How a School District IT Team Cuts Training & Documentation Time by 70%

By
Meg Zabrowski
June 27, 2023
min read
Updated
November 26, 2024
Photo credit
Learn how the IT team at D300, an Illinois school district, trains 3,000 faculty members on tools and technology in a fraction of the time.


Introduction

D300, a public school district located in the Chicago area, spans 27 schools and 20,000 students from pre-K to 12th grade. They have a dedicated IT department responsible for helping 3,000 faculty members access and use various technologies and tools.

It's no small feat — made even more difficult by an arduous process of building training and process materials. Thanks to Scribe, they no longer waste hours taking screenshots and video screen shares with Camtasia and WeVideo, or manually creating how-to guides.

Scribe's revolutionary solution has alleviated headaches and transformed D300's workflow for the better.

The D300 teams that use Scribe

There are three core teams in D300's IT department that rely on Scribe to enhance their faculty support:

  • Student Information Specialists: This team focuses on training end users to effectively enter required information and data into the student information system to accurately report to the Illinois State Board of Education.
  • Help Desk Specialists: These specialists are responsible for providing service and support for technologies employed by staff and students — including digital curriculum applications, informational data systems and classroom/instructional technology.
  • Digital Learning Coaches: This team assists teachers in integrating technology into instructional programs. They aid in both planning and implementation.
🎓 What is Scribe?: Scribe is an AI-powered process documentation tool that builds how-to guides and training materials in seconds. With the Scribe extension or desktop app, you can generate visual documents with screenshots, text and click indicators.

Use Case 1: Internal knowledge base

Recently, D300 implemented a new knowledge base. With Scribe, they successfully incorporated comprehensive how-to guides into every page, ensuring faculty members were equipped with the knowledge to navigate their new processes.

Before Scribe, the process of building these guides was extremely time-consuming. It involved:

  • Taking screenshots.
  • Cropping.
  • Annotating.
  • Writing instructions.

This process required approximately 30 minutes per guide, sometimes even stretching to 1 or 2 hours for additional review.

With Scribe, they have significantly reduced the time investment to just 10 minutes per guide.

"Scribe is a game-changer. It eliminates the need for multiple steps, such as taking screenshots, cropping, annotating, and writing instructions, just to provide a single step for the end user to follow."
— Jahan Rodriguez, Help Desk Manager

Furthermore, Scribe's ease of use allows the D300 team to customize their how-to guides based on unique faculty needs, emphasizing district-specific processes and procedures. 

Scribe’s analytical data allows the D300 team to monitor how many views a Scribe has. This has been extremely valuable in helping the D300 team see the success of each guide. Alternatively, when a guide is not highly viewed, they can solicit user feedback as to why and implement needed updates or changes.

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Use Case 2: Keeping Documentation Up to Date

A persistent challenge that the D300 team faced was the ever-changing nature of their software. This meant that much of the effort invested in creating how-to guides became obsolete when the user interface or processes changed.

Scribe enables the team to effortlessly maintain up-to-date documentation. When a change is implemented in D300’s PowerSchool Products (their Student Information and Learning Management Systems), affecting the majority of initial steps in their Scribes, they no longer lose hours creating new documentation. The team can promptly re-capture the first step of every Scribe in just a few seconds, ensuring all documentation remains current.

"Scribe has transformed a previously daunting task into a manageable job." — Marti Whitehouse, Student Information Specialist

Recognizing the inevitability of software changes, Scribe is a seamless solution for keeping documentation relevant and accurate.

Use Case 3: Making it easy for faculty to learn

When the registrar sends out a 30+ step guide on how to enroll students, other members of their district are able to easily follow along with the ‘Guide Me’ feature.

Clicking ‘Guide Me’ takes the viewer to the website the process is on, where they can scroll through the Scribe in a side panel. This ensures nobody has to switch tabs and can easily follow the process all the way through to completion. 

Conclusion

The D300 team is able to use Scribe to better support the district faculty in enabling everyone to correctly follow processes. So far, the team has created 425 Scribes that have been viewed 4,100 times (and counting!).

Scribe has given the D300 team superpowers and allowed them to provide better support in less time.

📌 Learn more about how Scribe can help you and your team.

Ready to try Scribe?

Scribe automatically generates how-to guides and serves them to your team when they need them most. Save time, stay focused, help others.