PRISM hosted by Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology

Teacher Professional Development Survey

PRISM Project, hosted by Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, is a K-12 teacher development program supported by the Lilly Endowment.  We provide digital resources and professional development opportunities in STEM-related areas.  To help us plan events, we reached out to K-12 educators to ask: if you had a professional development genie and you had an unlimited number of wishes, what would you wish for?  What kinds of incentives and formats are most appealing to you?  What kinds of barriers are preventing you to attend workshops?

The Grid course format is now available for all teachers to use in their courses. The Grid course format allows you to create a grid of icons (one for each topic) with short titles. Clicking on an icon will load that particular course topic. You can change an existing course to the Grid format by visiting your course and clicking 'Edit settings' in the course administration block. Scroll down, expand the 'Course format' section, and change 'Format' to Grid. You will see the page refresh to display a number of options for the Grid format.

Scroll down and click 'Save and display' to save your changes.

The PRISM Team would like to welcome all of our users back for the 2022-2023 school year. For those of you with existing courses on PRISM, here are some helpful tips to get started for the new year:

• You can re-use your existing courses. The first step to cleaning them is to perform a Reset. Look for the 'Reset' link in your course administration block. On that page, you will see several options that allow you to clear the grade book, groups, chat history, quiz data, assignment data, and more. Be sure to click the 'Expand all' link to see all of the options. Note: Do not Unenroll your users using the Reset feature. The student administration block in your course will be used to perform this function. Please reset your course(s) before unenrolling or deleting any student accounts. The Reset process may take some time, so do not close your web browser or navigate to another web page until you see a message indicating that it is complete.
  
  
• Clear your student roster using the student administration block. You can delete all students by clicking the 'Advanced' button in the student administration block. Now click the 'Delete' button. You will see a list of your students. You can either check the ones you want removed or remove all of them by clicking 'Select All'. Don't worry if you accidentally delete a student. You can recover the deleted student by clicking the 'Recover' button in the student administration block. Notes: Be sure to perform the 'Reset' options in your course before deleting students. Also, if you have a 'Master Student Roster' course for your school or district, please contact us before performing any enrollment changes. Also, if your students have email addresses but cannot receive incoming email from an external source, do not add them to student accounts.
  
  
• Update the course start date for your course. Look for the 'Edit settings' link in your course administration block. On that page, find the setting for 'Course start date' and update it for the new school year. Updating this date will properly date your course's weekly sections.
  
  
• Import your new student rosters. You can import your student rosters using the CSV Import feature in the student administration block. Please see our tutorial for help with using this feature. If you are enrolling more than 50 students in a course, please contact us. Note: Email addresses for student accounts on PRISM are OPTIONAL. Please do not add fake email addresses for student accounts.
  
  
• Remember that you have full control over your student accounts. Teachers on PRISM have full control over student accounts using the student administration block. This means that if a student has forgotten their password, you can reset it using the student administration block. Note: Please do not have students use the 'Lost password? link on the PRISM home page to reset their passwords. That reset option is only for teacher accounts.
  
  
• Contact the PRISM Team to remove old courses. Courses on PRISM are subject to removal after a year of inactivity. If you have several old courses that you no longer need, contact us and we will remove them.
  
  
• Visit our tutorial section. We offer many tutorials that cover how to use all of the Moodle resources and activities.
  
  
• Update your web browsers. For the best experience, the PRISM Team recommends the latest version of Chrome, Firefox, or Microsoft Edge. For iPad users, we recommend using Safari. For Mac users, we recommend the latest version of Chrome, Firefox, Edge, or Safari.
  
  
• Explore new features. PRISM is integrated with Moodle 3.11.8 and you can explore the new features here.
  
  The Boost theme is available to use in your courses. To switch, visit your course Administration block and click 'Edit settings'. Under the Appearance branch, change 'Force theme' from 'Do not force' to 'Boost'. Now scroll down and click 'Save and display'.
  
  The Collapsed Topics course format is available, allowing you to use a very versatile course format that expands and minimizes individual course sections.