District and building level teams put significant time, effort, and budget into finding, vetting, and procuring high-quality edtech tools. Make sure your educators know what’s available to them! Your LearnPlatform District Library is designed to be a centralized ‘source of truth’ that your classroom educators and other staff can access to quickly and easily see what’s safe, approved, and available to them–and what isn’t.
We’ve put together these best practice tips to help you get the most out of your District Library.
1. Add products to your district library either from the LearnCommunity Library or your Inventory Dashboard
The LearnCommunity Library is a comprehensive listing of edtech tools on the market. It’s a great discovery tool, but it also provides an easy way to search for tools you know are in use and quickly add them to your district library. Or, make it even easier for yourself and use your Inventory Dashboard to directly add edtech tools with usage in your district to your library with a single click. Add one product at a time or use the bulk add feature to really save time.
>>Help Center Article: How to Add Products to Your Product Library
2. Take advantage of Custom Statuses to ensure compliance
Set up custom statuses–based on your unique district approval designations–to facilitate more transparent communication with your educators, account for student data privacy, and ensure compliance with any local or state privacy laws. These statuses can be shown in your district library so educators understand what’s safe and approved at a glance.
>>Help Center Article: How to Set Custom Statuses
3. Use Tags to display edtech metadata that’s most critical for your district and educators
Creating tag groups is the first step to deeply customizing your district library. Tag groups help you organize and categorize products, and in turn can drive custom data made visible in your district library, as well as library search filters.
>>Help Center Article: How To Create Tag Groups
4. Build Product Library lists to communicate the right info to your staff
Product library lists are a great way to collect, share and update the key product and privacy information your staff needs to know. Lists inside LearnPlatform are tag-driven so you can organize, collect, share and update key product and privacy information that matters to your district. Here are a couple ways other LearnPlatform customers use lists and checklists:
- Create a list of student data elements a certain tool gathers, giving you the ability to share that information with students, teachers and families
- Configure a custom checklist for the edtech request and approval process
>>Help Center Article: How To Create Lists
5. Communicate approved edtech to parents, families, and other community stakeholders with a Public Product Library
Administrators and educators are consistently fielding questions from parents and families about the tools available to their students. Make it easy for your community members to find and understand what tools students are using in the classroom and what’s available for home use by enabling your district’s Public Product Library (PPL) and embedding it on your district website.
>>Help Center Article: Enabling and Embedding the Public Product Library (PPL)
6. Leverage the new ‘Retired’ product state to meet the specific needs of your district library
We recognize that sometimes, for many reasons, districts may continue using products that have been officially retired or are no longer supported by their parent companies. Historically, this has created some confusion and duplication in the LearnCommunity Library. With the new ‘Retired’ product state you can make sure your own district library is using the most up-to-date version of an edtech product from the LearnCommunity Library, or continue using the retired version of a product even if the product is no longer shown in the LearnCommunity Library.
>>Product Blog: Updates to Support the Usability of the LearnCommunity Library
Looking for more tips to make your LearnPlatform District Library better than ever? Check out the complete Help Center section dedicated to Product Library Management.
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