Estimated Time To Read This: 2 – 3 minutes       The Resource module of PD Place provides a great respository for documents, videos and web sites that can enhance their professional development. An item added to the resources of PD Place can be restricted to public or private users, but in general your employees will have full access to all of the content. It is also possible to link specific resources to any number of in-services via the in-service detail screen. If you do this, then users who view the ... Read More

Estimated Time To Read This: 3 – 5 minutes       You don’t have to take it from me.   A quick google search of the terms, “professional development” and “student achievement” will provide a profusion of scholarly articles that discuss the merits of teacher professional development and the direct correlation between it and student achievement.  We all know that staff excel when they possess the skills and knowledge to fulfill their role as educational thought leaders and students excel when they are ... Read More

Estimated Time To Read This: 2 – 3 minutes       I recently had the pleasure to attend the annual ATLE (Alberta Technology Leaders in Education) Conference in Red Deer, Alberta.  I go to many educational conferences and always come away with the impression that the people who attend these events are dedicated, committed and most importantly they care.  They really believe in what they are doing and are always looking for ways to improve and benefit their staff and the children whose education they are ... Read More

Estimated Time To Read This: 3 – 4 minutes       PD Place will streamline your professional development programs and save your organization valuable time and money, but that’s not all!  Did you know that you can use PD Place to generate a revenue stream for your organization?  In this blog, I outline a few different ways of how you can utilize PD Place to create a new source of income for your company and establish your organization as an industry leader in professional development.  With PD Place, your ... Read More

Estimated Time To Read This: 3 – 5 minutes       Cinema influences us all; from programmers to account managers, to educators and so on, you’d have to be living at the centre of the earth to survive a day without reference to a classic film or quip from a favourite flick.  With the upcoming release of PD Place version 3.8.4 just around the corner, I thought I’d have a little fun with this blog and present you with the top 3 films that provide insight into what PD Place can do for your organization. 300 ... Read More

Estimated Time To Read This: 2 minutes       Alberta Technology Leaders in Education (ATLE) has partnered with CoreSolutions Software Inc. to use PD Place professional development software as a registration tool for all ATLE sponsored events. In addition to the registration features of PD Place, ATLE members will also be eligible to receive a discount on the purchase price of PD Place. PD Place will offer superior session and event registration for ATLE sponsored events while facilitating a simpler payment method for ... Read More

Estimated Time To Read This: 3 – 4 minutes       PD Place provides a number of search features to aid end users in finding the in-services of interest to them. All of these search methods display their results on what is called the Search Result screen. There are a number of preferences that can be used to customize this screen to your own environment. This blog will look at some of the these preferences in a little more detail. These preferences can be found in the “Class Search & Display – ... Read More

Estimated Time To Read This: 6 – 9 minutes       I know you’re probably thinking, “There’s nothing Zen about managing professional development.  It’s stressful, time-consuming and when last minute changes arise due to classroom fumigation, it can feel quite maddening!”  What if I were to tell you that there is a way to run professional development programs at your Higher Learning Institution that is efficient, effective and will leave you feeling at ease?  The purpose of this blog is to elucidate ... Read More

Estimated Time To Read This: 2 – 4 minutes       There is an optional field in the in-service detail screen which by default, is labeled as  the “Special Event ID” . This field can be used in conjunction with the “Email Attendee List” report as an effective tool in managing some unique situations. One application is where you wish to extract managerial information about the attendance associated with a number of unique in-services.  The special event ID and Email Attendee List ... Read More

Estimated Time To Read This: 2 – 3 minutes       We recently attended the Desire2Learn Fusion 2011 conference in the ‘Mile High City” of Denver, Colorado. D2L are a very successful company that delivers eLearning solutions to academic and other leading organizations worldwide. Fusion is the D2L Users’ Conference which is held every July. This year D2L had a record attendance with over 850 attendees representing 212 institutions, 8 countries, 30 states and 8 provinces. I’d say that’s quite ... Read More

Estimated Time To Read This: 2 minutes       *Note: Please click images to enlarge The Instructor Statistics Report in PD Place is a great tool to show you how many in-services your instructors are teaching and their average satisfaction based on post-in-service evaluations. In order to take advantage of this report you will need to ensure you make use of the evaluation feature for each in-service and direct participants to fill out the evaluation after each in-service they attend. You can even block the printing of ... Read More

Estimated Time To Read This: 1 – 2 minutes       For several years now, our base development platform has been based on PHP version 5.2.  PHP 5.2 will run under Windows NT/2000/2003 with very few problems.  Of course, during this same time period, the environment has changed. The recommended version of PHP for production use is now 5.3.  5.4alpha1 was released on Jun 28, 2011 and promises to have improved memory usage and performance.  PHP 5.2, the version that we are currently using is no longer supported ... Read More

Estimated Time To Read This: 3 – 5 minutes       Over the last few months we have been approached, by a number of users, as to how to best utilize PD Place to address the following typical scenario: “We would like to offer a program with a certificate of completion at the end. The program will be made up of twelve (12) courses which the user must complete 6 of the 12.  Three of these are mandatory. ” There a number of ways you can set this up in PD Place. The choice of which method to use basically ... Read More

Estimated Time To Read This: 2 – 4 minutes       I realize this post is a bit late (sorry Mr. Marketing Coordinator Kyle!) but I wanted to take a few moments and let you know about our recent visit to the ECNO conference at the end of May. Our CEO Barney Lawn and I attended and I think he won’t mind me saying that it was very worthwhile. ECNO is the Educational Computing Network of Ontario and they are a fine group of people – even if I do say so myself.  A non-profit co-operative that can boast 66 ... Read More

Estimated Time To Read This: 1 – 2 minutes       Now that the school year is almost over, I’m sure many of you PD Place users have time to think finish up those unfinished projects from earlier in the year.  I’m hoping I may interject an idea into that list of unfinished projects.  Tell us what would you like to see in PD Place.  Over the years, we have seen a wide variety of ideas ranging from adding a new filter all the way up to integrating with other management systems.  When it seems all the ideas ... Read More

Estimated Time To Read This: 2 – 4 minutes       If you’re like me, I’m sure you’ve said this at one time or another during the software development process.  The app that just takes forever to load – and then gives you that nasty fatal error message.  With some fiddling and a bit of adjusting, you usually get this to work, but it’s still slow.  What do you do? Following from my last blog, I’ve started using phpStorm for my developing here at CoreSolutions.  Part of this suite includes an ... Read More

Estimated Time To Read This: 2 – 3 minutes       Registration restrictions can help you manage in-service attendance to ensure the right employees are able to register for events and in-services. First you need to find the in-service you would like to add registration restrictions to and click on the pencil icon under the admin column to enter the in-service admin portal Once you are in the admin portal you will need to click on the “Edit Registration Restrictions” link.   Now you can start to create ... Read More

Estimated Time To Read This: 2 – 3 minutes       In version 3.8 of PD Place, new functionality was added to the Qualification modules called “Qualification Clock Hour Rules”. If you do not currently track clock hours, I suggest you continue to read this document since there are preferences which allow you to change the clock hour labeling so that you could transform the tracking from clock hours to points, credits or any other category that is applicable to your organization. This new feature ... Read More

Estimated Time To Read This: 2 – 3 minutes       We’ve all been there at one time or another.  With confidence we go and make a change and voila, it looks beautiful.  After we celebrate our prowless, a few days later we go over what we did and notice that something just isn’t right.  Why are all my people at the wrong location?  Why are they assigned to the wrong school? At times like these, the existence of a good backup and recovery strategy is paramount.  In the case above, the creation of a ... Read More

Estimated Time To Read This: 2 minutes       Need a quick way to communicate with various groups within your school board?  The Email Groups feature allows you to do just that. *Note – click the images to enlarge Under the Supervisor section on MyPage click on the link “Email Groups”   Now you can use the value lists along the left side of the page to filter your email list by location, public or employee, employee group, supervisory role and more.  Simply click on the “search” button to make ... Read More

Estimated Time To Read This: 3 – 4 minutes       Overview In PD Place there is a simple but unique capability that was introduced in version 3.7 called “Extra Credits“. Not many clients currently use this feature and therefore I would like to review its capabilities and give you some ideas of how it can be used. Extra Credits provides you with the capability to indicate that  the successful completion of an in-service will earn participants a specified number of special credit units. The number ... Read More

Estimated Time To Read This: 1 – 2 minutes       With each new version of PD-Place, many new and exciting features are added. These features range from minor adjustments to large scale changes. How does the PD-Place team determine what new features are added? When the PD-Place team receives a new feature request, the request is recorded in a list of changes. This list of changes is reviewed by the PD-Place team between releases. If the request is a feature that many clients will find useful, the feature is ... Read More

Estimated Time To Read This: 2 minutes       Are you a Professional Development Instructor at your school district? Then this blog post is for you!  We wanted to make sure you knew what PD Place software has to offer you. PD Place provides you access to valuable features that will help you manage all in the in-services you teach! Instructors can be given the ability to create new courses and in-services.   Instructors can mark attendance, course completion and assign hours or credits. Instructors can easily email ... Read More

Estimated Time To Read This: 2 minutes       Have you ever been in that most undesirable situation where you want to do something, know it’s possible, but have no idea on how to proceed? Fear not, both ContinuED and PDPlace have an extensive help system that will show you the path you need to take to accomplish your goal.   In PDPlace, the help system can be accessed by using the rightmost tab in the upper left navigation bar.   In ContinuED, it is the second last tab, again in the upper left navigation ... Read More

Estimated Time To Read This: 2 minutes       If you have ever had the task of organizing and managing an internal conference for your organization, you know just how much work is involved … a lot! With the Conferences feature in PD Place, it allows you to better organize and manage registrations, speakers, rooms for break sessions (complete with conflict checking), mandatory sessions and more. The latest version of PD Place has included even more features to help you: Waiting lists for conferences: now you can ... Read More