(Bookmark This Blog Post!)

We certainly hope your summer has been all that you’ve imagined. Fourth of July is right around the corner! Woo-hoo! As previously discussed, the TORSH team has been hard at work updating our current platform to bring you the best user experience possible. While we understand that change can be a great thing, it can also be difficult to transition to something new, so we’ve included 4 things that will ease your transition to our redesigned platform.

Let’s take a look!

1. Quick Tips – Available Now!

Have questions about the redesign? Check out some FAQs about Coaching Corner & our New Features Here. We are doing what we can to eliminate some of the stress that comes along new updates. Throughout the course of this rollout we will provide you with helpful documents and videos to assist with the transition. Wondering how you can preserve your current Workflow? Watch these videos that illustrate our most common workflows – how they work now, and how they will work in the redesigned platform.

1. Collaborating on a Group of Artifacts – Old | New

2. Giving Summative Feedback on a Group of Artifacts – Old | New

3. Performing an Observation – Old | New

2. Webinars – Coming in August/September

In an effort to become more hands-on with you all, we will be hosting an informative Webinar Series in the near future. This series of Webinars will dive into the platform on a much deeper level and give you the ins and outs to some of our most common used functions! Take a look at our upcoming schedule. 

TORSH Talent HS Redesign 101: What’s Changed? In this webinar we’ll take a look into the new TORSH Talent HS platform and lay out the differences in what you may be used to versus the current version.

Take a Deep Dive into Coaching Corner Imagine GREAT becoming better? Well that’s essentially what has taken place and we are eager to inform you all about it in the second installment of our webinar series!

Observe & Reflect: Transforming the Feedback Process We close out our informative webinar series by giving you an in-depth look at how we’ve attempted to make receiving feedback much easier.

3. A Newly Redesigned Help Center

Coming in August, our Help Center will contain all new PDF’s, FAQs, & Help Videos pertaining to the TORSH Talent HS platform. Our goal is to get you back to what you love doing; Educating. By providing these documents we are trying to shorten the time needed to grasp all of the platform’s new features.

4. Pre-Recorded Training Videos

We will now provide access to tutorials of the TORSH Talent HS platform 24/7. Role-specific videos will allow Teachers, Coaches, & Admins to learn specific tasks at their own pace and feature-specific videos will take an in-depth look at different aspects of the TORSH Talent HS platform.

We are excited about the new improvements to the TORSH Talent HS platform, and we look forward to helping you get the most out of what TORSH Talent HS can offer!

— TORSH Talent HS Team 

The post Don’t Get Lost! Your Guide to Navigating Changes to Talent HS. appeared first on Torsh.

(Bookmark This Blog Post!)

We certainly hope your summer has been all that you’ve imagined. Fourth of July is right around the corner! Woo-hoo! As previously discussed, the TORSH team has been hard at work updating our current platform to bring you the best user experience possible. While we understand that change can be a great thing, it can also be difficult to transition to something new, so we’ve included 4 things that will ease your transition to our redesigned platform.

Let’s take a look!

1. Quick Tips – Available Now!

Have questions about the redesign? Check out some FAQs about Coaching Corner & our New Features Here. We are doing what we can to eliminate some of the stress that comes along new updates. Throughout the course of this rollout we will provide you with helpful documents and videos to assist with the transition. Wondering how you can preserve your current Workflow? Watch these videos that illustrate our most common workflows – how they work now, and how they will work in the redesigned platform.

1. Collaborating on a Group of Artifacts – Old | New

2. Giving Summative Feedback on a Group of Artifacts – Old | New

3. Performing an Observation – Old | New

2. Webinars – Coming in August/September

In an effort to become more hands-on with you all, we will be hosting an informative Webinar Series in the near future. This series of Webinars will dive into the platform on a much deeper level and give you the ins and outs to some of our most common used functions! Take a look at our upcoming schedule. 

TORSH Talent Redesign 101: What’s Changed? In this webinar we’ll take a look into the new TORSH Talent platform and lay out the differences in what you may be used to versus the current version.

Take a Deep Dive into Coaching Corner Imagine GREAT becoming better? Well that’s essentially what has taken place and we are eager to inform you all about it in the second installment of our webinar series!

Observe & Reflect: Transforming the Feedback Process We close out our informative webinar series by giving you an in-depth look at how we’ve attempted to make receiving feedback much easier.

3. A Newly Redesigned Help Center

Coming in August, our Help Center will contain all new PDF’s, FAQs, & Help Videos pertaining to the TORSH Talent platform. Our goal is to get you back to what you love doing; Educating. By providing these documents we are trying to shorten the time needed to grasp all of the platform’s new features.

4. Pre-Recorded Training Videos

We will now provide access to tutorials of the TORSH Talent platform 24/7. Role-specific videos will allow Teachers, Coaches, & Admins to learn specific tasks at their own pace and feature-specific videos will take an in-depth look at different aspects of the TORSH Talent platform.

We are excited about the new improvements to the TORSH Talent platform, and we look forward to helping you get the most out of what TORSH Talent can offer!

— TORSH Talent Team 

The post Don’t Get Lost! Your Guide to Navigating Changes to Talent. appeared first on Torsh.

New Features and Enhancements coming to TORSH Talent!

The July release of TORSH Talent includes new features and enhancements that take a fresh approach to our coaching and collaboration features, including Coaching Corner. These enhancements are the result of reflecting on our previous work, reevaluating what users need to accomplish and how, gathering feedback from existing users, and analyzing data to better understand user behavior.

Let’s take a look at the updates!

The Dashboard

Your new dashboard now showcases recent activity and metrics that are important to jumpstarting common workflows. For example, the most common user activity is uploading and sharing videos. In our latest version, when you log in to the platform your uploaded files are waiting for you and ready to share. We know feedback is the heart of collaboration and can be accessed easily from your home screen.

Admins and coaches will benefit from engagement metrics and can see standout performers.  To make your workflow more efficient, you can use Pending Observations to jump into a classroom observation. While all users can set and view goals, we highlight these for teachers on their homepage. Overall, the homepage puts common workflows at your fingertips as you keep track of progress in your professional development journey.

Document Observations

We are introducing the heavily requested Document Observation feature. Now you can provide both structured and unstructured feedback on lesson plans, student work, agendas and more. We have modeled this feature after our successful video and in-person observation models, giving you all of the same capabilities. In addition to performing an observation, you will be able to comment on the document, at the same time.

Projects

Projects is a completely new feature that was created after learning how some users go about their work. What we realized was that some folks need a shared workspace to organize videos and files with another person, and have ongoing discussions. Projects can also last any length of time and is a unique departure from the summative feedback of Observations.

We’ve added tasks and to-do’s so members know exactly what to contribute. The enthusiasm for this feature has been quite a surprise, so we encourage you to use it and provide us with additional feedback.

Recent Interactions

Recent Interactions is some techno-wizardry created by our engineers. Now when you go to Coaching Corner, you will see a list of folks that you coach and collaborate with most often. There are key activities we’ve taken into consideration, such as sharing videos and files, providing feedback, goal setting, and performing observations.

You can also curate the list as well by simply adding folks to it. That said, lists aren’t very useful unless you can take some sort of action. We’ve added the ability to quickly perform routine tasks on each member such as sharing videos and files, setting goals, starting observations and creating projects. You now have a centralized place to start your work.

Community Forums

Sometimes optimizing an experience can be a tiny little tweak, and we’d like to thank our customers who use community forums in their organization, for bringing it to our attention. The coming release of forums will function a bit more like popular social platforms you use every day.

We are introducing in-line commenting to help conversations feel a bit more congruent and much less disjointed. It’s now easier to contribute and come back to the conversation because the context is easier to understand. In addition, you can now tag and search threads, so discovering topics is more convenient.

The entire team at TORSH is excited and energized for our new release and we know you will be too!

The post Ready! Set! Grow! appeared first on Torsh.

 In Brief

When you next open one of your uploaded documents, you’ll notice that it looks a bit different. Below the “Share” button, there are buttons to “Toggle Highlighting” and to switch annotation mode on and off. You will still see the options to edit the document title, description, tags, and collections; as well as the options to rotate the view, and to change the viewing zoom level. To get started with document annotating, just click the highlighter.

 The Learning Curve

In general, annotating your document is as simple as 1, 2, 3. First, highlight the text you want to annotate. Next, click the comment icon to open a comment box. Then type your remarks and click the green “Comment” button to save. After sharing your document with your colleague, PLC, or coach, they can easily collaborate with you by annotating the document, and using the “Reply” button to add their insights to your comments. It’s really that simple!

 Some Housekeeping Items

Document annotation is available to all TALENT systems. As you get comfortable using this new feature, you’ll notice the pop-ups alerting you to the “rules” for using the annotation tools. You can use the “Got it, don’t show me again” option to close the alert for good. Just remember that the highlighter is only enabled when the document is viewed at 100%, and is rotated to its uploaded orientation. With that said, you’re ready to start the conversation.

We’re excited about making it simpler to give feedback on your colleagues’ lesson plans, curriculum materials and more, directly in TALENT. We hope that you’ll take the opportunity to connect with us about how this new tool, and all of the TALENT tools are making an impact in your professional development. If you have any questions or feedback about your TALENT features, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us!

The post Collaborating Made Easy: Introducing Document Annotation appeared first on Torsh.

Happy September! We hope the school year is off to a good start! Here at Torsh we have some exciting new updates! Read more about them below! Feature Updates Document Annotation: Drum roll please….This past week we released document annotation in TALENT!! You are now able to highlight text, comment, and reply to comments in any document uploaded to TALENT. Give feedback on your colleagues’ lesson plans, curriculum materials and more directly in TALENT. Check it out by navigating to any of your uploaded documents today! Document annotation is available to all TALENT systems. Don’t see it? Or having difficulties using it? Reach out to your account manager or support@torsh.co! We’ve had many new and exciting features come out this past year including a revamped Exemplar library, Forums, Coaching Corner, and Insights! Let us know if you have any questions about how you can start implementing these features at your organization today! Blog Posts We are excited to announce that Denice Mitchell has recently joined Torsh as our new Manager of Business Development. Learn more about Denice by reading her recent blog post. ThinkLaw – an organization that helps educators teach critical thinking skills – uses Torsh TALENT to impact teachers and students across eleven states. Read more about their innovative work on our new Client Spotlight blog post. Courtney discusses the Disconnect between Education and Entrepreneurship in his latest Forbes blog post. Top Articles to Read – Our hearts go out to the victims of Hurricane Harvey! The Atlantic talks about the long term impact Hurricane Harvey will have on school aged children – How Schoolchildren Will Cope With Hurricane Harvey – In the New York Times, we learn more about The Biggest Misconception About Today’s College Students. They’re not partying and enjoying college life at an Ivy League but rather the majority are living at home and working to make college more affordable. – Wanted: drone teachers! “Thousands of drone-related jobs are projected to be added to the nation’s economy…” – The Value of Bringing Drones to the Classroom Courtney’s Quote of the Day “[In the U.S], we are consistently graduating kids from high school who don’t have the necessary skills to meet the demands of a 21st century economy…As entrepreneurs, this should set off alarm bells. Building a business requires a certain mix of people with the right set of skills. If you can’t find these people, then an already exhausting climb will start feeling more like scaling Everest itself. ” – Torsh CEO Courtney Williams Courtney speaks out about education to the entrepreneurship community. Read more in his recent Forbes blog post, The Disconnect Between Education and Entrepreneurship.

The post September Monthly Update appeared first on Torsh.

Just yesterday, we launched a new and improved version of our Exemplar Library that was a direct result of client feedback. Building Excellent Schools, a national nonprofit that strives to improve academic outcomes for underserved students, approached us with suggestions to make the Exemplar Library a more valuable and useful tool. The development team got to work bringing these ideas to fruition, and the new version went live yesterday. 

So what’s different?

The Exemplar Library is now able to accept not just videos, but almost any type of file. Examples include PDFs, Excel files, Word documents, PowerPoint decks, etc. Regardless of format, teachers’ best practices, how to’s, lesson plans, presentations, curriculum materials and other artifacts can be posted directly into the Exemplar Library.

Of course, we still expect the Exemplar Library to contain many videos, and we want these videos to be as useful as possible. Therefore comments, rubric tags, supporting documents, and more can be transferred over with the video when publishing in the Exemplar Library. This eliminates the need to re-upload files, copy over comments, and otherwise repeat the hard work you’ve already done.

We renamed “Channels,” which will now be called “Exemplar Collections.” And these collections are nestable, meaning subfolders can be created easily to better organize, and specify, the materials they contain.

Each week, every member of the Torsh team — not just the tech team but marketing, sales, account services, and finance — sets aside his or her work to participate in a development call. Among other topics, we review client requests, and discuss the pros and cons of any changes we hope to implement. That’s how the request from Building Excellent Schools was brought to our attention. They use the Exemplar Library regularly and recommended enhancements that the entire TALENT community would benefit from.

We want TALENT to be the best and most valuable tool in your PD arsenal. If you have suggestions for how TALENT can improve, reach out to your account manager or send an email to support@torsh.co.

The post Torsh Development Team Launches Enhanced Exemplar Library on TALENT appeared first on Torsh.

That being said, this week we added a new “Forums” feature to TALENT. You can find it under the “Community” tab when you log in. We added Forums in response to customers asking for a better way to communicate within the system. Forums enables you to connect and engage with other TALENT users, whether they are colleagues you know personally, or people beyond your school or personal network.

So how can you take advantage of this new feature? Perhaps you have a question about how other people are using various tools in TALENT, or are looking for creative ways to use TALENT more effectively. Or perhaps you are working on a lesson plan and would like to hear how other teachers have approached the same material. Or, you have a classroom challenge and you’d love some suggestions on how to solve it. If you are a professor, you could use Forums to post assignments for your students. The uses are truly endless.

Forums is all about creating professional learning communities to communicate about topics of interest in education. The goal is to empower educators, and provide them with a highly-effective communication tool that does not require them to leave TALENT. When you click on the “Community” tab, you’ll see that we’ve created three Forums to get you started. They are Say Hello, General Assembly (for pretty much anything) and Brainstorm (to generate ideas for Forum topics). You can use these or click on “My Forums” to start your own discussion. You can make these threads private (to specific colleagues) or public (to your TALENT community).

Have an idea for how we can make TALENT even better? We always welcome your ideas, insights and suggestions. The best way to send that feedback along is by reaching out to your Torsh account manager, or by sending an email to support@torsh.co.

The post Torsh Development Team Launches New “Forums” Feature on TALENT appeared first on Torsh.

1. Upload Videos, Audio Files, PDFs, Word Documents and Images

Ever wanted to upload a document and share it with colleagues without tying it to a specific video? Now you can! You can upload a variety of files to TALENT including word documents, PDFs, audio files, and images. After all, a picture says a thousand words, and an audio track says 110–150 wpm. 

2. Find Files Easily With Improved Search

Searching for your uploads and your colleagues’ uploads should be easy. The new Videos & Files page increases the speed and precision of your searches. You can still do a simple search of all files or by matching tags. Now, you can also narrow down your results by searching within a collection or by file type and then, filtering the list by username or title. For example, if I want to find a video I know Krystal shared with me, I can search all of the files shared with me, or I can search just the videos shared with me and then filter by “Krystal.”

3. Change The Layout To Suit Your Needs

There are now three views on your Videos & Files page. The default view looks most like what you have seen before. However, you also have the option to select a tile view without the video stats to view more files at once. You can also select a compact table view. This can be really helpful for doing bulk actions. This allows you to view up to 100 records per page. You can easily select the videos you need and add them or remove them from a collection.

4.  Drag and Drop To Upload

As the old saying goes, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”  Now, instead of selecting the upload button at the top of TALENT and selecting the folder to find the file you need, you can simply drag and drop it from your computer. You can even upload and organize in one fell swoop: if you are currently viewing a collection, drag and drop your files to instantly upload them to that collection. 

5. Nest Collections Within Collections

Ever wanted to create a sub-collection? Now you can! For example, you can create a collection called “2016-2017 School Year” and then add three additional collections within the school year for math, language arts and science. Simply click “Manage Collections” from the gear icon drop-down menu and then click on “New Subcollection”.

We hope you are as excited about these new features as we are! You can always reach out to support@torsh.co if you need any help navigating a new feature. Also, feel free to send us your recommendations and we will do our best to listen to your feedback and add it to our roadmap. We would love to hear from you!

The post You Asked, We Listened! The Videos Page Got A Revamp appeared first on Torsh.

1. Take a look at your dashboard to see an overview of your system data

Click the “Insights” button on your navigation bar to see your community’s activity and performance over the last month. Perusing your Insights dashboard will notify you of your team’s movement on their goals, observations, and study of exemplars from your library.

2. Choose a report to review system-wide information

Compile your system’s data based on measures of frequency and performance over time. Performance reports are based on indicators from goals and rubrics, formal and informal observations, and coaching sessions. Activity reports track the frequency of collaboration within your community, including video sharing, coaching observations, completed coaching session, and more!

3. Drill into your data using filters

On each reporting screen, you can specify which populations to explore using the reporting filters. Use the calendar filter to change the reporting period. There are filters to specify the users’ roles, groups, grade level, and teaching subjects for the report. Choose which rubric and observation type to analyze for the most defined data. Then click the green “Run Report” button to apply the filters and populate your report.

4. Analyze your observation data using rubric/framework reports

Review the data for each rubric/framework available in your system. Filter the groups, subjects, and reporting period to compare results on each observed dimension and criteria. Use the View Population button to see a person-by-person breakdown of goals, sessions, and observations tied to the rubric.

5. Review your teams’ progress on their goals

Use the Goal Mastery and Domains and Dimension for Goals reports to see the progress towards mastery, and the linkage of goals to rubric items across your system. Hover over each colored section to see the exact number of users who are progressing toward, or have reached, mastery of their Primary and Secondary goals. Use the Export button to create and download a .csv file with a population breakdown of your data.

6. Use reporting so that it aligns with your success measures

You may find that you want to use reporting to monitor how often people are sharing and commenting on videos, how many formal observations are being conducted by each coach, or where the most people are challenged in reaching a goal. You may also find that there are reports that you’d like to see in your Insights that haven’t been implemented yet. Insights is designed to enhance your data-driven professional development and classroom observation strategies, so reach out to us to share your feedback on this new feature.

We’re enthusiastic about optimizing and adding more to the reporting suite, and are happy to hear from you!

The post Introducing TORSH Talent Insights appeared first on Torsh.

BC: Last year, Torsh TALENT became more than just a video platform. How do you plan to expand the use case for TALENT in the next year?

CW: We’ll continue to expand on what we did in 2016. Our goal is to become the premier go-to platform for districts, schools and other organizations that provide coaching, resources and ongoing professional development to educators. We launched Coaching Corner last year, which was a huge step forward. But there are still a number of new features we hope to develop. We also want to improve a number of our existing features and modules.

BC: You mentioned new features. What’s on the horizon?

CW: We will continue to broaden our feature set beyond video observation and feedback. Specifically, we will significantly improve our community and collaboration features. We plan to launch new features that will allow our customers to find, create, and host a wide variety of content that is necessary to support ongoing coaching and development. We will also launch a comprehensive reporting tool that includes a data dashboard and a host of standard and custom reports. These will be optimized for the organization that wants to track educator growth, manage access to content and use data to continually improve the delivery of professional development services.

BC: That’s exciting! As of now, what do you think sets TALENT apart from other professional development platforms?

CW: There are many things that set TALENT apart from our competitors, but I’d have to say one of our key strengths is the robustness and flexibility of our platform. TALENT is built in such a way that a wide range of customers can use it to satisfy their distinct needs. We serve K-12, higher education, early education and service organizations. This encompasses a wide range of clients from district schools, charter schools, teacher preparation programs, Head Start programs, state-based professional development, alternative certifications, and teacher support organizations. We provide tools and services that allow this diverse set of clients to do the important work of training and developing educators. 

BC: It sounds like TALENT has covered a lot of ground in education. Do you think TALENT has applications outside of education as well?

CW: Most certainly, although at this point in time we are 100% focused on building a coaching platform that truly supports and satisfies the needs of our education clients. I got into this game because I wanted to make an impact in education. Down the road, I see applications in the medical field for doctor and nurse training, in law, sales, psychology and a number of other industries. 

BC: That sounds great. Thanks, Courtney! I know there’s a lot of work left to be done but thanks for finding the time to sit down and share your vision for Torsh TALENT. It’s always exciting to hear what’s on the roadmap and learn more about the direction of the company. 

The post Conversations With Courtney: What’s On The Roadmap? appeared first on Torsh.