A Guide to USNA Starfish for
Evening Tutors
POC: LT Jacob Foster Davis
This document will help you setup the Starfish program and
show you the basic functions you will need to connect with
Midshipmen in your role as an Evening Tutor.
The Class of 1963 Center for
Academic Excellence
Levy Center, 2nd Floor
410.293.2933
[email protected]
2/1/2013
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Contents
What is Starfish? ........................................................................................................................................... 2
Legend and Conventions Used in This Guide ................................................................................................ 2
Setup Checklist .............................................................................................................................................. 3
How to Log into Starfish................................................................................................................................ 4
The First Time you Log in .............................................................................................................................. 7
Set up your Profile ........................................................................................................................................ 8
Your Institutional Profile ........................................................................................................................... 9
Your Contact Information ..................................................................................................................... 9
The “General Overview” box .............................................................................................................. 10
The “My Biography” box ..................................................................................................................... 10
Your Appointment Preferences .............................................................................................................. 11
Basics ................................................................................................................................................... 11
Location Preferences .......................................................................................................................... 11
Calendar Managers ............................................................................................................................. 12
Email Notifications .................................................................................................................................. 14
Set up Your Appointments .......................................................................................................................... 15
Set up a recurring Evening Tutoring session ........................................................................................... 16
View Your Sessions ................................................................................................................................. 21
Managing Your Tutoring Sessions ............................................................................................................... 23
Manage Participants of a Tutoring Session............................................................................................. 23
Record Outcomes of a Session................................................................................................................ 30
Speednotes ......................................................................................................................................... 31
Things You Should Never Do....................................................................................................................... 32
How to… ...................................................................................................................................................... 33
How to Add an Appointment for a Single Participant ............................................................................ 33
How to Handle a Walk-in That Exceeds Your Session Capacity .............................................................. 36
How to get more help ................................................................................................................................. 38
Feedback on this Document ....................................................................................................................... 38
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What is Starfish?
Starfish is a web-based service used to connect with students and allow them to sign up for your
appointments. It is scheduled to replace TutorTrac.
Legend and Conventions Used in This Guide
 Means you should do this. Checking all of these blocks means you are all set up to be a tutor!
 I will try to point out important things to notice with this red circle.
 This is an optional step that may make your life easier!
 Don’t do this! Seriously. Please.
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Setup Checklist
This is all of the items you must do to set up your tutoring account and calendar. Hyperlinks on each item will take
you to the section of this document where the item is discussed in more detail.
Log In
 Open a Firefox, Chrome, or Safari web browser. Use Internet Explorer at your own risk!
 Navigate to the login page. http://www.usna.edu/AcCenter/Starfish.php
Set up Your Profile
 Access your profile page
 Verify that your USNA email address (“Institution email”) is correct. Contact LT Davis
([email protected]) if it is not.
 Enter a short description about the fact that you provide tutoring. The first sentence should say,
“I tutor _________.” This will help Midshipmen quickly find that you tutor in the subject they
want. Don’t put the times/days that you offer in this spot.
 Set your minimum appointment length to 30 minutes
 Set the Scheduling deadline to 12:00PM the day of the office hours
 Check the “Allow drop-ins after deadline has passed” box.
 Add each of the locations where you offer/hold your tutoring sessions. Make the type
“Elsewhere” and the Name = the room number and building name. Also include instructions that
give a general description of where this room is.
Set up Your Weekly Tutoring Schedule
 Navigate to the Appointments tab. Select the “DAY” sub-tab.
 Select “Add Group Session”. This will pull up a blank appointment scheduling box:
 Fill in the appointment block with the following guidelines.
 Title: “Tutoring: __________”, where __________ is the name of the course you cover,
e.g. “Spanish” or “Calculus I & II”
 When?: Weekly. Repeats on the day you have tutoring.
 What time?: According to your schedule.
 Reason: Routine Evening Tutoring
 How Many Students?: 3
 Check “Allow students to see other students who have signed up”
 Check “Support supplemental instruction”.
 Provide some instructions.
 Select the “START/END DATE” tab
 Starts: The next day that you will hold this session
 Ends: End of Term (or if you are the wiser, the day of your last session)
 Click Submit.
 Do the above for each 30 minute block of tutoring you hold each week.
Become Familiar with Managing your Tutoring Schedule/Sessions
 Navigate to your Appointments->DAY page/tab
 Click on a bold date from the monthly calendar
 Scroll to the appropriate time in the DAY view
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 While viewing the appointment, click on “Manage Participants”
How to Log into Starfish
Starfish can be accessed on or off of the yard.
Quick login Links:
On the yard only: http://intranet.usna.edu/AcCenter/Starfish.php
On or off of the yard: http://www.usna.edu/AcCenter/Starfish.php
You can also navigate to this page from the Academic Center’s Website on the left side menu (link titled,
“Starfish”):
http://intranet.usna.edu/AcCenter/
 Open a Firefox, Chrome, or Safari web browser. Use Internet Explorer at your own risk!
 Navigate to the login page.
 Bookmark the login page in your web browser
This will bring you to the login page. Use your USNA userid and password to log in.
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 It would not be wise to save your password in your browser’s password manager, as this is the
same login you use for your other USNA services.
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The First Time you Log in
The first time you log in (and in the future if you don’t set up your schedule) you will see the “Office
Hours Setup Wizard
We won’t use this wizard.
 Uncheck the “Show me the Office Hours Setup…” box so that this doesn’t bother you again.
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Set up your Profile
The first time you log in, you should set up some of your information. You may also need to visit these
pages over time to maintain your information.
To access your profile, click on your name in the top right corner of the Starfish interface:
You should then see your profile page. This page contains 3 tabs: Institutional Profile, Appointment
Preferences, and Email Notifications. The Institutional Profile tab should be active/selected.
 Access your profile page
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Your Institutional Profile
This page contains information that other people around the Yard will see about you.
Your Contact Information
Starfish has a few tools that can help you stay notified when Midshipmen make appointments with you.
The options should be self-explanatory. If you don’t to check your USNA email, you might want to add
an alternate email address and have Starfish send your appointment notifications and changes there.
There are also options for you to be notified at your cell phone. Keep in mind that information you
provide here will be visible to Midshipmen.
 Verify that your USNA email address (“Institution email”) is correct. Contact LT Davis
([email protected]) if it is not.
 Don’t put any information into your profile that you expect to be private. It won’t be.
 Verify your phone number (if you have one/care to provide)
 Customize your email preferences.
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The “General Overview” box
This section of your Institutional Profile gives Midshipmen a general idea of how you can help them.
They will see this information when they are considering signing up for your tutoring sessions.
 Enter a short description about the fact that you provide tutoring. The first sentence should say,
“I tutor __[subject(s)]_ ____.” Don’t put the times/days that you offer in this spot.
 Don’t mention the dates or times that you offer tutoring in this section. We will do this a
different way.
The “My Biography” box
This allows you to tell a bit about yourself. All users will see this information.
 Provide a short biography. Consider including your credentials as they relate to your role as a
Tutor.
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Your Appointment Preferences
This tab is important because it sets up a few bits of information that you will need later and throughout
your time as a Tutor. It will also allow us to enforce rules that we impose on Midshipmen who wish to
make appointments with you.
Basics
 Set your minimum appointment length to 30 minutes
 Set the Scheduling deadline to 12:00PM the day of the office hours
 Check the “Allow drop-ins after deadline has passed” box.
Location Preferences
This very important step will allow you to designate where you will hold your tutoring sessions. It lists all
of the locations that you have defined and will save you time in the future.
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 Add each of the locations where you offer/hold your tutoring sessions. Make the type
“Elsewhere” and the Name = the room number and building name. Also include instructions that
give a general description of where this room is.
Calendar Managers
Calendar Managers are other users that can edit your Calendar. This will either be blank or will contain
the name of one of the Academic Center staff. This allows us to manage your calendar in the case that
you can’t or have other problems.
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Email Notifications
This settings page allows you to customize when the Starfish system will send you email alerts.
 Set up a “Planning Reminder”. I recommend the “send one email reminder with all
appointments” for a daily synopsis.
 Customize your other email notification preferences
 If you made changes… click Save!
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Set up Your Appointments
Appointments are how you will connect with Midshipmen. We will set up special types of appointments
in the system, and Starfish already knows that you are a Tutor – and which courses you tutor.
 Navigate to the Appointments tab. Select the “DAY” sub-tab.
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Set up a recurring Evening Tutoring session
Your tutoring sessions will be “Group Sessions”. Starfish allows you to set up recurring session to make it
easier for you to schedule your semester.
 Select “Add Group Session”. This will pull up a blank appointment scheduling box:
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You can see here that “Where?” is already filled in for you.
 Fill in the appointment block with the following guidelines. You will create 1 recurring
appointment for every 30 minutes/week you offer tutoring!
 Title: “Tutoring: __________”, where __________ is the name of the course you cover,
e.g. “Spanish” or “Calculus I & II”
 When?: Weekly. Repeats on the day you have tutoring.
 What time?: According to your schedule. Remember to schedule in 30-minute blocks!
E.g. 8:00PM to 8:30PM.
 Reason: Routine Evening Tutoring
 How Many Students?: 3 (this is the advertised number… to deviate discuss with Dr.
Shepherd)
 Check “Allow students to see other students who have signed up”
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 Check “Support supplemental instruction”. This will make sure that the first person that
signs up determines the subject to be tutored.
 Provide some instructions. Tailor this as you see fit. Consider giving this “lost” and
“scared” Midshipman a little bit of guidance… he may have never been to Tutoring!
Here is a recommendation: Please bring questions and any material that is relevant to
your questions with you to the appointment.
 Select the “START/END DATE” tab
 Starts: The next day that you will hold this session
 Ends: End of Term (or if you are the wiser, the day of your last session)
 (A third selection box should appear) – select the current term, e.g. Spring 2013.
Filled out, your appointment should look similar to these next two images (one for each page of the
INSTRUCTIONS/START/END DATE tab):
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 Click Submit.
 Do the above for each 30 minute block of tutoring you hold each week.
When you click submit it should say “Saving…” for a second or two, then refresh your appointment page.
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View Your Sessions
You will need to be able to find each of your Tutoring appointments in order to see who is signed up, or
to add a walk-in student. You will also need this to add Outcomes and indicate that the Midshipman
attended (or missed) an appointment.
 Navigate to your Appointments->DAY page/tab
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You will see a monthly calendar on the left side. Notice that if you have appointments scheduled on a
day, that day shows as bold.
Use the small monthly calendar to click on a bold date. This date will contain an appointment.
 Click on a bold date from the monthly calendar
 Scroll to the appropriate time in the DAY view
Your appointments will appear similar to the following:
Here, we can see 4 Spanish Tutoring appointments. Each are 30 minutes long and can hold 3 spots. None
of the spots have been reserved yet.
 Explore the layout of the WEEK view by using the sub-tab near the top.
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Managing Your Tutoring Sessions
After your tutoring schedule is setup, you will need to routinely access the appointments to manage
participants and outcomes.
 Never delete a Midshipman from an appointment because he missed the appointment. Instead,
mark him absent in the outcomes. If this exceeds your appointment capacity (because a walk-in
took his spot), please follow the How to Handle a Walk-in That Exceeds Your Session Capacity
instructions.
Manage Participants of a Tutoring Session
If you have a walk-in student or if you want to see who is scheduled to come to your sessions, you will
need to use this function.
 While viewing the appointment, click on “Manage Participants”
This will bring up the appointment:
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 To add a participant (maybe because you have a walk-in)
•
•
•
•
In the Add participant box, you can start typing the last name or the alpha code (don’t
use “m”, e.g. use 151234, not m151234)
Course: will give you a valid entry when you pull it down
Click Add (you should then see the person’s name appear in the table)
Click Submit
 Never leave the “Course” field blank! We won’t be able to track why they came to tutoring!
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The above screenshot shows how typing “14” will show me all students taking the relevant course (in this
case, FS104) whose alpha code contains “14”. I could also use part of the student’s name.
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After I enter a value for “Add participant” and “Course”, I would click Add to add this person to the
session.
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I can see that BROWN, THOMAS has been added as a participant.
To remove a participant, click the gray chevron icon on top of the calendar icon. This is a pull down
menu. You can then click the “Remove” hyperlink to remove this person.
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Clicking “Remove” will remove this person from the session.
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Record Outcomes of a Session
You will do this after each Tutoring session. This will allow you to indicate if a Midshipman missed an
appointment and give credit and feedback/notes to those that did show up.
While looking at an appointment, select the OUTCOMES tab.
For each participant, you will notice an option to indicate if the student missed the session and a text
box for comments.
The Session Sharing option should default to Shared. All outcomes should be shared. If you think you
have reason to select Private, please discuss this with Dr. Shepherd.
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After filling in the data, click Submit to save. It won’t save if you don’t click Submit!
Speednotes
The Speednotes function (you can see this tab in the appointment window) is still under revision and will
be released at a later date.
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Things You Should Never Do
Either for our record-keeping or to support our policies, we ask that you never do the following in
Starfish:
 Never delete a Midshipman from an appointment because he missed the appointment. Instead,
mark him absent in the outcomes. If this exceeds your appointment capacity (because a walk-in
took his spot), please follow the How to Handle a Walk-in That Exceeds Your Session Capacity
instructions.
 Never delete an old appointment. We need this for record keeping! If you have a strange
circumstance, please contact Dr. Shepherd or LT Davis.
 Never forget to enter a Course when making an appointment with a Midshipman. Failing to do
this means that we won’t know why the Midshipman needed help!
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How to…
The basics are covered above, but there may be other abnormal but frequently occurring things you
have to do to keep your data lined up.
How to Add an Appointment for a Single Participant
Your regular tutoring appointments should be group appointments, but if for some reason you need to
add an appointment for a single person:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Go to your Calendar by clicking the Appointments tab.
Click Add Appointment
Fill out the Scheduling Tab
Go to Outcomes and fill it out
Click Submit
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How to Handle a Walk-in That Exceeds Your Session Capacity
If a Midshipman shows up to a session that is already at capacity and you decide to keep them at the
session, you will need to follow these guidelines for properly documenting this in Starfish.
Currently in Starfish, there is a bug/problem that prevents an easy and elegant solution. The following
discusses a workaround.
The idea is that we want to record that the Midshipman attended – and that is the primary objective. So
what we want you to do is to create a new one-time appointment and make that appointment be
sometime between 2400 of the night of the session at 0300 the next morning. We will know that any
appointments from tutors during this time are for this reason.
1. Follow the instructions for How to Add an Appointment for a Single Participant
2. In the Reason box when creating the appointment, select “Overflow from Routine Evening
Tutoring”.
3. Ensure the time of occurrence is from Midnight to 0300 after the would-be routine group
session.
4. Finish the instructions on how to add the single participant.
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When accounting for an overflow to your routine tutoring appointment, add a single appointment
following the instructions above.
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How to get more help
If this document doesn’t answer your questions or solve your problems, please contact:
LT Jacob Foster Davis
or the current Starfish Administrator
256 Levy Center, 2nd Floor
(office) 410.293.2933
(office) [email protected]
Dr. Rebecca Shepherd
267 Levy Center, 2nd Floor
(office) 410.293.2957
(office) [email protected]
You can always find out more information about Starfish and other Academic Center programs by
visiting our website: http://www.usna.edu/AcCenter/ and http://intranet.usna.edu/AcCenter/
Feedback on this Document
Please provide feedback to this document. Tell me what you like and don’t like. Tell me what needs to
be improved. [email protected]
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