the most painful parts and the future looks bright!

Here are a few facts about what we did to prepare for this massive undertaking.  In terms of professional learning here are some stats.  We focused our on-site, trainer-led learning for our office staff and other lead learners.  Here are some numbers:

• 330 unique staff members were invited to trainings
• 366 hours of training were offered on varying topics
• 111 sessions were offered for 49 unique Campus’ topics
• Classes were offered over 6 months beginning in January and several classes have not yet occurred (September)
• Classes ranged from 1 hour to 16 hours long and averaged 4 hours
• On average, each job type was asked to come to 5.5 different classes to get what they needed

In addition, we have 40 hours of onsite training scheduled for the week of 9/23 for our office staff.  We are currently building the schedule for that week based upon feedback from our office teams.  My team also has been organizing and facilitating a 90-minute bi-monthly (every other month) meeting for all office secretaries from across the district.  These meetings include targeted learning and problem-solving time.  We had our last meeting on 9/5.  We spent all of our time on Campus learning at that meeting.  We will continue this learning at subsequent meetings this year.

For teachers, we asked each teacher to attend a 90 minute Campus Instruction learning session in both June and August — so that was 3 hours of learning on Campus Instruction for all teachers.  In addition, my team is working with buildings to do “just in time” learning on Campus based upon local questions.  Since the start of school, we have done sessions at Kennedy, Madison, and Truman.   We hope to visit each building at least once before the fall is over.  We would also be happy to come out and work with smaller groups, too — grade-level teams and department PLCs as well.  Just reach out to either Ryan or me directly to set up a time.

While there are lots of moving parts, we have done our best to get as many groups of people learning about the product as possible.  Please also remember that we have broadened our support platform as well — making more district-level individuals available to answer questions and work through problems. You can find information related to that in this post.  Reach out to any member of the Digital Literacy team if you have questions.