Manage a peer mentoring program Minimum version: FirstClass 8.3 Audience: Teachers Experience: FirstClass applications used:             Workspaces            Instant messaging/chat room            Documents Summary Want an easy way to manage your school's peer mentoring program?   •       Use a FirstClass workspace for projects and discussions. •       Create documents to outline processes. •       Use the workspace calendar to manage and track events and meetings. •       Use a chat room for online meetings. Example Ann Jones is a grade 12 teacher at Avalon Academy. As the coordinator of the peer mentoring program, she is responsible for overseeing the student mentors' questions and progress. To help these senior students understand the objectives and techniques for peer mentoring, she creates a workspace called Peer Mentoring Program in her Workspaces area. She chose Standard Workspace when prompted to chose a template, so most of the containers she needs were added automatically, including: •       Our Bookmarks •       Our Documents (where she adds a Peer mentoring guidelines document) •       File Storage •       Discussion Conference •       Our Calendar •       Our Contact Database If Ann doesn't require any of these containers, she can simply remove them. However, one container she wants but can't create herself is a chat room. She asks the FirstClass administrator to create a chat room called Our Chat Room so she can hold online meetings (she does not have permissions to create chat rooms). To add members to the workspace, Ann simply clicks Workspace Members and enters the names of the peer mentors. Adding their names to the list of members automatically adds the Peer Mentoring Program workspace to each member's Workspaces area with Contributor permissions. The peer mentors use the Discussion Conference area as a forum to ask and answer questions. Ann sometimes holds online meetings in Our Chat Room. On the Attachments tab, she can provide files in the chat room for the mentors to download if necessary. When there is a program event, Ann adds the event to Our Calendar and posts a message to Discussion Conference. Ann can view the message history to make sure that all of the student mentors have read the message.