Overview
This article summarizes the setup process of your Foundry site. Think of it as an outline for a full Foundry tutorial. Each section below contains a summary of each setup step, with links to more in-depth articles. Most articles contain video instruction as well.
If you are a new customer, you may be working with a coach who will help refine your setup journey based on your organization's individual needs.
We know that sometimes during school staff turnover, not all the knowledge gets passed from the outgoing to the incoming Foundry admin. These steps can be very helpful to refresh your working understanding of the Foundry setup process.
Once your site is delivered to you, the most basic setup tasks are detailed below:
Contents
- Login
- Users, Roles, and Groups
- Learning Targets
- Scales
- Learning Plans
- Forms
- Miscellaneous
- What's Next?
Login
When you complete your Foundry subscription, you will receive a URL (your Foundry website name) and a login credential. Once you login, follow these guidelines to get your site set up before you can start creating learning experiences.
Users, Roles, and Groups
Your first task is to add Users and assign them roles. Then, you will create groups and assign members to your groups. Group association is how Advisors can assign, view, and evaluate student work and how Parents and Coaches see their students' work and performance. The links below are to individual Knowledge Base articles for these related tasks.
Learning Targets
Next, Foundry will need to know what your students are expected to learn.
Learning Targets are the standards by which student work is evaluated - the content and skills your students will master. They fall into broad areas, or Subjects (like Science), smaller Subject Groups (like Biology), and finally, individual Targets. Your site will come pre-loaded with several sets of both Content and Skills targets, but you can adapt these and/or develop your own.
Scales
After you have Learning Targets, Foundry will need to know how you will evaluate them.
Scales are the sets of marks you will use to evaluate work at the Target or Learning Experience (project) level. If you have ever assigned a rubric that includes terms like "Approaching, Meeting, Exceeding", or assigned letter grades like "A, B, C...", you will be familiar with what is contained within scales in Foundry.
- Manage Scales (note: this feature is located in the Site Settings section of your Foundry site)
Learning Plans
Now that you've determined users and groups, your total set of learning requirements, and the scales you will use to evaluate work, students need to know which targets they will be expected to complete.
As students complete work, they are progressing toward one or more overall goals. Foundry calls these overall goals Learning Plans. Learning Plans are powerful tools for personalizing learning.
Technically, Learning Plans are filters - they determine which targets must be met, to what degree, and how many times. Learning Plans can describe an entire set of requirements, like "Graduation," or a limited set, like "Grade 7" or "Capstone Requirements."
Learning Plans cannot be pre-loaded by Foundry - they must be created from scratch by your design team with Admin credentials.
Learning Plans determine how the Performance Page displays evaluation data and how transcripts and other reports are produced. The articles linked below contain a general introduction as well as instructions for creating, assigning, and managing Learning Plans.
- Learning Plans: An Introduction
- Create a Learning Plan Template
- Learning Plans: A Conceptual Framework
Forms
Students work in Foundry by completing Learning Experiences. These experiences are built with Forms.
Forms are tools for creating Learning Experiences and their associated components, like Journals, Learning Logs, and Evidence. They are a means for delivering expectations, instructions, requirements, and due dates.
Your Foundry site comes with a set of pre-loaded forms for managing common experiences of all scales, such as lesson plans, seminars, workshops, independent projects, capstones, internships, or courses.
Foundry Admin users can edit these forms and create new ones. The articles linked below detail how to create, edit, and assign forms to users.
- Forms: Introduction
- Create a New Form
- Customize Your Forms
- Assign Forms to Users
- Export or Import Forms
- Pre-selected Targets
Miscellaneous Admin Info
Other settings are required, like Terms - meaning starting and ending dates for reporting (ex: "Semester 1, 2020-2021") - time zones, and other administrative settings are managed by the Admin account(s) as well.
What's Next?
Once you have completed these setup steps, you are ready to start creating learning experiences. Proceed to either of these sections of the Knowledge Base to learn more!
Learning Experiences (learn to create, assign, and evaluate experiences)
Performance Page (learn how evaluation data is displayed in Foundry)
Labels: setup, getting started,
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