Slate.org Webinar: End of Cycle Tasks

Here again.

Times.

Let's do it again.

All right, we're going to get started in just a minute.

Hello everybody, thank you for joining us today and for grooving. Along with our music welcome, my name is Francesca Shanker and I am on the slate. Did work side of things over here at techno lutions and we want to welcome you to our webinar today. I'll be joined by my coworker Sarah Koshen will be hopping in shortly and we also have some team members on the back end moderating the chat so if you do have questions.

Feel free to put them in the chat and someone will help you out with that. So just a couple housekeeping tips. This webinar is being recorded and will be made available for viewing.

Closed captioning is enabled. If you click on the CC button at the top right corner of the share window.

You can also make it full screen by clicking the expand button if you want to see things a little bit bigger.

If you're having any audio or video issues, you can go ahead and refresh your window, and as I said, questions would be posted in the chat, so again, we're very happy to have you here today. I can see you're joining us from all over all over the country, so that's exciting.

And just some information on what we're going to be covering today, so it's going to be a pretty quick session. We have half an hour of your time today, so for those of you who are newer to sleep, there might be a lot of information thrown at you, but we'll do our best to get you out of here on time.

So we're going to be covering a little bit of information about slate.org, what it is, why it's important, why we want you to use it.

Also talking about data sharing, why it's important what it is? How do you do it? Very important for you colleges. We're going to touch upon a little bit of a demo showing you how to configure yourslate.org application sharing settings within your database, and then we'll leave some time for questions. And we do have some questions that came in on the registration form, so we'll try to cover those as well. Time pending.

So just some information about you. We thought this was kind of fun to note. All of you are joining us from the college and university side, obviously, but here's a little breakdown of how long your institution has been using slate. It's possible you've been using it somewhere else before that, but you can see a large chunk of you. 25% are pretty new to sleep one year or less, so that's very exciting. Hopefully you're learning a lot and.

Not feeling too overwhelmed, but we're here to help you. We also have another pretty big chunk of two to three years, so getting your feet wet into sleep, we have a sliver who are 10 years or more. So you all are are definitely pros and we welcome you know all of your feedback as we move forward.

And then just some information on who's joining us today. Your different roles, the majority. As you can see, are slate captains, but we do have some other staff or other administrators. Whether that's you know IT, or admissions or what have you. So just kind of interesting to see your peers and and where you're all coming from today.

So where are we coming from? Slate.org? So for those of you who are newer to learningaboutslate.org, we have been around since 2017 and you can kind of see a little trajectory here. We introduced data sharing the following year.

In 2019 we had about 5000 schools, whereas today in 2022 we have almost 14,000 schools. High schools that we work with, so that's very exciting. We also launchedslate.org for students in 2021 and has a right now. We have about 6000 student accounts, so hopefully some of.

The schools that you work with are have some student accounts and we're always trying to obviously get that number growing.

And of course, we have things like our feedback forums and our counselor communities. So we do have things on our end where people can post questions or feedbacks. Or you know if they have ideas of things they want to see as part of slate.org, we welcome that as well.

So slinkard by the numbers I touched upon a little bit of this, but just kind of interesting for you all to see. We have, as I said, almost 14,000 high schools and 62% of those are publicsoslate.org is a free platform for high schools, community based organizations and independent counselors. But obviously the majority of our users are high schools.

It's also free for students, just as a reminder. So slate.org will always be free. It is currently free and it's a you know, we think a great tool to kind of connect all of these different parties with the colleges.

So we have about 6000 students. Slate.org is worldwide, so we do have about 2000 international users and it's kind of fun to see the countries where we have those users really everywhere.

These are some of our largest populations by state, so we have a lot of high school users in California and New York.

And then this data sharing information here this is.

Colleges and universities who are data sharing who are currently in slate. So of the schools that we work with in Slate, 50% of them are sharing their data with slate.org. Hopefully some of you are sharing your data, if not, we hope to.

Educate you more about why you should be sharing your data by the end of this call. Hopefully you'll find out some more useful information, but I'm going to actually switch it over now to my colleague Sarah, who's going to talk a little bit more about data sharing. What it is, how to do it, and then we'll actually kind of demo some pieces for you so that you can follow along if you'd like to.

So take it away, Sarah.

Everyone so glad to see you so glad to see so many from Miller names in the chat and glad to talk to you a little bit today about sleep.org and what you could be doing to share data so we're kind of considering slate.org and data sharing in the scope and in the context of what you might already be doing in terms of cycle prep. I know we're all looking at the calendar and excitedly waiting until May 1st rolls around and then we have some time to think about how to clean up.

The databases how we're best utilizing some of these sharing settings and how we are organizing ourselves within the context of our slate universe. So I'm going to quickly go through what data sharing is in terms of the slave.org configurations that you have control over, and then we will go into a short demo so that you can see what a high school counselor would see and how your configuration settings impact that.

So what is data sharing? First, we're going to talk about the importance of configuring your active periods and rounds. This is a really great conversation to have in tandem with something on one of kind of plug. Our CSMS our client success managers host a number of different resources for you to aid in cycle prep. I would say one of the more useful sessions will be a cycle prep session that is specifically going to take place on May 25th, so in just about a month.

Are they also host weekly calls? If let's say I don't know, maybe the first week in May is the only time you have to do cycle prep. They are available twice a week for anyone who might be struggling with the strategy behind the way that they're currently organizing periods or rounds. We know because we got a few questions about institutions that have multiple start dates or how best to strategize periods in rounds and they have some really helpful cycle prep advice for you. So I would strongly recommend.

Dipping into one of those sessions, we also can help you to configure materials that you collect from counselorsthroughslate.org, whether or not you're going to allow for batch material uploads, you can share application statuses with high school counselors and students through site.org. You can actually share checklist materials if you'd like to give your slate.org counselors the ability to assign an uploaded material to a checklist item, and then of course.

Decisions, so we're going to go ahead and jump in. I'm going to begin by sharing my screen and what you're going to see.

Istheslate.org student profile. Import settings at the very top. I'm also going to show you how to navigate here just in case you're unfamiliar. So in your own database when you head over to the gear wheel and I'm doing this intentionally just in case you have two screens and you might want to navigate there yourself right now, I wouldn't blame you, but if you had it over to the database and Scroll down to your configurations, you'll find theslate.org application.

Sharing settings, and that's where I'm referencing everything that we're about to touch on in terms of data sharing. So the very first option that you have for sleep.org student profile import settings is really reliant on whattheslate.org student has set in their configurations in terms of privacy, so a student that is using slate.org has the ability to let's say register for a visit with the help of their counselor. So let's say they register for a visit with your institution in the fall and they've turned.

On their privacy share settings, you could theoretically.

Head over to the source format library.

Scroll down to theslate.org student profile data.

Add it.

And then configure the source format to automatically begin importing the data from each student that registers for a visit with your institution. Super helpful if you have questions about this, we can address it in a bit, but this is a super helpful configuration to set as active. You are slate.org application sharing settings will automatically be on, so you might have noticed that when you navigated to this configuration page, however, you are not sharing any information.

With counselorsorstudentsusingslate.org, unless you are sharing an active round.

So that is as easy as it gets to begin sharing information using slate.org as a platform, you'll just have to select whatever active round you wish to share on the platform. I'll show you what it looks like in the configuration settings. Right now we're not sharing.

But should we determine that we would like to share with slate org institutions, we can do so here by also editing the shared name and perhaps what the applicant sees. Maybe you have very specific names for your rounds, but you just want to call this freshman application. You can certainly configure that to your liking. Many of our institutions also utilize this filtering function to kind of test out their slate.org sharing settings, so if you have, let's say, a feeder high school that you have a really good relationship with the counselor.

Perhaps you filter by seed code so that only one specific high school has access to the data that you're sharing, and you could maybe host a zoom call with them and make sure that everything is appearing as you would like. One of our frequently asked questions that we get is what does it look like for our counselor?

And.

We unfortunately don't have a good way to show you that without mocking up the data ourselves, because of course we couldn't give every one of our partners access to a counselor say.org page because you would be able to see students that didn't actually allow you to see their student information, so that's kind of why I'm referencing this as a potentially useful tool for you to begin sharing. So sharing an active round here will begin the data sharing process for you. You can share application statuses. These can all be configured to your liking.

I've seen some schools configure, let's say, awaiting materials with an applicant view that says something like.

Something like incomplete application and perhaps we're awaiting materials then.

So you can configure this to your liking whatever you want. Your applicants and counselors to see. You can also choose to share checklist materials you can see in our database what the material is and what the name is that the students and counselors can see on their slate.org profile. You could also allow counselors to upload in batch, however, this is a question that we got in some of the registrations to this session.

That batch upload that the counselor has access to and I'll show you in just a moment is going to allow them to upload one material to any open application that the student has.

So here I am in my sleep.org counselor profile and I'm currently on applications for a student named Jolene Jones.

Oops, let's go back to students. Sorry Jolene Jones. So right here on mysleeve.org platform for a counselor, I have the option of let's say uploading jolene's transcript and any institution that Jolene has applied to. Should they have these settings set for a batch material upload to accept a transcript?

A counselor can simply upload the material here and it will be applied to any open application that Jolene has. That also has the configuration set to accept that material, upload. The other option would be let's say the counselor clicks into the actual application checklists and Slate University is sharing checklist materials.

I, as the counselor of the high school counselor I'm able to ask Nate a material to a specific checklist item, so two different options there that you control as the university and institution. You do have a number of different options here in terms of what you're accepting for the batch material you can send to batch acquire. So that means someone manually will have to go into batch choir and assigning a specific material with an applicant record.

Or you can map it to a material and that assignation would follow the person record in their folio so it would be uploaded as like a folio material.

Last but not least, you can share decisions and so for each of these decisions you can see a number of different settings that you can configure.

Of course, this one is being shared with slate.org institutions. You could see the shared name and the decision type.

The decision status is you can kind of toggle between the two, so you can share only decisions that have been viewed by the applicant. Let's say you don't want to share with the counselor until the applicant has viewed their decision through their status portal, or you can share all decisions by any number of days after release.

And as a reminder, that is echoed down there at the bottom. Again, students will not be able to view their decision within their slate.org platform, so they won't ever see any decision. However, they will be prompted via their sleep.org page to go into your applicant status portal to view their decision, so they'll basically see they have a decision and then they will navigate to your specific portal to see exactly what that decision.

Those.

I'm going to stop sharing here for a moment and click forward so you can see the screenshots that the student would see so they would be able to view status page.

And this also brings up another frequently asked question that we got off from registrants to the session, which was if we could go a little bit more in depth in terms of what the single sign on means so you can see the single sign on configuration settings at the top. I intentionally left it for last to touch on it now, but should you decide to enable that single sign on basically what it means is that you're making it easy for the student who is a slate.org student to sign in with their slate.

They were credentials and when they click view status page on their slate.org portal, it will basically bypass the need for them to enter their credentials to your applicant status portal. So basically slate.org is acting as a single sign on to your institutions applicant status portal. It's really for the ease of the student. They don't have to navigate away, they'll be able to see in their slate.org platform that they have a decision. Click on that view status page and go directly to your application.

Applicant status portal.

Sarah, interject for a minute. It'll just take a second. I figured while we're here and we do have a little time, I'm just going to share something with you here just so that you can see what Sarah was talking about, oops.

OK, so we are on the student side of things. This is a student view coopwood. If I went to my applications this is going to show me my application tracker so these are all of the colleges I've applied to, whether they're in progress, writing materials and so on and so forth. If I click on Slate University for instance.

This view status page would enable me to get to my application status in Slate University by using my slate.org credentials. So of course this is the screen shot we were just showing. But if you kind of see better visually here this is. This is what we were just mentioning.

OK, so.

I'm I'm back. I just wanted to make sure it was big enough for everyone to see it gets smaller when we're both the very, very last thing I want to make mention of is what I plugged before, but we do have a community conversation coming up May 25th with our CSM's that focuses directly on cycle prep. We figured that sleep.org may be something that your institution hasn't begun as a project. I've made the joke before that you never know how big a project is in sleep until you start it.

And I'm here to assure you that turning on your data sharing settings in slate.org can be really monumental and useful for your office to provide some transparency to counselors as well as students. And it doesn't take very long for you to kind of sit down and strategically determine how best to share that information with your constituents. But during the cycle prep conversation, I'd be remiss if I didn't again plug that session with them, and I do that they do have recurring calls Tuesdays and Thursdays.

If you have any pressing questions.

And just as an aside, again, there's you know there's a lot of information in a short period of time, especially if you're brand new to slate, so you also have a lot of documentation at your fingertips. You can refer to the knowledge base. So on slate.org, for instance, we have demos and articles and step by steps about how to do certain things, and so if you need to refer back to that.

You can always check out the knowledge base and David just to answer your question.

David asked how many students we have on slate.org. We have just over 6000 currently.

OK, so I think we have had some questions come in through the chat. We also we do have a little bit of time until we are done so we're just going to take some of your questions now. Just give us a second to kind of go through. So last I see that you had shared a briefcase link, that's great. So again, if if any of you have tips and tricks for the newbies, feel free to put information.

Into the chat for them.

Let's see.

I did see a question that we get very frequently in our box because we do have a quite a number of institutions that are newer. I do want to address it. We frequently get emails from you, our partners, because you're getting emails from high school college counselors that are saying I submitted for an application, or I'm sorry, an account.

Translate.org it hasn't been approved. Can you help me even feel free to send them over to us, but you can also remind them if you're talking to anyone in person that the first user is approved by our office, we reaffirm their credentials and assure that they are who they say they are and they work for the institution that they're trying to access and then not administrator is responsible for approving each subsequent account.

It's like.

Sarah Linda's asking. Can you go over the student profile import settings one more time? I see that our source format is awaiting activation.

Yep, and I can show you where it is and those are going to be mapped by you directly. But let me take you through it real quick.

I'm going to hop off so that the screen is a little bigger for you all.

No.

And you should be able to see now. So just as you would be useful or any source formats you want to remap.

Into these, and it's going to show you what they're coming in as a source fields and where you want them to go. So we've done our best guess that you can also do not should you decide to some of this information could also be helpful for you to that employees of the way that your institution is leveraging this data.

Is that helpful?

Another question.

Yes, OK, so Linda said thank you for that. So this is kind of going back to the SSO. Scott is wondering.

Fortheslate.org single sign on? How does that affect the instructions we provide to students from our instance? That is, if they're already in slate.org, what about the pin we'll be sending in our application? Acknowledgement emails.

Yeah, this is a good question and we chatted about this actually today within our within our team and I would say that it's going to differ based on institution at this point. If you haven't started sharing decisions with slate.org and your students and counselors aren't really used to our comfortable going to sleep.org yet for decision releases, our recommendation is probably to keep everything copacetic for now in the future. Perhaps what you decide to do is alter that system email that is generated after an application.

Is completed and allow students to know that they can. They can access the applicant status portal with either the these credentials or by logging into theirslate.org account. For now, probably our recommendation is going to remain whenever you have been doing.

Keep doing that until you know you have your constituents that are on board with usingslate.org as their go to.

Couple other quick questions and someone asked to sleep.org work.

Across different applications, it does so a student can. It can work with a slate at the Common app coalition. It doesn't necessarily matter, it's open to all.

I'm going to pick out a question that I think is is important and it's it's the question about status type and for the decision I'm actually going to navigate back, I realized we're running low here on time, someone to try to be quick.

And I think what we're referring to here is the one second.

Oh, and your question specifically is.

Does it make it so that the decision shows on the list of applications to a university or college instead of counselors clicking on each student to see the decision?

Umm?

Each independence.

I think if I understand your question Brady, I could be wrong, but counselors do have to click on individual students to see their decisions. There's not a way for them to see everyone's decision all at once. However, counselors do have the ability to download all student data into an Excel spreadsheet, so in that case.

May be able to download, let's say all of their students applications and see the status, but if they're just doing it within the slate.org you know website they do have to click on each individual student.

And I just want to share my screen once more to show you how the user the user faces interact.

And when you are configuring your application statuses, I do want to make it clear that the status type that you select for your application status does drive the UI on slate.org. So let's say you're awaiting payment. Application status means that you're in progress. Perhaps that's the way that you want to use the lexicon. If I update it that way.

That application would show for the high school counselor.

In this section of their application tracker, so that status is basically a categorical header for where you want the application to show on the slate.org site. For counselors and students. So it it does become a important based on where you want them to see these types of statuses and where that falls on the slate dark side.

Just to I wanted to make a note we we are at time, but we're happy to kind of stay on if if more people have questions. Otherwise feel free to to go about your day but just a question that Michelle had about international agents. That's actually a good question. I'm assuming that if it was an international agent they would come in as an independent counselor because again, we are only involved in approving the first active user at a high school, but obviously we do have independent counselors.

And independent consultants, and so on and so forth. So if they're not affiliated with an actual high school, they would be joining as an independent educational consultant. So it's possible that international agents would be doing it at like that.

Great.

OK.

Let's see what would it look like if we leave status type as blank.

You can't play won't allow you, so it won't be saved as as blank. You'll have to choose one of those types for status, so you have to basically have to choose which of the application statuses you want to fill in which bucket for the application tracker.

David is saying our status types are all blank.

Oh, we'll reach out to us. We'll have you on.

Yeah, David and this goes for anyone. If you have follow up questions you can email us at infoactually.org. I'll put it in the chat. OK, a lot of people are saying there's there's a blank so.

So we will look into that.

All right, I think we.

Covered almost everything.

If there's oh, wait, one more John does a high school need a College Board seed to registerandsave.org?

No, it does not. We have a lot of international schools that do not have steam codes and what we do is we kind of manually give them the seed code.

That's just kind of the way we do it, because we want them obviously to be able to have access to sleep.org, even if they don't have a College Board seat.

All right?

Yes.

We appreciate your time. Thank you all for being here. We've retained a lot of great questions. We hope you learned a lot and that you're ready to go into cycle prep strong. And please let us know if you have any questions. Thank you guys for being here.

Thank you, have a great day.

Just can't wait.