Today, this feature is available to all Our School Pages customers for $40 per year.  But if you like, you are more than welcome to try it out for free for 30 days.  Just visit your Billing page to start your free trial.

To get started with the feature, you need to first have an appropriate program, for example "Eager Reader".  If you don't already have this, start by adding it on the Programs page under PACKET SETTINGS.  Then, under EXTRA FEATURES, click on Reading log programs, and then the [+ new reading log program] button.  Fill in the form to configure your reading program.  You can decide whether you want students to be able to enter their own minutes (recommended, because it's fun!) or whether you want parents to do all of the entry.  You can also decide whether your school does weekly tallying or monthly tallying.  Press Next when everything looks right.  The next page gives you the ability to customize the "virtual badges" that are offered.  For now, you can leave the badges the way they are, so just press Save.

Once you've created your reading log program, you will be provided with two links:  a student entry link and a parent entry link.  These links lead to specially designed built-in pages on your website that allow students and parents to view their reading logs and record their minutes.  When you're ready to go live with the feature, it is your responsibility to publish these links on your website -- on the menu bar, in an email blast, or in a newsletter -- so that parents and students can easily get to the reading log entry pages.

Here's an example of what the student entry form looks like: 

As you can see, students simply type in the number of minutes they read each day, and the page automatically saves the changes and tallies their minutes for them.  Students can also earn virtual badges, which are shown at the top of their reading log, when they reach certain goals.  It's just another fun way to encourage reading.  When students enter their minutes using their online reading log, their parents receive an email asking them to approve the minutes.  Parents will need to visit the parent entry log in order to approve the minutes.

On the back end, administrators have full access to reports that show each student and how many minutes were read each week, or each month.

Give it a try and let us know what you think!

Our School Pages will be offering online interactive training sessions on the following days and times.  Get first hand assistance with customizing your website and making the most of the features available.  All you have to do is just be at your computer at the designated time.  Our expert web master will spend the first ten minutes going over the main features of the website.  After that, you can ask questions specific to your own school or PTA, and watch step-by-step as he shows you how to get your website to do exactly what you want.

Click the appropriate link below to see our web master's screen, and dial in the phone number to join the conference call for audio.  Questions?  Send email to info@ourschoolpages.com.

Note:  All times are Pacific Time

Some have suggested that fundamentally it’s the lack of control that is the common thread in all our complaints.  Indeed most aspects of air travel are out of our control, and when we can’t control our environment, it adds some stress.  That makes sense.  But today, I had five hours seated in a cramped uncomfortable seat to think about this further.  A lack of control implies that any attempts on my part to improve my own situation are futile and have no impact.  Yes, this is annoying (especially to control freaks like myself), but it’s manageable.  After all, there are plenty of situations in life where I have no control.  So what would be even worse?  What if our attempts to improve our own situation actually had the opposite effect?  What if … instead of being rewarded for doing a good deed, I was punished instead?  Now wouldn’t that be stressful?  Unfortunately that’s how air travel has been designed and implemented.  There are a few examples of this, but the big offender is the way luggage is treated.  When it comes to luggage, the system gives me every incentive to do the very thing that makes my experience worse.

Photo By sun dazed

Imagine a world with no carry-on luggage.  I dream of this world.  Just think …

• Security lines would go so much faster.
• You wouldn’t have to lug your baggage around with you all over the airport while you get food, use the bathroom, and wait for boarding to begin.
• Boarding the plane would be as easy and friction-free as boarding a bus.  The boarding process would be a lot faster, almost as fast as the deboarding process.  (Fully boarding a 737 takes about 25 minutes, while fully deboarding takes 5-10 minutes.)
• You wouldn’t get knocked in the head as your neighbor unloads their 30 pound suitcase from the overhead bin.
• There wouldn’t be any contention for overhead bin space.  This has the added benefit that people wouldn’t be as determined to be the first to board the plane.  This would reduce congestion near the gate doorway as people anxiously await their zone number to be called.  (But that’s a whole other blog post.)
• All the legroom under the seat in front of you could be used for  ….. well, your legs.

Not only would all of this save travelers time and reduce stress, but it would save the airlines and airports money.  But instead of this paradise, airlines have created the opposite world.  Every step of the way, travelers are encouraged and incentivized to bring more carry-on luggage instead of less.  Here are some of the many ways:

• The number one incentive is that I don’t have to pay for my carry-on luggage.  Checked bags cost $25 per bag, and my one carry-on costs me nothing.  Therefore I should try and fit as much stuff into my carry-on as possible.
• Larger carry-ons can be placed in the overhead bin, while smaller carry-ons must be placed under the seat in front of you.  Therefore, passengers who bring larger carry-ons (i.e., suitcases) actually get more legroom.  On my flight today, I tried to do “the smart thing” by checking all my bags (and paying the baggage fees).  My only carry-on was my laptop bag.  When trying to put my laptop in the overhead bin (I wasn’t actually planning to use it on the flight), the attendant told me that my laptop was small and needed to go under the seat in front of me, and that the overheads were reserved for larger pieces.  So basically, I was penalized for bringing less carry-on luggage.
• If I have only carry-on luggage, then it saves me time on both ends of my flight.  I don’t have to wait 10 minutes to check my bags in the first place, and I don’t have to wait 20 minutes to get them back at my destination.
• Checked baggage is handled with zero care.  Bags are thrown, dropped, kicked, stacked, and rolled.  No passenger would dare check any sensitive camera or electronic equipment because it is virtually guaranteed not to arrive in one piece.  Yet another incentive to carry it on.
• And then there’s the risk of lost luggage when you check it.  The truth is that checked luggage actually gets lost very rarely.  Still, because there is a non-zero chance that this will happen, people tend to want to eliminate the risk entirely by bringing all their luggage on board with them.

So, every incentive from the airline is to make my carry-on bag as big as regulations will allow and stuff as much into it as I possibly can.  But when all passengers do exactly this, it creates a worse experience for everyone.

What if the airlines gave passengers incentives to bring less carry-on luggage?  They could …

• … make checked luggage free again, like it used to be.  They could more than compensate for the lost revenue by increasing the price of every ticket by $15.
• … charge a fee for bringing more than 10 pounds of carry-on luggage onto the plane.  Or, divide each overhead bin into smaller compartments so that there is a fixed (but small) amount of assigned storage space per seat.  No more contention, and no more incentive to be the first one to board the plane.
• … create a system such that I can tag my checked bags myself at home.  If I can print my own boarding pass, I ought to be able to tag my own bags.  As I enter the airport, I can just place them on the conveyor belt myself and head straight to security.  This incentivizes me to check my bags rather than carry them on.
• ... design a better system for unloading checked luggage off the plane and getting them into the hands of passengers quickly.  This is admittedly a hard engineering problem.  But for Pete’s sake, we landed an unmanned vehicle on Mars and drove it around from Earth.  There are plenty of ideas out there.  Instead of loading and unloading one bag at a time onto the plane, what about putting the luggage onto carts, and loading the entire cart onto the plane?  Then, upon landing, the cart could just be wheeled off the plane, hooked to the train, and whisked off to baggage claim faster than the passengers could get there.  Passengers could pull their bags directly off the carts, rather than having a complicated and expensive system of conveyor belts and carousels.

Just a crazy idea.

--Rajeev

We went from room to room, closet by closet, drawer by drawer and we purged.  It was both tedious and exhilarating.  We faced some tough questions.  How many wine stoppers does a family that entertains need? (Hint…not 17)  Is pasta that says “best before August 2009” still edible?  OK.  Not all the questions were tough.  But what about the perfectly nice margarita glasses that we received as a wedding gift but have never used?   At the beginning of our married life, we moved every 1.5 years so we were constantly evaluating whether or not something was worth, packing, boxing, loading and shipping to the next place, but since we moved to the Pacific Northwest almost seven years ago, we have remained in the same place…same house.  Yikes.  Things were starting to accumulate and it wasn’t pretty.

It wasn’t easy and we did a lot of negotiating but in the end we hauled 7 giant bags to donate to a local charity.

Our family is blessed with financial resources that will allow us to give gifts and we have friends and family that will continue to give us wonderful treasures and new things.  Not everyone is as fortunate.  It is a great time of year to give to organizations that provide low cost gift possibilities or outright donations to those who are in need.  That made it easier to part with some coats from the coat closet and those “perfectly nice” margarita glasses that hadn’t been used in our entire 12 years of marriage.

It wasn’t the most fun and relaxing Thanksgiving weekend we ever had but it made me Thankful.  It left me thinking about how much we have and also to try not to hang on to more than we actually need.  We’ll never know for sure but maybe someone will even end up getting something they really needed.  That would sure be nice.

I am feeling lighter, happier and cleaner than I have in a long time and I didn’t even have to move to get this feeling!

Happy Holidays to All,

Diana

The Short Version

• It is now possible to sell a product that costs $0.00.
• If you have a donation type of product (where the user sets his own price), it is now possible for users to add multiple of those items to their carts.

The Long Version

When Our School Pages was first built, it seemed rather silly to allow users to purchase products that costed nothing.  Why would anyone want to do that?  It’s like walking into a garage sale, grabbing something out of the “Free” basket, and being asked to swipe your credit card on the way out.  The whole point of the Products For Sale page was to collect money – to fundraise.  So the system was designed to immediately discard any items from the user’s cart if the price was $0.00, so they could skip right past the Payment page.  This was especially relevant for donation type items, where the user sets his own “price”.  For these types of items, there was no concept of adding or removing the item from the cart …. the item was just permanently there, and the user simply chose “how much?”.  If the user chose $0.00 for his donation, then there was no good reason to store that in the database and create unnecessary records.  So the system just quietly threw it out.  It made sense at the time … to me anyway.  :)

However, in recent months, some website admins have found perfectly valid reasons for wanting to sell products that cost $0.00.  And in fact, at my own school, we had a situation come up just this week that required us to do exactly that.  For example, some PTAs host an After School Movie Night for the kids.  They wanted to use the website to allow parents to simultaneously 1.) sign their kids up for the event, 2.) capture some additional information, such as the date they are attending, and 3.) make a donation towards the event.  (To comply with state PTA regulations, it must be treated as a “donation” instead of a fixed ticket price.  I won’t get into why this rule is complete ridiculous nonsense … I’ll save that for a future blog post. :) ).  So, essentially the PTA is selling tickets, but the price of the ticket is variable, and some parents may choose to pay $0.00 (but still want to attend).  So, it’s clear from this scenario that items in the cart, even those that are priced at $0.00, must still be entered into the database and tracked as part of the order.  Fortunately, that is now possible ….

Also, clearly in this scenario it is important to be able to add multiple of these items to the cart, so that people can register multiple kids at once.  That [add one to my cart] button wasn’t there before for items that were variable priced.  (The theory was … why allow multiple separate donations? … can’t people just make a single combined donation?)  But now it’s possible:

The other example that came up at my school recently was related to our Geography Bee.  There is no cost to register (and no donations either), but we do need to know which kids are participating, and we wanted to throw an extra field on there so they could specify their teammates’ names.  Because the Event Registration page doesn’t currently allow for any additional input fields, the only way to do this right now is through a product.  This is a fixed price product, and the price is $0.00:

The one unfortunate part about this scenario is that you still must put a Payment Page in your packet.  Even if the total transaction amount is $0.00, the Payment Page is required because it’s only at that point that the order actually gets stored in the database.  If the user doesn’t hit the Payment page, then his order doesn’t get recorded.

I hope that helps unlock some interesting scenarios for your school!

--Rajeev
Founder, Our School Pages

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Over the course of the past few days, I’ve rolled out a set of small but important features which allow admins to better manipulate their data directly through the back end.  It was always possible to view the data, but now you can add, delete, and modify the data too.  This is especially useful for organizations that still receive paper forms from their users, and want to get the data from the paper forms into the system, so that all the data is in one place.  But also, it’s just plain necessary in order to correct mistakes on behalf of your users.

On the website, just like in real life, the concept of a family unit is an important one to keep in mind.  For example, now admins have the ability to add new users into the system through the back end.  But if you are adding Mom and Dad, you generally don’t want to add them as two completely separate users.  Rather, they should be two users that are linked together by virtue of the fact that they are in the same family.  They would still optionally have their own separate login emails and passwords, but they are essentially sharing an account.  Being in the same family means that they can see and manipulate each others’ orders, volunteer sign ups, event registrations, etc.  This is fairly important because if Dad signs little Johnny up for the spelling bee, or donates money to the Walkathon, Mom really ought to know about it.

Note that the idea of a family is independent of their actual marriage status.  In other words, even if Mom and Dad are no longer technically a family, I recommend they still be entered as one family on the website.  The point is that they both still have responsibility over their kids, and are co-managing a single website account on behalf of their kids.  (If Mom and Dad are each placed into their own family, then any kids would most likely end up getting added twice, and reports could get confusing.  E.g., Mom says Johnny is participating in the Spelling Bee, but Dad says he isn’t.  Now you have two conflicting entries for Johnny.)

Anyway, here are some of the things that admins can do that they couldn’t do before:

I’m sure you’ll all find it useful to be able to manipulate the data on the back end.  At our school, we’ve already started to take advantage of this, especially in terms of modifying or adding orders in the system when the checks we receive don’t match up perfectly with the orders that were placed.  Enjoy!

--Rajeev
Founder, Our School Pages

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