Welcome back to school with Grouptrail’s work-based learning newsletter!
We have a lot of exciting things happening here and wanted to share them with our community (that’s you!). With back to school in full swing, we thought it would be the perfect time to share some insights and recommendations on kicking off your work-based learning (WBL) programs.
We would love for you to share this newsletter with everyone on your Career and Technical Education team and encourage them to sign up to receive future communications! We will be keeping in touch monthly with important updates and would love for it to reach the right people so the burden of communicating upcoming events, new training material, and additional resources doesn’t fall on you!
Launching your WBL program
Are you back to school ready? We jotted down some check list items we think are important to consider when rolling out your WBL program. Feel free to copy and paste this checklist when you’re launching. Did we miss anything important? Let us know!
WBL program rollout checklist:
- Data sharing agreement in place: Start by signing the Student Data Privacy Consortium legal agreement.
- Data in the system: SSH Key/Secure File Transfer Protocol data integration to securely send student data to your Grouptrail site. Grouptrail can also support a manual spreadsheet import to get things started.
- Identify what reports are required: Send Grouptrail an outline of your reporting needs considering both internal and state level requirements. If you have an existing template of how you need the data presented, even better!
- Site Admin to review site configuration: Set up a meeting to go over site configuration based on your WBL planning process and reporting needs.
- Invitation list: Identify who from your district needs access to your site and what they need to do. Record participation? Pull reports? Manage the site? Complete an invitation list using this template and send to Grouptrail.
- Teacher training on the schedule: Ready to launch? Ensure training is on the schedule and done with sufficient lead time from when you are wanting teachers to be actively using the site.
- Schedule check in with teachers: Gauge confidence of participants in the program/system by scheduling a check in with the teachers.
- First report scheduled: After participation data has started to be recorded, run a first report to ensure program pieces are rolling out as expected.
- Resource folder: Keep your resource folder up to date as a location where teachers can easily access directions/videos for instructions and as questions!
Product news and updates
As we work on some exciting updates to our platform, we want to make sure we keep you aware of features available to you already. Here’s what’s new for August:
Manage partners:
- Track and manage partners who are working with your district, filter and search for partners by industry, career cluster or other search criteria to help with outreach and also identify gaps to help drive new partner engagement to ensure equitable student participation. Keep track of Partner engagement to keep everyone on your team on the same page!
Engage students:
- See your students by school, career interests, section and other criteria for outreach and engagement. Record CCL participation and see the detailed history of a student’s participation for longitudinal impact.
Report on impact:
- Automatically generate ODE and Synergy exports through our flexible templates and view our new live actionable data visualization showing participation.
Help us share the good news!
We’re super excited to be able to connect with you and want to keep open lines of communication. Please reach out if you any questions or comments. Also in order to keep you and your colleagues up to date, you can share this blog post and sign up for the Grouptrail WBL Newsletter. Thanks!