Adam Bilsky
Updated :
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Overview
This article walks the parent user through the various tabs in Foundry that show student work and performance data.
Contents
My Family
When logged in to Foundry, Parents will see the following home screen, with "My Family" as the tab displayed:
The table shows every student in your family, as well as the date or time that student last logged into Foundry.
Clicking the name of that student will open their 'portal', which shows the primary views that student sees when logged into Foundry.
Current Work
The first blue tab above (from left) shows the student's Current Work. You may think of these items as assignments, projects, or even courses. They could be any of these - in Foundry, they are all referred to as 'learning experiences.' Each learning experience has a specific title, description, goals, activities, and learning targets attached.
A learning experience might be created by your student's advisor or by your student. It may be an experience they are working on independently or alongside other students. Each student and advisor working on a common experience is a member of that experience.
Filters
Above the table, you can filter by the experience name by typing in the text box, or you can select the experiences your student is working on with a particular advisor - if your student has more than one.
Icons
Below the filters, at the top of the table, each column header contains an icon. Clicking the icon will sort the table by the number of items in the column.
The below image labels these icons, including those that appear on the Experiences page as well. Note: In the above graphic, the arrow icon to the right of the eyeball (not pictured below) is the date on which the student last logged into Foundry.
Interacting With the Cell Data:
Clicking on any cell containing data will open a pop-up, or "modal", listing the items and allowing the parent to view each item and comments on them.
Data in the Experience cells show all experiences of which your student is a member, sorted by their current status.
Data in the Tasks cells shows all the tasks in their most recent state: still 'to do,' 'due soon,' or 'late.'
Data in the Logs cells shows all learning logs sorted by particular experiences.
Data in the Journals cells shows all the journals submitted as part of a particular experience.
Data in the Evidence cells shows evidence of learning uploaded to a particular experience - these might be document files (like .doc, .xls, etc), which will download to your desktop when clicked. Or, they may be image files (.jpg, .tiff, .png, etc) or video links (ex: youtube, vimeo), which will open in a Foundry viewer.
Communication in Foundry
Parents also have the ability to send their student or teacher (Foundry calls teachers 'Advisors') a message, or leave comments in their students' work. To send a message to your student's Advisor, click the Quick Actions menu and select 'Send Message'.
In the window ('modal') that opens next, you'll see many potential recipients.
Click 'Remove All' and then type the name of the Advisor you want to message. You can also use the group/role menu to select Advisors, then remove all but the one(s) you wish to contact:
Note that you do have the option to associate the message with a particular learning experience, but this is not required.
Be sure to include the Subject line and your message, then click 'Send Message.'
You will see any replies to your message in the black info bar at the top of your Foundry screen - the envelope icon will open your Foundry mailbox.
Experiences Page
Your view of this page and others in Foundry is essentially the same as your student's. What shows here are all of your student's learning experiences, with various filters you can use to show just the work you'd like to see.
How it works
- Status Filter and Time Filter
- Sortable Table Headings
- Cell Data
- Experience
- Tasks
- Logs and Journals
- Evidence
Status Filter and Time Filter
|
The Status Filter at left lets you show only experiences of a certain status by clicking a button.If you click the "Completed" button as pictured here, you will see a table with 9 completed projects and all the associated work: journals, logs, evidence, etc. The number of projects you see on the button depends on the Time Filter. "All of Time" (as pictured) will show you every experience you have finished, started, are working on, etc. Click the button to see other options. Select another preset or your own custom setting (by inputting dates). If you select a shorter time filter, for example, "last month", you will see the numbers on each button change, and the time filter will show you a table from a smaller pool of experiences. |
Sortable Table Headings
Along the top of the table, below the Experience title text filter at left and the "Create an Experience" button at right, each column header contains an icon button. Clicking the icon will sort the table by the type of item in the column. The "Experience" button will sort alphabetically by name. The "Due Date" button will sort by calendar date. The "Experience Actions" column is not sortable. All the others will sort largest to smallest or vice versa, by number.
Cell Data
Click the number, text, date, or the action arrow within any cell to interact with the data.
Experience (Name)
This opens the experience "workflow", which contains the plan and the work your student has submitted. if the project has been evaluated and/or completed, the evaluation data and performance summary are here too.
Tasks
This opens a task 'modal,' which shows all the tasks in their most recent state, even if they are late. You can view each task type right in the window. As your student marks tasks 'complete', their teacher can verify their completion, which will remove them from this view.
Logs and Journals
Like Tasks, clicking the cell opens a modal showing all the logs your student has completed as part of a particular experience.
You can click an entry to expand and view the content of the journal, and add and review comments as well.
Performance Page
Purpose
In general, the purpose of the Performance page is to show you how much your student has done, how much is left, and how well they are doing - like any grade book, report card, etc.
But Foundry was created to help schools where students and teachers focus on project-based learning, competency-based learning, and other learning models where 'grading' a project doesn't necessarily help students or parents see in detail what you learned.
You will see experiences listed on the Performance Page, but mainly, you see learning targets (standards, competencies, habits, etc.).
Performance Page Overview
Targets and Credits Pages: What You See
Targets and Credits Pages: Using the Filters
Switching between Content and Skills Targets
Switching between Learning Plans
What does Subjects/Target Groups/Targets do?
What does Done / Done+ / To Do do?
Targets and Credits Pages: What You See
Targets and Credits Views
| Note: If your student's school does not issue standard credits in learning experiences, you will not see that tab here. Similarly, if your school does not use the Foundry 'Assessments' feature, you will not see that tab. |
The default view of the Performance page begins with Targets: the learning targets - known in some schools as standards or competencies - your school uses to measure skill growth. The Targets and Credits views have the same layout and function, so they are described together here.
There are several ways to use these pages, but the overall purpose is to show you how much of your learning plan your student has completed, which experiences contained the targets and credits, and how much remains to complete.
You can view both content and skills targets, and you can change how specifically you are looking at your student's performance - from the broad subject down to the narrow target. There are three large visual sections of the Targets and Credits views, and several filters that help you see exactly what you want to see. The visuals are the Performance Level graph, the Progress pie chart, and the Progress bar graph.
Performance Level graph
The "Performance Level Graph" quickly summarizes all the scale marks your student has earned on all individual learning targets by the mark earned. Many schools use labels like "Approaching," "Meeting," "Exceeding," etc for content and skills targets. Whatever scale marks your school uses for the selected targets will appear here. The graph shows how many of each mark earned overall. The Trends page (click to skip to this section) shows this data in more detail.
Progress Pie Chart
On the right side of the page is a pie chart showing overall progress toward completing whichever learning plan is selected. Notice how more of the chart is complete when you are viewing a shorter plan (ex: 9th grade), and less is complete when viewing a longer plan (ex: Graduation). All the work done is there - it just represents different amounts of the whole in different plans.
The chart above and the progress bars below are color-coded:
Green: targets or credits your student has completed;
Orange: targets* in progress - meaning active experiences with those targets assigned to them;
Grey: required targets not yet attached to an active learning experience;
Red (outside the bars to the left of the chart): targets your student attempted but did not yet meet;
Blue (outside the bars to the right of the chart): targets completed beyond what is required by the selected learning plan.
| *Note: Targets are earned as soon as an advisor evaluates them, even if an experience is still technically "active." But credits appear when the advisor marks the experience "completed," so they will not show as "in progress." |
Targets and Credits Pages: Using the Filters
Content/Skills Toggle and Learning Plan Selector
Just above the Performance Level graph are two filters. The first is a pair of radio buttons that switch between showing Content targets and Skills targets. When you switch between them, the choices in the learning plan selector also switch between available Content or Skills learning plans.
Below those is a dropdown menu that allows you to switch between showing one of several learning plans or to show everything done without looking at a particular learning plan (this is currently called Autoplan, and you can read about it here).
If you are not sure what this means, ask your advisor, or read about how learning plans work. To use the more traditional school model as an analogy, switching between plans is like seeing what you have to do to finish 7th grade compared to what you have to do to finish all of middle school.
All active plans are shown in the dropdown, plus a choice called 'User Default Plan.' The Default Plan is set by the school admin team. This is what shows on the Performance page whenever you first open Foundry. It's also the plan Foundry uses to create reports and transcripts.
If you are looking at a different plan and then choose 'User Default Plan' from the dropdown, Foundry switches back to whichever plan is the default and shows that plan in the selector. This is helpful in case you forget which plan is set as default.
Subject Selector
Just above the Progress Chart (shown directly below) is a dropdown menu that allows you to narrow the view of targets - both in the pie chart and in the progress bars - to a single subject or subject group.
Subject / Target Groups / Targets
- The Subject button (the single bar at left above) shows completion of targets/credits in each subject only, by default; click it to close up the expanded views and show only subjects again.
- The Target Groups button (double bar, middle above) expands that view to see the Target Groups and targets/credits completed in each:
- The Targets button (three bars, at right above) shows completion at the deepest level - the individual Learning Targets. When you select this view, you will also see each experience in which the target was earned as well as the scale mark (ex: meeting) earned on that target and the date earned.
Notice also that you can view a summary of what's required, completed, and remaining for each subject, subject group, or target by clicking into the bar itself:
Done / Done + / To Do
To the right of the Subject / Target Groups / Targets filters are the Done / Done +/ To Do filters.
The Done button (checkbox only) shows targets you have completed: you submitted the experience containing the target and earned at least the minimum mark to 'complete' the target.
The Done + Attempted button (checkbox with '+' sign, middle) show targets completed plus targets attempted but not yet met.
The To Do button (empty checkbox, right) shows all targets left for your student to complete. Out of those, the orange bars are targets in progress - meaning there are active experiences with those targets assigned to them. The grey bars are required but not yet attached to an active learning experience:
Trends View
If you remember the Performance Level graph on the Targets page, the Trends view expands on that. Like the targets view, you can view both content and skills targets, and you can change how specifically you are looking at performance - from the broad subject down to the narrow target.
However, the Trends page shows the number of marks you've earned on each target, or in each subject group or subject. So the Targets and Credits views answer the questions "How much has my student done? How much is left?" But the Trends view answers the question, "How well are they doing?"
(The below image is from an Advisor's view, but functions the same way.)
Whatever scale your school uses for evaluating targets is shown at the top of the chart. The chart above shows scale marks from "Not Yet" to "Exceeding." The highest scale value is always furthest to the right. Each time you earn a "Meeting" on a learning target, it is counted in the "Meeting" column in this graph. The darker the color (green in the images here), the more times you have earned that mark.
The yellow star on the chart indicates the most recent mark earned.
Subject / Target Groups / Targets on the Trends view
Like the Targets and Credits views, the default view shows your scale marks by Subject first (the single blue bar in the image above). You can click to open each subject and show all the target groups, or click
to open every subject group to see individual targets. The video below demonstrates what you see.
Notice that when you click into a cell in the Subject row, a pop-up shows you all the experiences that earned the mark you clicked; the same is true if you click into the target group or individual target. The popup shows the definition of the scale mark as well.
Notice also that the Trends view does not use the buttons, but you can use that popup to see which experiences earned you each mark, and you can click to open the original plan.
Zoom
Some school sites have a "zoom" feature enabled that allows you to break down the view by periods of time - from as short as a week to the whole year. This lets you move period-by-period to see how you did during each time window.
For example, if you choose "4 weeks", the chart will begin with the first 4 weeks of the current school term. Each time you click the direction arrow (right or left), you will move forward (or backward) to the next (or previous) 4 weeks, and you will see any marks earned during that time.
Comments View
Currently, this view shows you the comments your advisor makes when evaluating a learning experience.
Assessments View
This view will show links to assessments you have completed, if your school uses them. "Assessments" in this context means Foundry-based assessments - they are multiple choice questionnaires you can complete in Foundry.
All completed assessments will be linked here:
You can open them to view the questions and answers:
Suggested Reading
| Note: Articles linked here under "Suggested Reading" are chosen by Foundry Support team members for their relevance and are updated as needed. The articles listed here may differ from those on the right side of the page, where the Knowledge Base AI lists "Related Articles." |
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