Monthly Archives: May 2021

Rocky View Schools (RVS) has announced that Greg Rankin will become Director of the RVS Community Learning Center (CLC) for the 2021/22 school year.

With campuses in Cochrane, Airdrie and Chestermere. CLC is an alternative school that offers students in Grades 9-12 a flexible program to meet their learning needs. The school offers outreach and home education programs including Building Futures, The Farm, and the Mechanics Training Center.

RVS Superintendent Greg Luterbach says Rankin’s experience and skills will set the stage for success in his new role.

“Greg’s innovative spirit, strong leadership background and history with alternative RVS programs make him well positioned to take the lead of RVS CLC,” said Luterbach. “I know he will excel in his new role and I wish him every success.”

Rankin first joined Rocky View Schools in 2010 and has served as Principal of Meadowbrook School in Airdrie since 2018.

During his time with RVS Rankin worked as a teacher at George McDougall High School, where he later became assistant principal. He also served as Deputy Principal at Springbank Community High School and helped establish the first of two Building Futures programs in 2013.

RVS Board Chair Fiona Gilbert sent her congratulations in a written statement.

“On behalf of the Board of Directors, I extend our congratulations to Greg,” says Gilbert. “We appreciate his leadership and look forward to seeing the positive impact he will have in these school communities.

Learning tools

Community Learning Platform Adds Deeper LMS Integration

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 05/27/21

Piazza, an education technology company developing a community learning platform, updated its app to give campus administrators more control over course creation and course registrations through the school’s management system. ‘learning. Key enhancements include the integration of Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) 1.3, the latest version, of IMS Global Learning Consortium, and Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) single sign-on (SSO).

The program serves as a question-and-answer platform for a course that allows students to ask questions and answers by name or anonymously, take surveys, and get feedback from their instructors. The software uses a wiki style format which supports code, mathematical notation, videos, images, and other file types. Professors who use Piazza have reported that this eliminates email clutter and requires more student participation.

The upgrade enables connection management through LMSs including Blackboard, Canvas, D2L Brightspace, Moodle and Sakai, as well as course registrations. Depending on the company, the LMS administrator will be able to:

• Provision and manage more easily course creation and course registrations in Piazza via the LMS;
• Enable single sign-on with the university’s identity provider;
• Automatically synchronize lists between the LMS and Piazza; and
• Integrate Piazza’s gradebook functionality with the LMS, to transfer student participation statistics.

“As our university customers continue to simplify processes and navigate new learning models, we are excited to bring this protocol update which will allow university administrators to manage access to Piazza directly through their LMS. “, Said Pooja Sankar, founder and CEO of Piazza, in a press release.

The update is available for current institutional clients.