We made the change to the student interface to provide more information to students about what is expected of them. Focus mode also removes distractions (games, activities/wordlists), and gives clear goals for the students. This shows the students how they are progressing towards their weekly goal and an opportunity to earn a diamond medal if they achieve these goals. Focus mode makes it easier for students to know exactly where they should be when they log into StepsWeb.
Students that are not on Focus mode aren’t included in the weekly report.
The games, supporting activities and wordlists have been removed from the screen in Focus Mode. This is to stop students being distracted when they should be working on the Course.
Games etc can be assigned to students via the Assigned Work section.
In Exploration mode, Games etc are available to your students, as they were prior to the update.
In Focus mode, students are no longer able to create their own wordlists. Any existing lists students have created would need to be assigned to them as work for them to complete.
You can change some/all of your students back to the old interface. You can change it for individual students (inside Manage Students), for whole classes (inside Manage Classes), or for the whole account (in School Settings). The option is called “Mode”, with “Focus” being the new interface and “Exploration” being the old interface.
Please note that if you change any students back to the old interface, then they won’t appear in the weekly report.
There are some students who will work better in Exploration mode.
By default, students who have a spelling age lower than their chronological age are assigned a goal of 20 activities per week. Assuming they complete that goal most weeks during term time, this should result in the student making 2 years spelling age gain over 1 year.
If the student has a spelling age higher than their chronological age, then they are assigned a goal of 10 activities per week. This should keep their spelling age consistent with their chronological age.
You can override this value using the manual setting. The default value updates at the beginning of each week when the student first logs in.
You can change the weekly goal for individual students. This is done via the Manage Students tile.
We have added a few different places for students to see their medals:
Your weekly reporting email has:
From early December, we are sending out a weekly report to all educators on StepsWeb. To ensure the emails are relevant to you, we suggest you mark the classes you oversee as a Favourite. This will mean you only get information for your classes and students. If you do not have class(es) marked as favourite, you will receive weekly progress information for all the student logins on your StepsWeb licence.
https://support.stepsweb.com/339/favouriting-classes takes you to our Support Site article with a step-by-step walkthrough of how to mark a class as a favourite.
If you do not wish to get the reporting information we sent out, you can unsubscribe from these emails. There is an unsubscribe link at the end of the email. When you click on the link, you will be given two unsubscribe options.
You can unsubscribe from the Weekly Goals report or the Renewal Reminders. You can also unsubscribe from all emails. Please note that this unsubscribe does not affect your newsletter subscription.
As you will see, we have changed the design and function when you assign work to your students. The old Assigned Work only supported a single wordlist. However, it didn't retain the progress that the student had achieved. As a result, assigning the same wordlist twice would result in the previous results carrying over to the second piece of work.
The new Assigned Work can now handle multiple items, including Supporting Activities and Games. We also changed the way it records progress, so assigning the same wordlists twice would result in the student needing to complete that wordlist twice.
We decided against converting the old Assigned Work into the new design due to time and development constraints. We sincerely apologise for any inconvenience, especially if you lost students' Assigned Work and had to redo this.
We observed that this setting was normally used to pace students going through the course. This should be unneccessary now that students are given a 'weekly goal'. The new emailed weekly reports will let teachers know if the students have completed their goal and how well they did.
If you are not getting the information you need from the weekly report, please let us know. We are keen to gather feedback so we can continue to provide timely and relevant information.
This will create the Assigned Work for your student. You will need to do this for each student. If you wish to assign the same activities to each student in your class, you can do this via the Manage Classes section.
For any big changes, we mention them at least a week in advance in our newsletters. You can sign up to receive them from the front page of our website. Head to www.stepsweb.com and go to the bottom of the page. There is a newsletter sign-up form. Fill in the details and verify your email. You will receive any future newsletters.
We also talk about changes on our Facebook page, which you can find at https://www.facebook.com/LearningStaircase/
Email: info@stepsweb.com
