But this update is about more than looks. It’s about function. It’s about a course registration system that’s now as easy to update as your online classroom. Practically speaking, you’ll find entering catalog data like classes and categories smoother than ever, and you’ll find more tips along the way.

It’s about time you see for yourself. Contact your account manager for pilot and pricing information, or drop us a note at sales@haikulearning.com if you’re just getting started with Haiku Learning.

Haiku Learning’s online platform emphasizes content, creativity and collaboration. The cloud-based service provides teachers, students, and parents access to their course content anytime, anywhere. Integration with tools like Google Apps for Education™ and Noteflight enables educators to seamlessly, affordably bring the best of the web into their classes through an easy-to-use, simple interface.

Whether serving a school of 50 or 50,000, Haiku Learning makes it possible for educators to create and easily maintain blended and virtual classes with powerful features to stimulate participation and gauge performance.

As a publication focused on education, EdTech Digest keeps tabs on the latest and greatest in educational technology, recognizing leadership and innovation that moves education forward.

For more information about Haiku Learning visit www.haikulearning.com.

More room to grow with twice the data storage

If you’re already using the School Edition of Haiku, you’re going to like this: We just doubled your storage space! (Actually, if you’re considering Haiku this news applies to you, too! ) No action needed on your part. No additional fees. Just more room for your teachers and students to create and collaborate.

Why the free upgrade? It’s simple: Storage keeps getting more affordable as we grow, and we’re committed to passing on our lower storage costs to our schools. Your Haiku Administrator can see the new updates on the overview page of their Domain Control.

Three other great updates.

If you’re on the go with your iPad and using our mobile web app, drop by Discussions to join the conversation and respond to peers’ posts. Then swing by our new universal Inbox to see and respond to all your messages in one place (instead of each individual class)! You’ll see in the coming weeks and months that we are building our mobile version into a powerful tool focused on student interaction.

Ready for a dramatic makeover reveal? Discussions just got a shiny new look! Review student posts even faster, and by popular request, you can now use subject lines on posts. 

However, if you should miss the old look and want to use it through the rest of the school year, you can still toggle back to the familiar.

For those of you wanting to embed links, audio and video into your Assessment questions, you can! Now when you create an Assessment, you have the option to enable embeds so that students can click to the resource and, if needed, copy and paste into their answer. Just use the new ‘Web Friendly’ option when creating your assessments to enable this wonderful new feature.

The beat goes on.

We’re working fast and furious on our other 2012 Roadmap features. Stay tuned for more updates and let us know what you think!

To start the presentation, Gates jokes that the only school he ever graduated from was an independent school (Lakeside School in Seattle where he met future business partner, Paul Allen). He gives a great deal of credit to Lakeside, their teachers, and their teletype machine saying, “My career at Microsoft was completely launched during those high school years.”

Lakeside School is one of the hundreds of independent schools using Haiku to power their blended learning initiative.

But it was actually our work with the Global Online Academy that captured Gates’ attention. The Academy is led by the wonderful Michael Nachbar and exists as a consortium of sixteen leading independent schools around the world. Gates gushes “that range of the classes is really exciting to see” and that “you gain this unbelievable ability to bring diversity into those classroom discussions.”

The full keynote — including a fascinating Q&A –is embedded below. Watch minutes 25-28 to see the section highlighting Haiku and the Global Online Academy!

…but wait!

What on earth do I do with my old class now that it’s over? Do I really have to rebuild from the ground up for next term?

Rest easy! You’ve worked hard on your Haiku class, so why not use it as a basis for next term? Follow the tips below to save yourself a ton of time (and storage space)!

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Make your class inactive
2. Save it as a new class or as a template
3. Add next year’s students to the roster

The steps are simple, though the specifics vary based on your set up. Read on for more details!

If your class is over, the very first thing to do is make your class Inactive.

Why? When you make your class inactive it becomes invisible to your students. Making your class inactive will prevent students from logging into the class, but all of the class content and student data will still be available to you (and any co-teachers).

How? To make your class inactive, choose Make Inactive from the Manage Class menu. (Or watch this short video to get the full context.)

What happens to inactive classes? Do they ever get deleted?

Your classes are yours, so it’s up to you to decide what happens to your inactive classes! You can keep them around as long as you wish, or delete them whenever you wish. You can access your inactive classes by clicking on the Inactive tab on your My Classes screen. You can also reactivate a class at any time.

Why should I save my class?

Haiku allows you to re-use your class content with a Save As option to make a copy of the class. When next term starts, you can use the copy as a basis for your new group of students.

If you are going to re-use the content in a class for a new semester, or wish to save the content to re-use again and again, save your class as (Manage Class > Save As) a either a new class or a template. If your schools Student Information System is pushing information to Haiku, save as a new class. If you’re manually creating classes in Haiku and plan to use this course material over and over, save as a template. (Read more about the Save As option and How to Use Templates.)

What if my school automatically creates classes for me? How can I re-use content then? 

When your school automatically imports classes to your account from a Student Information System (SIS), those classes often have Rosters, but never any content. Those classes are also connected to your school’s SIS, and your school needs you to use that specific class for reporting purposes.

However, you can prepare your class content ahead of time in a separate class. Then, when you are ready, you can Merge your content class into the class imported by your school.See what we mean!

Why should I delete my class?

If you don’t want to save your class and will not be using it again, you may want to consider deleting your class. Classes use storage space, and keeping classes around, especially classes with videos and images you uploaded, that you won’t be using again could be costing your school extra money.

Please note that deletion is permanent, so if you think you may need your class resources again, don’t delete them! If you really want to delete a class, you can see how to do so.

And speaking of storage, here are some other ways to conserve time & space!

1) Copy a file from one class into another.
If you have a resource you want to use in multiple classes, you can Copy the file rather than upload it multiple times. (Each upload counts toward your school’s storage quota, so if you copy files, you’ll be saving your school storage space and making your life easier!) See how to copy a content block and an entire page!

Be sure to use the copy option rather than copying and pasting the image or the HTML. Doing the latter will generate a temporary link that will expire after 24 hours.

2) Those of you teaching more than one section of a course will LOVE Roster Sections.
Maybe you teach English 101 first, second, and third period. Instead of creating three separate Haiku classes and updating content in three places, create one Haiku class that has multiple Roster Sections. Watch as we create Roster Sections and connect them to Rosters coming from a student information system, or if you’re creating classes manually in Haiku you’ll find this walkthrough relevant.

That’s it! You’re ready to roll for next term and you’ll save space!

First, we now offer the ability to design and publish what we’re calling Extras! When used in combination with role-based classes, Extras will serve as a powerful tool for schools providing resources related to libraries, media & technology, sports, clubs, and even professional development for teachers. (See how!) Extras help to keep your Haiku portal organized via a new global filter that separates traditional academic classes from Extras.

We also rolled out Gradebook Sorting.  Teachers now have powerful sorting options directly in the Haiku Gradebook which allow you to control the order in which assignments appear. (See how!)  It’s perfect for when your class doesn’t necessarily run in chronological order.  We think anyone running self-paced classes (especially at virtual and cyber schools) will absolutely love this.

We’ve also enabled Restricted Access Assessments & Restricted Access Results.  Haiku now contains a suite of new features to help teachers better manage assessments in a proctored or lab environment.  With a Restricted Access Assessment, students can only access the exam with a password provided by the proctor.  Similarly, teachers can now post exam results with the added security of an exam-specific password. (See how!)

Finally, for our domain administrators, we’ve added a small (but mighty) feature to manually create School Years in Haiku.  This is the perfect solution for when teachers are working ahead to plan for next year before your SIS system is ready to go there! (See how!)

This 127-page book is an amazing resource with creative ideas and real-world tips for taking technology to the next level in your school.  Get your free copy below!

	Look inside >
Tech Integration Book 2012

We’re excited to be joining ASB for their Unplugged conference taking place next week in Mumbai. (If you’ll be there, too, drop Renee a line at community@haikulearning.com so you can be sure to connect in person!)

We also wanted to give a special shout out to some of the other leading International Schools working with Haiku LMS including:

• American School of Dubai
• American School of London
• British School Manila

Thanks for being awesome partners in revolutionizing digital learning on a global scale!

There are many local events throughout the country to celebrate and learn (see a schedule here), and the marquee event will take place this afternoon at 1:00 p.m. EST when U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski take the stage in DC (and online) to make an exciting announcement! Join us and more than 10,000 teachers who have already registered to watch the webinar live!

We also want to extend a special congratulations to our friends at Klein Independent School District in Texas who were selected as a national showcase school for their innovative use of technology. Bravo!

Follow all the action by with the Twitter hashtag #DLDay and check out the Facebook page!

Haiku Mobile. You can read so much of your Haiku LMS content on an iPad. And this just in: Now you can see grades, too! Up next: Teachers will be able to enter grades!

Discussions. Keeping it simple(r). As a teacher, you click on a Discussion topic and what do you see? Student posts, right? Well, if you want to see all the posts by one particular student, you have a new option in the “More” menu: “View This Student’s Posts.” And if you want to enter a grade at that point go right ahead: A new entry field awaits you!

(Major) Assessment Improvements. Once upon a time your network and Haiku Assessments may have miscommunicated. That is, a slow network could cause Assessments to lag. Though a rare occurrence, this simply cannot be! So it no longer is. We added a number of failsafes to ensure that your data remains intact and your Assessments keep up-to-speed.

We made many minor fixes and other enhancements, too, and we’ll have another round of updates launching yet in January. Trust us: You’re gonna love them!

What You’ll Experience in Haiku Mobile

Haiku Mobile is meant to be as easy to use as Haiku in your computer’s browser, and that means different interactions for touch interfaces. Because we’re in a beta phase, you’ll find that we’re still implementing features and refining the way things work.

Much of what you already see in Haiku is ready and waiting in Mobile. You’ll see the same class content you have in Pages and Calendar, and you’ll see Announcements, Assessments, Assignments, Discussions, and Dropbox.

One major improvement in the mobile web app is the Universal Inbox, which aggregates messages from all your Haiku classes into one Inbox! In the app, you no longer have to go into each class to see messages – they’re all available in a central location!

One important note: the app is a read-only in the beta release. In the coming weeks and months we’ll add the ability to interact and update content. And we’ll roll out Mobile for other devices, too.

How to Access Haiku Mobile (and Give Us Feedback)

Get your iPad ready and then:

1. Open your Haiku LMS domain in Safari
2. Log in
3. In the upper right-hand corner click “My Account” and choose “View Mobile Site”

The screen will refresh and (ta-da!) you’ll be using the web app on your iPad. (At this point you may want to bookmark the app or add an icon.)

When you get going, make notes of what you like and what you don’t. Tell us in our UserVoice forum set up specifically for Haiku Mobile. If you visit the forum and see that someone else has already reported what you’re about to then your job is simple: Cast your vote for that issue or idea so we know more people have seen it or want it!

And those of you who aren’t using Haiku Mobile have big things coming your way in 2012, too. Check out our plans for next year, and let us know what you think!