iFish – a Teacher’s Guide
- Entering data about their personality and interests
- ‘Fishing’ for potential partners on the basis of their personalities and interests
- Becoming ‘paired’ with a student in the partner school, for further work.
Background Information
The process of using the iFish system will take your students through three main stages, data entry, fishing and pairing. Within these, a student may be working, or finished. There are five states that each user will pass through, each with a different screen.
- Created. Student is entering data about their personality and interests.
- Dataentered. Student has finished entering data, and is waiting to go to the fishing stage
- Fishing. Student is choosing their partner preferences
- Fished. Student has chosen three possible partners in order of preference, and is waiting to be paired.
- Paired. Student has been assigned a partner.
Steps 1 and 3 require action from the student, Steps 2 and 4 require action from the administrator (ie, you)
Preliminary Setup
In order for your students to start using the system, you must create a user login for each student. Each user is created as a member of a school, and in order for the ‘fishing’ and ‘pairing’ steps to be completed, the school must be paired with a partner school which also has a number of students. Ideally, the number of students in each school should be about the same. If they are not the same, some groups of three (or more) will be created.
To do this preliminary setup, log in as the administrator.
Create Schools
On the “Schools” page (the first screen available after login), enter an ID tag (alphanumeric, unique) and a school name, and click “Add” for each school to be created.
Create Users and Assign Partner School
Click on the name of your school, to take you to its school admin page. To assign it a partner school, select a school name from the dropdown, and click the “Add” button next to it.
To create each user, enter a unique login id, password and student name (name doesn’t have to be unique) and click the “Add” button next to it.
Step 1 – Students
Each student should log in with their unique ID and Password. They will then see the Data Entry screen:
Each student should select a fish picture as their avatar, use the sliders to enter information about their personalities, fill in the “Tell us a little more” boxes, and select a pre-recorded audio file, with more information about themselves.
They should then select “Next” They will then see a screen which shows them their fish, with its associated data. Students may go back and edit data at this stage, by pressing the “Edit” button. They may do this as many times as they like, until the administrator moves them to the “Fishing” stage.
Step 2 – Admin
In order to move to the next stage of the process, you should log in as administrator, and select your school from the schools list. Choose all the students who you wish to move on to the next stage, by checking the box next to each of their names then clicking “Change Status” to “fishing” at the bottom of the screen.
Normally, you would change the status of all students who are at the ‘dataentered’ stage, but you may choose to leave some out and move them to the fishing stage later, if you wish to give them extra time to make changes to their information. However, students in the partner school will only be able to ‘fish’ for partners who are themselves at the fishing stage. So any student who is moved on after their classmates will be disadvantaged, and less likely to be chosen in the pairing process. You may not move students to the fishing stage if they haven’t yet entered all their data.
After you have moved your selected students to the fishing stage, click on the name of your partner school and do the same with their students.
Step 3 – Students
When students log in after being placed in the ‘fishing’ status, they will see the fishing screen. When they move the sliders on the left, to select characteristics they are interested in (eg “likes reading”) the fish will change position to bring fish to the top if they match the student’s criteria.
Students can click on a fish to give them more information about that user, and to select it as a favorite.
Once three favorites have been chosen, the student may save their preferences. Preferences are ranked from first preference (top) to third (bottom). Students may change preference ranking by pressing the up and down arrows next to their choices’ names.
After saving preferences, they may still go back to change their minds by clicking the “Edit” button.
Step 4 – Admin
Once students from both schools have chosen their preferred partners, the administrator should pair them up.
Log in as administrator, select your school (or your partner school) and select “Pairing”
Students who have saved their preferences and are allowed to be paired will be shown from each school. Select the students you wish to pair (they will all be selected by default) and click “Match”.
After this, click “School Data” to go back to the information for your school. The students who you have just paired will show their status as “paired”. To see who each student has been paired with, mouse over the word “paired”.
If there are mismatched numbers of students, some students will be allotted groups of three instead of pairs.
Step 5 – Students
Students may now log in and see their assigned partner(s). They can click on their partner’s image to see more information about them.
