Blogging impact repeated for a second summer

For a second summer, 2016 -2017, Manaiakalani learners had the opportunity to blog supported by Dr Rachel Williams and her team from the Woolf Fisher Research Centre through the Summer Learning Journey (SLJ). While many children continued to blog 'freestyle' as they always have, 141 learners actively participated in the SLJ activities.  It is these learners that the latest publication reports on.


On receiving "An Evaluation of a Design-Based Approach to Holiday Blogging in New Zealand Primary and Intermediate Schools" authored by Dr Rachel Williams and Dr Rebecca Jesson this month we immediately looked to comapre the impact on literacy achievement outcomes with the previous summer.

Check out what Rachel says in her Executive Summary:

"At the end of the summer holiday, I evaluated the quality and accuracy of all of the posts provided by our students. I also explored the impact that participating in the Summer Learning Journey programme had on the writing and reading ability of our students. 

Writing: Figure 1

The results were really exciting! They suggest that participation in the programme led to significantly higher writing (e-asTTle) and significantly higher reading (PAT) scores in Term 1 2017 (after the summer programme) for participants than non-participants (see Writing: Figure 1, Reading: Figure 2). 

In fact, the participants were 31.65 asttle points (approximately 6-9 months of learning) and 5 full PAT points (approximately 6 months of learning) ahead of non-participants at the end of the summer. 

Reading: Figure 2

We believe that these differences are quite substantial and provide clear evidence of the significant, positive effect that sustained blogging over summer can have on the writing and reading ability of the students."

This insight into the impact of the Manaiakalani kaupapa is valuable. 

Our Manaiakalani Education Trust provides a free wifi network to our learners to support ubiquitous learning, and our summer bloggers have made full use of it. The SLJ would be challenging to support if the kaupapa of visibility was not genuinely supported, both for the learners and adults interacting with them. The design of the programme empowered our learners and overtly encouraged connectedness. We look forward to exploring the report in depth in Term 3 when our Kahui Ako theme is "Connected Learners Share".


There was a focus in this report on non-academic skills and 21st century competencies, including the development of individual prosocial skills (eg. communication, collaboration, empathy, support, etc).

"The presence of the commenting feature also appeared to drive student engagement and encourage participants to engage positively with the ‘expert’ commenting staff, with family/whanau and with students from New Zealand and overseas. There were numerous instances of positive, prosocial interactions between students in the commenting threads. 

There were also instances in which the commenting staff forged deep and meaningful relationships with the student participants. It was clear that students trusted the expert commenters and were prepared to share personal details of their lives with them. The ‘mutually reinforcing nature’ of this interaction ensured that the students continued to participate and the commenters continued to engage positively with them, driving further, deeper and more meaningful participation from both parties. 

 The research team strongly believes in the capacity of this digital programme to facilitate the development of genuine personal relationships between individuals separated by geographical distance. 

They also believe that individual, social and mental/emotional well-being may be enhanced through sustained participation in this programme, particularly for students who may be without much social interaction over the holiday and are at-risk of feeling lonely, alone or under supported. They would like to further explore the impact of participation on student well-being in future iterations of the programme."

Finally, I want to acknowledge Manaiakalani teachers and principals who encourage and actively support their learners as they head into the holidays. The report notes that

"Rates of engagement were highest amongst ... students attending schools with strong role modelling and support from teaching staff. Staff who valued the programme clearly communicated this to students who, in turn, were more likely to participate."

Data suggests blogging impacts literacy achievement

Teachers are investing time, and in some cases their own vacations, in supporting learners who blog in the holidays and want to know if it impacts academic achievement. Feedback from colleagues about my previous posts, sharing evidence of the significant impact blogging outside of school can have on learners literacy achievement, indicates that there is wide interest in research being conducted in this area. 

The programme being conducted in Manaiakalani schools to address the Summer Learning Effect (where students’ learning is adversely impacted over the summer period, in particular, because many school-like learning activities desist during this time) is being carried out by the Woolf Fisher Research Centre and led by Dr Rachel Williams.

Rachel has recently published an update on the pilot, carried out over the summer of 2015 -2016, tracking the original cohort of participants throughout the 2016 academic year. The difference in achievement over time on writing test scores is shown in this graph. The blue line is the participants, red line is matched baseline control group who did not participate.

Rachel comments:

"The data suggests to me that participation in the Summer Learning Journey has the potential to truly accelerate achievement in writing for our students. The SLJ participants continued to improve their writing over the course of the 2016 school year and ended with an average e-asTTle score of 74.5 (up from 63.47). Our matched control group also realised a significant improvement in writing over the course of the year (up from -119 to 12.88). Interestingly, however, despite the great gains that the matched control group made they could not catch up with our participants and ended the year approximately 60 points below the SLJ participants. This is a significant difference and represents a genuine 'gap' in achievement for the two groups. I find this quite startling as they both ended the 2015 at the same level. The matched control students then dropped over summer and were not able to re-gain the learning that they had lost over summer while our participants steamed ahead."

A further paper published by Rachel and Dr Rebecca Jesson investigates the achievement trajectory of these matched cohorts of young people over five time points. By using data available from the previous year, they show the two cohorts of learners following a parallel pathway from the end of year high in 2014, dropping back over the summer holidays to a low point at the beginning of 2015, then encouraging acceleration during the school year towards a high point at the end of 2015.

And then their pathways separate.
Those who participated in the first Summer Learning Journey, blogging over the summer holidays, settle into a positive incline pattern.  Those who didn’t, not only continued the ‘yo-yo’ sliding effect, but also failed to catch up during the school year.

Rebecca concludes:

While this is a small study to gauge the effectiveness of blogging as a suitable vehicle for summer programmes, the results are promising.  Of particular note are the sizes of the differences between the writing scores of participants and both estimates of the control condition: students’ own scores in previous summers and the scores of matched control group. This provides initial evidence that participating in a blogging programme over the summer holiday period can attenuate the drop in literacy scores realised by students attending schools in low SES communities. Given the high rates of SLE previously reported by these schools, and the negative effect that low literacy ability has on students, these results offer an important building block for tackling the educational challenge facing these schools, who seek educational solutions to ongoing challenges using digital learning initiatives.

I would like to acknowledge colleagues (eg Helen King, Sandy Lagitupu, Andrea Tele’a, Jenny She and Priscilla Lavakula) who have regularly supported and encouraged learners by commenting on their blogs over the summer holidays for almost a decade now.

And more recently teachers (eg Robyn Anderson, Kiri Kirkpatrick, Karen Belt and Jackie Buchanan) who have designed and monitored holiday blogging programmes for their own classes.

We had a hunch this was making a difference!

Knowing Your Learners

It's that time in the southern hemisphere - summer holidays are coming to an end and teachers are expectantly planning for the new academic year with new classes, new learners and new whānau to engage with. Effective teachers should not need the NZ Curriculum to tell them that the implementation of effective pedagogy (p37) requires teachers to spend time knowing their learners and their whānau, and establishing relationships - whakawhanaungatanga. It is simply common sense and something most would do in any social setting when planning to spend a year in close quarters with someone(s) else. 

In light of this I have been reflecting on my first year teaching when I was super excited about the year ahead and my 'expert' mentor teacher told me to throw all the documentation that came from the primary schools about my learners into a back cupboard as  

1. it will be inaccurate (implying primary teachers make stuff up) and 
2. the children deserve to start with a blank slate and have a fresh start in a new year. 

I ignored that advise and pored over the information supplied, taking note of what was said and also what wasn't said. Hopefully even as a beginning teacher I was able to jump start whakawhanaungatanga with the limited information I had gleaned about the learners, rather than starting from nothing.

There is a no shortage of useful ideas online to support teachers knowing their learners, from locally generated kiwi ideas eg. "Whakawhanaungatanga - Getting to know our learners" led by Tessa Gray on the VLN through to international suggestions such as "Strategies For Getting To Know Your Students" by Mike Anderson. 

Teachers in Manaiakalani schools have a significant head start when planning for the new year. An advantage probably only equalled in small country schools where the class sizes are small and the children stay with the same teacher for several years. Manaiakalani children all have a personal blog, and over time these reveal a wealth of information about each learner, their whānau and their learning journey.

Over the Summer many of our young people have participated in the Summer Learning Journey - a blogging programme - and as I have read their posts and the comments and threaded conversations attached, it has dawned on me that Rachel's research team have made significant connections with our learners and know some of these learners very well now. If they were to become their teachers in February I suspect the learning would accelerate very quickly as they have learnt so much about these learners from their blogs.

Our curriculum also reminds us that "teacher actions promoting student learning include making connections to (children's) prior learning and experience". Even a quick skim or scan of a child's blog provides teachers with significant information about prior learning experiences. Not only the learning areas covered, but also the engagement and attitude to learning becomes apparent when a whole year of posts are viewed. And for those with multiple years of blogging some trends emerge of differences from year to year.

Blogging represents the learner's voice and gives an entirely different perspective from the teacher generated profiles of test scores, work samples and comments that were passed on in the pre-digital era.

"We have a unique opportunity to forge very real and meaningful connections with our students using the blog. I think that they are a rich resource for all teachers. The details present on the blogs, the frequency of blog posting, commenting and replying is quite indicative of the degree of engagement that our students have with their learning. They certainly signal the degree of self-regulation and personal drive for learning present within the student and offer us a glimpse into their personal worlds." Dr Rachel Williams, Jan 2017

I would love to hear from teachers 

1. What you discover about your learners from reading through their blogs in the remaining time before school starts
2. How you start the year differently with 'knowing your learner' activities when you can acknowledge the content on their blogs and the information they have chosen to share publicly prior to joining your class/es

I recommend taking a few minutes to explore some examples of the threaded conversations Rachel and the SLJ team have been having with our learners this month, using the links below as a starting point.

Harrison 1	Stevenson	Anna 1	Von	Jessica
Stanley	Robin	Jahzara	Harrison 2	Anna 2

Another Summer of Learning

Following on from the success of the pilot one year ago, the Summer Learning Journey is underway again for Manaiakalani school children while schools are closed and everyone is on holiday. Rachel Williams has expanded the programme and her team, and they are supporting our children to continue learning during the Summer holiday period. 

The Summer Learning Journey utilises the embedded blogging programme existing in Manaiakalani schools and provides engaging activities for our young people to interact with throughout the Summer. Where this differs from other programmes which may provide stimulating holiday learning is the ongoing community building designed into the programme.  Every post shared is commented on by at least one adult and the children are encouraged to connect with each other and interact with the posts their peers share.

We look forward to the report that will emerge after school resumes as the researchers evaluate the impact on academic outcomes for the participants.

In the meantime we invite anyone with five minutes on their hands in the next couple of weeks to go to this URL : twitter.com/clusternz and follow the links to one of the 400 children who are currently participating in the programme. Become an active participant in their learning journey by leaving a comment on their blog.

Here are a sample, randomly selected from the Twitter feed:

Harrison	Riiana	Alex	Stanley	Jahzara

One thing that drew my attention was the number of boys participating (writing). Food for thought for teachers and CoLs beginning the year with a goal of "doing something about boys writing..."

We note that the Education Review has also published an article recognising this initiative.

Blogging Supports Writing Outcomes

Blogging has played an important role in the Manaiakalani pedagogy for over ten years now and a generation of young people have been through our schools knowing that sharing your learning publicly is an important part of the learning process.

Many of our learners have chosen to continuing sharing on their blogs during the school holidays and I have written posts like this sharing anecdotal observations about their holiday writing. Writing is a social activity for many people and our learners are encouraged when someone interacts with their post and they see on their feeds that people have viewed their blog.

Over the 2015/16 summer holidays the Woolf Fisher research team set up a project to encourage more of our young people to blog during the long summer break to observe whether this was in fact a valid way to arrest the frustrating 'summer drop-off' that so many of our priority learners experience. This was led by Rachel Williamson. Rachel constructed the Summer Learning Journey using the Manaiakalani pedagogy and the young people had multiple opportunities to Learn, Create and Share as they explored the world virtually.

A full description of the programme and the outcomes can be seen on this page on the Manaiakalani website.

Two observations I have noted from the research report:

The first one is a highly valued outcome in our Manaiakalani schools. The learners who participated in the blogging programme did not experience a significant drop off in their test scores as measured by the e-asttle writing test. The blue line on the graph shows the summer bloggers test scores over the course of a calendar year. The red line shows a matched sample of learners who did not blog over the summer (matching gender, ethnicity and achievement level) and displays the trend we are familiar with - writing outcomes rise during the school year and take a deep slide over the summer break.

The second observation is an outcome that is valued by some people who question us about 'WHY' we 'LET' our young people share their learning prolifically online. These adults express concern that the writing might not be perfect, and imperfect surface features may even reflect negatively on the child, the family or the school.

Glass is half full people!!

Rachel analysed the surface features of the writing shared online during the summer break - presumably completed with little direct adult support - and came up with surprising results that should reassure people whose inclination is to micro-manage children's published writing.

Accuracy was measured using four indicators: Percentage of words spelled correctly, percentage of word sequences that were correct, percentage of punctuation marks that were used correctly, and percentage of sentences that were complete and correct.
In each case the percentage score was calculated as: Number of correct examples/total number.

Spelling:
On average, 96.7% of the words in each post were spelled correctly

Correct Word Sequences:
 On average, 88.2% of word sequences in each post were correct

Punctuation:
On average, 77.1 % of punctuation marks in each post were used correctly.

Sentences:
On average, 73.6% of sentences in each post were complete and accurate.

We highly recommend you read the report yourself.

Kids' blogs recognised by the Blogger Team

Some very happy children when they saw themselves featured by the Blogger Team today.  Lesieli, Quasia and Mary are Year 7 learners at Pt England School and have been blogging for three years now.

At this age, and in our learning community, blogging is much more than social networking.  It gives our young people a voice and it significantly increases student agency. It invites the world to participate in their learning journey.  

Link here to the original post.

Thanks to +BrucePolderman and +MylesJohnson for this piece.

We are also grateful to the students in Dr John Strange's class at the University of South Alabama, USA for their ongoing support of our learners and their blogging.  It is very special to young people who live so remotely on the planet to have people from around the globe taking an interest in their learning.

Rolling Over Individual Blogs

I have spoken a lot about the benefits for children when they have their own blog to use as a record of learning.  In the last few months I have presented workshops at two Google Apps Summits on how to manage a quantity of individual blogs. A question I was asked from at both GAFE Summits by teachers was, "Why go to all this effort managing the individual student blogs?". They would like to simplify matters by simply getting each student in the class to set up their own blog for the year and the teacher have no responsibility for what happens the following year.

There are three parts to my response:

1. In our Manaiakalani schools the teachers take delight in supporting the children build their record of learning - an ePortfolio - and our original child bloggers are entering their 6th year of having a personal blog.  So we do need to be able to track the blogs and support the children as they transition from class to class.
2. If we create the blogs with an accurate naming structure the posts and comments feed through to Teacher Dashboard - a fabulous way to monitor them for the teacher.
3. We are able to ensure the settings are all completed in the way we have discovered gives us maximum accountability for the online supervision of minors. (More about that at this link)

As we enter a new academic year I have updated the workflow for a school managing the transition of a set of student blogs onto the next teacher(s).

I will headline the stages below, but the full process is available for anyone to use at this link.

Blog Rollover - Workflow

Step by step to transitioning the student individual blogs at the end of the academic year to their new class/teacher.

Stage One
Getting Organised
Get all the documentation sorted BEFORE starting the rollover process so it happens in a methodical fashion

Stage Two
Passing on a class set of blogs to the new teacher(s)
This really should be done by the teacher who taught the class in the PREVIOUS academic year.

Stage Three
Updating information on the new set of blogs
The classroom teacher has just been made Admin of a whole new set of student blogs. Now the header information, which displays publicly, needs to be updated.

Stage Four
Publicity
Spreading the word about the children’s blogs is an important way of supporting their learning.

I do hope this is of use to others!

Got a blog? Make a book!

 I never expected to find myself a fan of printing out blog posts, especially as a person who has shared satirical videos like this from way back.

However, this Christmas I ordered my THIRD book from Blog2print and on each of the 3 occasions I have been very pleased with the result. So why on earth would I want to have a hard copy of an entire blog?

On one occasion it was a gift to a person to recognise the 'completion' of a chapter in their blogging life; on another it was a gift to a person leaving a school (and a blog built up with huge amount of content) who wasn't sure what the school would do with the blog when they left, and the third one (which I have videoed below) was to create a quick 'coffee table' example of what the blog was about for occasions when I didn't want to log onto a computer. Sometimes books ARE simply quicker than going online in New Zealand!

All three of the blogs I created books for were rich with multimedia content, so it certainly is disappointing not being able to view the video and podcasts.  But it also reinforced to me the importance of creating posts that have text and images along with multimedia.  

We live in an increasingly device-rich world and it is not always appropriate to have sound playing because other people are often in close proximity who don't appreciate the sound pollution and headphones can be perceived as anti-social. So it is important to be able to grasp the main points about a blog post via text as well as video.

I am sure there are lots of sites that would create books from blogs but I stumbled across this one and gave it a go.  And having spent lots of NZ dollars in the process hoped for the best.  I was very happy with the simplicity of the creation process, the delivery time from USA to NZ,  the quality of the book and the very positive reaction of the recipient.

Generations of Bloggers

After three weeks at the beach and time to reflect on an action packed year in 2011 of new learning, innovation and challenges, it was hard to pick one stand-out event. 


My highlight personally and professionally would have to be presenting a workshop at ULearn11 in Rotorua with my own daughters.  Over the years I have collaborated on projects and workshops with a lot of teachers - many of them first time presenters. So it was a lot of fun working on a first-time presentation with my two daughters who have been teaching for two and three years respectively, and blog with their students.


We submitted a proposal we called "Blogging - a possibility for everyone" and began our 'blurb' with this:

Blogging has been around for a decade now and to many teachers it has become so mainstream that it is an automatic part of the class setup at the beginning of a school year. On the other hand, there are many schools and teachers for whom Blogging still has a very geeky vibe.

This presentation is designed to share experiences with Blogging, and lessons learned along the way, from a variety of perspectives:

• individual, group, class and subject blogging
• primary through to college students
• decile 1a to decile 10
• beginning teacher to been-around-for-decades teacher

The presentation is embedded below and some of the notes are attached.

We also created a quick links page for people to access the material we were talking about.

My personal pride in presenting this workshop with Georgie and Ashleigh is pretty obvious.

From a professional perspective it was great to be able to share the achievements and challenges experienced in high school classes as well as junior primary school and the middle school years.  Being able to share about blogging from the extreme perspectives of Deciles 1a and 10 (socio-economic extremes FYI to non-New Zealanders) offered a much more rounded picture than when I present blogging workshops on my own.  It certainly became clear that the issues and challenges are very different and this kind of online sharing (via Blogs) does not have a one-size-fits-all approach.

I was also interested that the high school teachers in the workshop were much more tolerant of the issues facing primary school teachers than vice-versa.  This was highlighted when we read through the written feedback forms where a few of the comments from primary teachers (yes - easy to work out who they were!) were quite judgemental of secondary schools. This is of concern to me because I work with Years 1-13 in our Manaiakalani cluster and know that to achieve a learning pathway that benefits all our students we need to be able to put ourselves in someone else's shoes from time to time.  

Fortunately most people took away our 'learning intention':

This workshop will NOT teach you how to set up a blog, but it will step you through the many reasons for using Blogging in your class/school/cluster.  You will hear about involving your school, parent and wider community. You will hear about things that work, things that are tricky-but-can-be-done and things that don’t work for us. You will hear many tips from the presenters about how to organise and manage both the set-up phase and the daily integration in the classroom. You will have ample opportunity to ask questions, like, “How come my lovely young Bloggers never get to do it once they get to college?”

PS: I should also mention that another highlight in 2011 was presenting a series of workshops with my son-in-law this year!  I was chuffed that Joel (who works in IT) was prepared to share a platform with his mother-in-law at a non-education event.


PPS: I had a number of opportunities to present with my husband again during 2011 which is always fun.


I am not sure which of the three groups produced the most heated debate during the 'co-construction' stage!

Blogger improves Comment Management

The recent update from Blogger to comment management will make life much easier for teachers managing class blogs and for any of us managing personal blogs. At this point in writing the Manaiakalani schools have 240 blogs posting student content and we have had very little problem with inappropriate comments on any of these blogs. But we have had a real issue over the last 6 months with spammers. And when they have hit a blog they have defaced 15 posts at once, which has been very tedious for teachers to remove.

We have very reluctantly responded by turning comment moderation on (for posts older than 14 days) and activated the capcha / word verification tool. We do not like doing this because between them these actions create real barriers to our students and whanau - and anyone following this project will know that one of our major goals is developing student voice and authentic audience. Removing barriers to interaction with our students' online learning is important to us.

So it was with real pleasure we saw this notice on Google Support:

"To make it easier for you to manage your comments, we’ve created a new Comments tab for you to access them. Here, you can manage published comments, comments that have been flagged as spam and comments awaiting moderation if you have turned on Comment Moderation..."

They have made a lot of useful changes at once:

• Being able to see all your comments in an editable list - just as we do with posts and labels.
• For our researcher, having a tally of how many comments have been made on a blog at a glance is useful
• Being able to select some comments as spam and 'train' Blogger to recognise similar ones in the future as spam - just as we do with GMail. I have already had success with this in the past week.
• Being able to remove spam comments from one checklist without having to track them down on each individual post

Coming to an end with our Blogs

This is not breaking news that Blogging is about to come to an end! Just that our academic year is coming to an end in New Zealand and as we farewell our classes for the Summer and prepare for new students in 2010, some teachers are beginning to ask, "What do we do with our Blogs?" This tells us that Blogging has become a mainstream activity in many schools now.

The question has two main underlying strands: these Blogs now contain an extensive record of student learning so we want the content preserved for the students; they also represent a lot of hard work on the part of the teachers who don't want to lose all the connections and hyperlinks that have evolved.

So we have tried to put together some helpful tips for our teachers about what to do at the end of the year. They come under headings like:

• if the teacher is leaving the school
• if the teacher is switching rooms or levels
• if the teacher is starting from scratch
• if the teacher is inheriting and 'old' blog
• etc

You are welcome to check out and use our Google Site we have created. If you have further suggestions for it, please add them to the comment here.
NB: as we use Blogger, the resource is all based around Blogger.


We can't help you if your own school has different protocols! eg We have heard of a school that requires teachers to close down all blogs and start fresh at the begining of the year; we have heard of schools directing teachers to hand their blog to another teacher etc
Well worth checking out the expectations at the beginning of the year before you start blogging!

Managing all those Blog feeds

One of the key indicators we are researching through our Manaiakalani Cluster projects is the impact of authentic audience on student motivation and engagement, and ultimately on their learning oucomes. This means that they are increasingly publishing their work in online spaces such as blogs. As our students move more and more into working in online spaces the task of tracking their changes and just keeping up with it all can become daunting, particularly for those in school management roles (and secondary school teachers) who are overseeing more then one class of students. At the moment there are close to 100 blog feeds alone from our cluster students, from Year 1 - 13.

I have been working with principals and teachers to introduce them to RSS and try to find a method that suits their eLearning style to aggregate their RSS feeds. We have explored all the usuals; Netvibes, Google Reader, iGoogle, browser based, Apple Mail (would love to know if Outlook and Entourage have simple RSS like Mail does), etc and the most commonly used appears to be adding a feed gadget to the sidebar of their own class blog, as I have done on this blog. But this doesn't allow for the sheer volume of blogs they want to follow.

I have come to accept that the sort of person who is reading this blog has no problem with the concept of RSS, but not everyone is willing to either set up an aggregator OR go searching for the feeds. Most willingly accept responsibility for a feed from the work they monitor from their own students as part of the job, but the rest of it feels too hard or too geeky. So I am trying another solution.

I have tried adding individual feeds to our cluster website using Grazr, and that worked well while we only had 10 or 20 accounts feeding in. As the numbers grew it has become a 'hunt the needle in the haystack' to try and find them.

In the holidays I saw isaac_d send a tweet from Twitterfeed and I checked it out to see if it might be a one stop solution for Manaiakalani. I created a new Twitter account, clusternz , then signed up to Twitterfeed and added all the RSS feeds from the cluster blogs one by one - very tedious, as even on our KAREN connection it doesn't load fast! Now every time one of the cluster blogs publishes a new post clusternz automatically sends out a tweet.

However, I didn't actually create it to Twitter from myself, as I can't imagine many people wanting to follow an account that only tweets blog updates! I really wanted the RSS feed that Twitter generates on the side bar. http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/55514340.rss

So now I have another option for creating widgets schools can put on their web pages, like this one, or individuals can add to their blog side bars (an example in the sidebar of this blog), or the RSS feed works in Mail, iGoogle etc. I have had feed back from two people this week who say it already feels much better having all the kids' blogs consolidated into one feed and not swamping all the other feeds they follow.

The only problem with this is for teachers in schools who block twitter, but maybe if this is an effective system for the principals to use, they may unblock it ;)

And now, I am waiting to hear feedback from you all that there is a MUCH simpler solution that I haven't thought about yet.....