Links to Other Key Pages
Using the New Teacher Site Button
FirstClass is a very comprehensive and complex platform and there are often many ways to do a particular thing; each way more or less advisable based on a variety of issues such as the local server configuration, the level of technical expertise of the administrator and users, etc. and other variables. Often when writing help, there is a temptation to cover every possible way of doing something - so much so that it can actually create confusion, not reduce it. In these help documents, when there are several ways to accomplish something, we will try to limit our instruction to only one method.
When you want to give a teacher a website, you do so with the New Teacher Site button that is on the toolbar in the Root Site Conference of your website - if there is no such button, your school website conference has not been made a member of the RWD Root Sites CG as it should have been. This button should ONLY be used by RWDe Site Administrators.
The following image shows the button in question.
Before you begin, make sure to have the following information for any and all users that you wish to give websites to:
1) A plan for what the site will be called - eg. firstinitial_lastname, Ms_lastname (or Mr_lastname) etc.. DON'T Use spaces!
2) Each user's FirstClass login ID (their username in FirstClass)*
3) Each user's Full Name EXACTLY as it appears in FirstClass (when they send email or appear in the Who's Online listing)
4) The name of the Root Site Container that will contain the user's website (EXACTLY as it appears in the WWW folder in FirstClass)*
* if you are not a FirstClass Subadministrator you may need to get this information from the FirstClass Administrator
Clicking this button does the following:
A) Opens a form that will collect data from you about:
1) what you wish to name the teacher's website conference - this is what will appear in the browser address bar as part of the URL
2) the teachers FirstClass login ID is (UserID)
3) the teacher's full name is as it appears in the User Information Form in FirstClass
4) the name of the Root Site Container that is the site in which you wish to create the teacher's site - this is the actual name of the conference as it exists in the WWW folder
B) Once the data is filled in, RWD Opens a picker from which you can select the type of teacher's site you wish to deploy (RWD ships with one example site that you can modify to your own needs or you can create as many new ones as you wish)
C) When you have selected a template site from the picker, RWD creates a copy of the template site and puts it in the Teachers folder of the Root Site Container you entered in Step 4) of A) above, and names it what you entered in step 1) of A) above
D) RWD subscribes the teacher to the newly created Site Container and puts an alias of the it on the teacher's FirstClass desktop
E) The teacher is added to the RWD Builders group (a user group that they must belong to to have the appropriate permissions and resources in order to user RWD)
Notes:
You always create the teacher site in the root site container that it belongs in (you can move that teacher's conference around afterwards if you wish). The automation process will create the teacher's website conference in the Teachers folder that is located (and must be located) in the Root Site Container.
If you are deploying a group of teachers, you may wish to have your FirstClass administrator output a list of the teacher's User IDs and Full Names first; it is critical that the information is correctly entered!
Once a site has been deployed, you should modify the listing in the Home Page of the Teacher's folder with a link to the new site so that web users can access it easily.
| 
Help Site Home Page
