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Building Community with your Edlio Site [Edlio Webinar]

Added Jan 19, 2022 •

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We all want our schools to feel like a small community and your Edlio website can be an invaluable tool in making that happen. Learn new ways that you can use the tools included in the Edlio CMS to increase engagement and build community in this short, pre-recorded webinar.

Show Transcript

Alright, everybody! I think we are ready to get started. Thank you so much for joining us for this My Edlio webinar. Now, today we will be looking at some ways you can use your Edlio website to build, grow, and strengthen your school community. Building a strong school community can enhance learning outcomes and make your school or district a warm, welcoming, inclusive community, which I think is what we're all striving for as educators. Now if there was ever any doubt about the importance of community, I think that changed about two years ago in the spring of 2020 with the spread of coronavirus and school closures around the country. I'm sure in those times of uncertainty, school committee members are looking to you and your school website as a way to stay informed and get help-- a real lifeline, I'm sure. Since we know how important it is to build a school community, let's look at a few different ways we can use our Edlio site to accomplish that goal. Alright, now number one, I'm going to say shout-outs. A space word teachers, admins, or even students can give a shout out to a person, group, whatever they want in their school community. Not only will it give this person an opportunity to make their voices heard, a huge part of building a strong school community it'll also allow them to shine a spotlight on a person or achievement that might have flown under the radar. It's important to celebrate the wins in a school community so having a shout-outs page or a section is a great way to do that. There's a few different ways you can do that. You can build out a page where a new shout-out is posted every week, you could create a separate news category specifically for shout outs and just post you know your shout outs within that news category. Be creative with it! Think of different spots where you can post these. Let's take a look at our homepage here to see what real estate we have to see if we can get notice more eyes on this thing. So scroll down here, you know we have our quicklinks our news and announcements again if you want to create a separate category just for the shout-outs, you can do that. I'm thinking right now actually we're going to use, this the spotlight message here. Not every home page has a spotlight message. Check to see if yours does, a lot of them do. It's meant to you know shine a spotlight on something you really want your school community members to see in this case I think we're going to use it for our new shout outs program. So, in order to edit this I want to jump over to the admin page for the Edlio College Prep site, I want to go to the hamburger drop-down menu, Announce, Spotlight Messages. Alright, now find the one that you want to edit. Okay, now first up here, we want to go ahead and edit the title. Alright now in this case here we're going to say this shout out is coming from an eighth grade student, Robin R., to her favorite teacher, Ms. D. I'm going to go ahead and add a photo of Ms. D here as well. Alright, do not forget to add Alt Text. Alright, we'll delete the files over here from the previous Spotlight Message, we'll select save Let's come back over here to the Edlio College Prep homepage and we'll give it a few refreshes here. Look at that! Now we have our first shout out of the week to Ms. D here. Again, Spotlight Message, a great way to do shoutouts. You could also do a page and link that somewhere in your Site Navigation or you know you use a create a news category and push it that way, any way you can get those shout outs out, I definitely recommend doing it. It makes people feel appreciated and I think it's just a great way to build a stronger community. Now, next up how can we build a stronger community. Get parents or guardians excited about what's happening in your school. To get more families to your event we should talk up the benefits or incentives when we're publicizing them, right? For example we have a family reading night where kids will get a free book and parents can learn different ways that they can support reading at home with their children. Now the event has been planned, what's the best way to get this message out there? Now through your Edlio site, you have multiple communication methods to get this out there. You could use news and alerts to set up an announcement, we could also actually then push that to the School News App so parents can get a notification when that's posted if you know your school community is not already using the school news app definitely recommend getting them on that. We could use the newsletters feature as well, let me hop over here to the admin site. Here under Announce, we have our Newsletters feature. Now we could build out a newsletter, if we come up here to New Newsletter, let me just show you one of the layouts that we have here, this one Events and News, so if that reading night we were just talking about has been added to calendar, has been added to news, you can use this layout here boom we can just automatically insert both the events and that news announcement there right there in the newsletter and get that out to as many people as possible. So those are a couple different ways you could do that but right now let's say you know the events happening tomorrow night you know we want to get one last big push out there to see if we can get more attendees to this event. One of the ways I'll recommend doing that is with our Broadcasts add-on feature and with that you could text, voice call, or email parents straight from your site here to get the news out about this event. So let me go up here to the Hamburger Drop-Down menu and we'll go to Announce >> Broadcasts. Now again, remember this is an add-on feature so reach out to your Client Success Specialist about pricing on Broadcasts. Right now let me go over here on click new broadcast Alright and we want to give it a name. Now we want to choose which channels we're going to send this out to. If I want to reach the widest audience possible I'm going to keep all three selected- email, text, and voice. Right now though I'm going to limit it to just text. We'll select Continue. And this is where we're going to put in our message Alright, there we go, Reading Night is tomorrow night, join us and get a free book for your ECP student and learn ways to encourage reading at home, simple enough. Now let's go ahead here we can add a translation to, another way to build a stronger school community, we want to be as inclusive as possible. Let's say there's a large Spanish-speaking population at our school, we don't know what the parents are speaking at home possibly we want to make sure we're getting this message out in as many languages as we can, right? We want to hit as many people as possible with this. I'm going to go ahead and add this translation and right now it's auto translating. Select here and this is what that translation is going to look like. So we're going to have this message sent out in both English and Spanish thanks to this auto-translate feature-- pretty cool. Go to Continue. Alright, so next up we need to add a Contact List Alright and this is going to pull all of the contacts that we want to send this message to we can send now or send later I want to get this thing out right away so we'll send that now. Alright and just like that I just sent out that text message to my school community to hopefully get more people to attend to this event that we want we want to get people excited for you know we want to promote more reading going on at home and I think this will be a great way to get the message out about that event. So we've already looked at shout outs you could do for students, staff, things like that. We looked at getting parents and guardians excited about school events, now next up I want to focus back in on the staff. We want to make sure we're keeping them in the loop about everything that is going on in the school, right? So in this case here, I've created a Section, just for staff resources. I'm going to go here to our Page Management >> Pages Alright, so when building out a Staff Resources section like this you know think about things that they they might want you know, Professional Development, Insurance information, PTO info, emergency resources, things like that. I'm going to open this up here the public link so you can see what it looks like now anybody that wants to visit this page right now they are able to, so let's say we want to go ahead and lock this page down, turn this whole section into a staff intranet, something like that we can go ahead and add this entire section to a password protected area. What we can do then is add users to that password protected area so any staff member will be able to login to view this alright. Any regular user that comes to visit this and they're going to get a login page for a username and password, they will not be able to access it unless you have added them to that password protected area. So I'll show you how we can do that right now. We'll come back over to the Admin Page, alright we'll go to Hamburger Drop-Down Menu >> Page Management >> Password Protected Areas Now the first thing we want to do is create a new area and we'll give it a title. Now we want to select what is going to be protected. We want to add Pages or Features here so, in this case we want to add that staff resources section I just made. And we'll scroll down here, Staff Resources 2021-2022, This is the section I made. I can either add the whole section right now like this or I can go in and add individual pages if I like but I want to add this entire section so I'm going to select up here just going to auto select the rest of the pages within that section. We have that selected here Alright and we'll select Save. Next up, we want to add users who will have access to this section. We'll go over to Who Has Access I want to search for users to add. I'll go ahead and add myself there. We can add some other users as well. Make sure you select Add. Awesome! Now save. Alright, so it has been saved now so the only people who will be able to access the section right now are these three people right here. Let me hop back over here to that page. Let me go ahead and reload it and look at that, you need a username and password to get in. Look at that! I am in. I was able to get access to this password protected area so we can we want to keep our staff in the know in the loop of what is going on in the school community and a staff intranet is a great way to do that. You can restrict access to certain users and give your staff a central hub for them to visit for any info they might need. Now staying on the topic of your staff, the next tip I'm going to offer is getting input from your staff to learn about ways that we can best support them. Staff members want to be heard right right now is a really weird time in the profession and the number one thing we can do for teachers is to listen to them. They're on the front lines and can communicate precisely what is needed for them to be able to do their jobs effectively. So let's listen to them. One way we can do that is setting up a form where they can come in and submit questions, requests, feedback, things like that. So let's go over here to our admin site and you can build out that form within the forms feature so we'll select Forms here. I've already buit out this form just to give you an idea of what it could look like. If you want to get creative with yours, add different questions things like that, I definitely recommend doing that. I just want to kind of give you an idea of what this could look like right? I'm going to click on that link there which will bring us to the public link for this so look at that this is the the actual form where teachers can go in and write you know questions, send feedback, things like that. What I want to do actually is add this form to this section here to be part of that intranet. Now what we'll do is we'll go over to the admin site. Alright and we'll go to Page Management >> Pages We'll go find that section for that staff resources and add that form Alright, now we'll select New Page up here. Alright, so instead of adding a blank page we can choose one of our Feature Pages down here, in this case we'll grab the form. Now we want to find that form that we made, that staff feedback form. Alright now, we'll go ahead and save. Now if we come back over here to our staff resources section and I refresh look at that, we have our staff feedback form right in that section. Pretty cool! Alright, I think we are ready to wrap things up for today. I want to thank you all for joining us for this webinar. If you have any questions about your site, about anything at all, please reach out to your Client Success Specialist. Every Edlio website comes with a Client Success Specialist who can answer any questions about your site. If you are not sure who your Client Success Specialist is, please reach out to clientsuccess@edlio.com and we will be happy to point you in the right direction. Thanks again as always for joining us and we hope to see you at the next one! Take care!

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