Time to think about the AEA PD Online Training System

Hello! For those I have not met, I am Evan Abbey, the Program Director for AEA PD Online. You are receiving this email because you are a system administrator in our Training System. We will be sending out updates regarding the system.

May is a good time to 1) be thinking about summer plans regarding the training system, and 2) be aware of new changes that are coming. Let's take a look.

Important To-Dos:

• Double check who is a system administrator for your district. If there are any new system administrators, make sure they have access within the system. Remove access for those that have left the district.

• Make sure that you are receiving emails from the system. If you are not receiving emails from the password recovery, talk to your district technology staff to see if they are blocking email from our site. If so, they will need to "whitelist" the following:

aea11.org
keriomail.aea11.org (should be covered by above)
aeapdonline.org
heartlandaea.org

Additionally, they need to “whitelist” email coming from _www@swtrainingprod.local as an email address. If they are unsure of the process or want to check with us to see if the email is making it through, please contact me at support@aeapdonline.org

• Make plans for any assigned trainings that you will do for staff. Summer is a good time to assign trainings, giving staff flexible time to complete the trainings to free up their August inservice time, plus it is much less busy on the system in July than in August.

• Remind staff to make sure their information is up-to-date. Many educators in the system have not updated the new fields we added this past year (building, grade level, subject area, role). Without this up-to-date, you are unable to assign a training specifically to that group.

Important Updates Coming this Summer

As always, the training system has many updates coming this summer. These will be put into place on July 4-5, during which time, the server will be down.

1. Password lookup is going away

Due to some potential security concerns, system administrators will no longer be able to look up employee passwords. You will be able to reset a password, including setting it to anything that you would like, so if you are not sure of an employee's password, you can simply change it to what they would like it to be.

2. Ticket system for help

During our peak times, we will be handling support a bit differently than we have in the past. Several individuals have been frustrated with being on hold a long time just to look up a password (a reminder: a local district system admin can look that up for them, or there is an online recovery). So the help area will not provide phone numbers or email contacts at that time. Instead, it will be a place where they can submit their inquiry and provide an optional phone number for us to reach them, in case the issue cannot be solved through an email. You will be able to see the queue of help requests for your district, and be able to answer them on the system too.

3. Portfolio & credentials

We are adding back the onsite portfolio area, in conjunction with a new feature called credentials. This will be an item a system admin can set up and manually assign to staff. Say you wanted to recognize staff who have either been through a training or have a proficiency in an area, like rubric creation. You could create a badge for rubrics and then use the system to award that to staff. Staff can then upload their own documents and their own text with the credentials to create a portfolio, that aligns to the Iowa Teaching Standards.

Questions?
We can assist! Be sure to contact us at support@aeapdonline.org