Great news Teachers! We’ve released an update for Digital Xpress that redesigns the assignments section. The new interface has been improved to make managing and grading your assignments and student writings easier. The new interface is designed to fit your workflow better, and to give you better control over what is happening in Digital Xpress.
Let us know what you think!
While you are out for the summer break, the Digital Xpress team is here - hard at work.
We’ve received feedback from several teachers over the last school year that they would like to have more control over their assignments and better organization for grading the student submissions. Well we’ve got good news. New improvements to the Digital Xpress site are in the works, and they will improve the way you create & view assignments, grade and publish student writings, and keep track of student progress. We’ve also updated the look & feel of Digital Xpress.
We expect these changes to be rolled out in the next 6 weeks, so keep your eyes peeled. We’ll be sure to keep you posted!
Digital Xpress now offers 30-day trial accounts for teachers that want to give us a test drive. You can signup here.
If you have a class period coming up and have not had the time to prepare a lesson, or if you’re looking for some new ideas to develop plans from - we’ve got a couple of sites that you’ll be interested in.
k6educators.about.com contains many ideas for developing language arts lesson plans. This link focuses on elementary education and is a great resource.
One of the areas that about.com focuses on is journaling and journaling ideas. Digital Xpress is a great way to get your students started with journaling. You can start with one of these prompts and upload an image to really spark their creativity!
Journaling throughout the school year helps develop writing skills and can be fun. With Digital Xpress they can quickly look back at earlier work to see how far they have come. Or you can “buddy” the students so that they can read each other’s journals and share the experience together. Students that share their work with other students invest in their work!
We, the Digital Xpress Team, are very interested in hearing your input. We’re actively making changes to the site to make it better and simpler to use. But we need to hear from you!
This blog is a place where you can comment and contribute to the discussion around Digital Xpress. We’ve also got a new email address info@mydigitalxpress.com where you can contact our team of educators and developers.
We need your support. We’re grant funded and need the support of the community to carry this effort forward. Do you believe in online writing? Help us make it better!
!Maintenance Notice!
Teachers and students, Digital Xpress will be undergoing scheduled maintenance tonight beginning at 10pm for an estimated 3 hours. The site will be unavailable during that time. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
Thanks,
The Digital Xpress Team
Good news! Digital Xpress has a new feature! You can import students from an Excel Spreadsheet or CSV file and save yourself a lot of typing.
Why would I use it?
There are a couple of ways you may want to use this new feature. First, you can use the Student Import to import a list of students for your first class. With a spreadsheet of students, Digital Xpress will create users, assign passwords, and automatically add the students to your class. You’ll be ready to begin creating assignments in no time!
Second, you can use the Student Import to assign students to additional classes, even if you’ve already imported a spreadsheet once. You can import a spreadsheet multiple times to assign those same students to other classes. So, for example, if you’re teaching English, and another teacher is teaching Computer Skills, you can share your spreadsheets. Or if you teach two different classes, but some of the students overlap, you can import the spreadsheet twice to include them in the class roster. Digital Xpress will make sure that each student keeps one username and password, and allows the student access to the assignments for his/her classes.
How does it work?
After logging into Digital Xpress, click on “My Students”. Look for the new link on the top right, “Import Students from a Spreadsheet”. Click that link.
The first step of the Student Import will appear and looks something like this:
If you have a spreadsheet ready, you don’t need to read this paragraph, but if you don’t, there is a link on the right hand side to “download a blank spreadsheet”. Using this template to create your spreadsheet will help to make sure you have all of the information you need and in the right places.
Once you have a spreadsheet ready for importing, click the browse button and select the spreadsheet you would like to upload. If your spreadsheet includes column titles (the “blank spreadsheet” does include column titles), leave the column names box checked. Finally, select the class you would like to import the students into.
When you click next, you will come to Step 2.
This step of the import process sets up the records in the system correctly. Some people find this step to be a little tricky at first; it is technical, but easy to understand. If you used the “blank spreadsheet”, you’re lucky, the assignment will be done for you automatically. If not, you need to make a few selections. This page of Student Import ties a column in the spreadsheet to a field in our database. On the left hand side, you see a list of fields for a student “Name”, “Grade”, etc. Then on the right hand side there are a series of drop down boxes. For each one of the drop downs, you want to select the column from your spreadsheet that contains the student data we need. So for “Name” select the column in your spreadsheet that contains the student’s name. And for “Grade” select the column that contains the student grade.
Remember! Only the Name, Grade and Student ID are required. The other fields are optional. If you do not assign a username, penname or password, the system will automatically generate them. You can print a list of usernames and passwords to give to your class later.
When you’ve selected the columns click “Next” and proceed to step 3.
Step 3 of Student Import reports back to you what it finds in the import file. Listed on the page are the students in the file and any errors found. If there are errors, a message will appear in red beneath the student’s name. You can click “edit” to edit the student and fix the errors. Or, if you would prefer to ignore errors, you can click “Next” and proceed to the last step. Also, the “remove” link can be used to remove a record from the import. For example, if you have a spreadsheet you are using that has students not in your class, you can remove them at this step to make sure they don’t get assigned to your class.
Check your work, when you click “Next” the system creates the student records! If there are mistakes, you will need to edit the records by hand!
Now you’re finished! The page that appears will look like this:
Congratulations! You’ve imported your students!
There are several links that may be of interest to you in the center of the page. You can print a list of usernames and passwords for the students in your class, or you can view the roster & edit it. Either way, you’re ready to give your students access to Digital Xpress and give them the chance to learn new writing skills!
Let us know!
Have you tried the student import? How was your experience? We want to know!
Those of you who use Digital Xpress regularly may have already noticed, but we’ve made several changes to the website recently. We’ve taken your feedback, listened, and made changes to improve the site for you.
First, performance of the website has been a problem with some teachers - thank you for the feedback. We’ve made several changes in the application to speed up the site. Many of the changes we’ve made are not visible to you, but believe me they are there. We’ve made changes to the underlying database and analyzed the application’s performance. One of the changes that you can see, is the new “Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 …” links at the top of listing pages such as My Students. Instead of returning the whole set of students, we now return the first 20 of them. This helps the load time of the first page so that you can search for the student you are looking for more quickly.
Second, there were limitations in some sections of the site where pressing the back button would generate a page that said “you must resubmit this page”. We’ve reviewed the application and updated all of those pages so that the back button can be used without limitation throughout the site. You are free to use the back button at any time.
Other minor changes include the addition of new navigation links to provide more options as you work. These provide faster & easier navigation while you work.
As always, thanks for your involvement! Let us know what you think!
Post your reflections on doing a wiki point of view activity in your classroom here.
Post your thoughts on the examples of wikis in elementary schools classrooms here. Which wikis seem to be the most effective? What did you learn about wikis as you viewed these sites?
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