Welcome! This forum has a treasure trove of great info – Scouters helping Scouters! Just a heads up, though - all content, information, and opinions shared on this forum are those of the author, not the BSA.
Ah, district JTE and not unit JTE! That makes a bit more sense. Units are not required to record ANY of that data, nor were we given direction to provide it, nor a means of providing it (at least in my district and council). I wonder how districts have been gathering the data in the past and not just “guessing”? They aren’t getting it from our troop besides the dates of the campouts. They are not getting any of the resolution that those fields show. How would they know any of this other than from their particular camps. That accounts for 3 out of 12 months of camping.
If this district JTE information is desired, the log entry should be structured such that it is gathered. If not, the JTE criteria should be changed or eliminated. It is that simple.
It appears that the service reporting is the same interface as https://servicehours.scouting.org/ used to report unit service hours for JTE, and it is a bit cumbersome. I imagine that its strength is that so many details can be reported and this no longer needs to be reported to our service coordinator to report.
Categories are not intuitive. I had to go look up what a “Messenger of Peace” project is. Perhaps adding a “Good Turn” category would be good?
The project title does not appear on the report, but the “location” does, so if you want useful information to appear on the report, you basically need to put the title in the “location” field. I ran a report in Scoutbook (I use Feature Assistant) and the newly entered service project did not appear on the report generated by Scoutbook, but the newly entered project does appear on the report I generated in IA Activities interface.
I just took a look at what exactly migrated from Scoutbook/JTE, and boy it’s a mess. Almost all of our activities that were logged in the national systems for last year were lumped into the last event date and categories/locatations. The only unique detail to tell which was which was the description that I used in the detail. NONE of our Scoutbook events made it to the IA (3.0?), and I’m dreading having to go clean up the data on camping/hiking events for every Scout in our troop. {/rant}
Highly predictable. Instead of waiting for everything to be ready, they did it way to early. Wouldn’t it have made sense to wait until they had all the interface ready to go. At least you get to look at the mess, even though I am a Troop Admin and the person that has been entering all the data, since I am not Key 3 I won’t be able to view it. In what world does it make sense to not even give view priv to non-Key 3. I guess the SM will have to take some time out from planning virtual campouts, advancement, talking to all the parents, dealing with scouts, etc. to deal with data entry. Like I said above, time to go back to just using the handbooks to track activities. Maybe even time to dust off the subscription to TroopMaster.
As an FYI, the Scouting app was just updated (at least for iOS). It allows parents to perform entries in the new activity logs. Still needs leader approval in IA2.0, but allows another method for individual entry.
I don’t see any past hiking/camping logs in IA2 that were entered into Scoutbook. Has this data been lost?
Shawn O’Hearn - Scoutmaster Troop 106 Fulshear TX
Scoutbook is a user-friendly platform in my opinion. We tell our boys that their books are, of course, their official record, but we use Scoutbook for their backup. If IA2 is for Key 3 only (as originally touted) you are making more work for the key 3 when you had given the scouts and families the ability to enter their log info themselves. Plus the new format in IA2 does not give the total night, hours, etc, which is very convenient when doing a scoutmaster conference or trying to figure out camping nights for rank, etc.
I found that you have to go under the Scout’s profile on the Roster, THEN you can see the Hiking/Camping, etc. No mass entry for records as far as I can tell.
I found our scout logs without any issues. Reading the help guide was indeed a benefit. I was also able to create an activity and by again following the guide prep the selection of attendees.
I can also add that my son logged in and found all of his entries no issues there.
I believe he was speaking of past events. None of ours that weren’t in the JTE database transferred into IA. I’m really hesitant to re-create the events because of how unstable the data transfer was.
@BryanRoti - all of our scouts prior logs were able to be found if they entered any. I dont follow exactly what you are talking about though. Are you talking about entries that had been in scoutbook or JTE ? I do not think JTE history was a part of this migration but others can better inform.
Maybe I’m wrong, and I am willing to admit it, but at first (and second) glance, the events from Scoutbook that were previously created, but NOT entered in to the JTE database (e.g. events from this year) didn’t appear to migrate. Events that DID migrate appear ( like I mentioned in my first post) all with all the same start dates, category of service, and other data. I know this due to the descriptions I made when entering the data for JTE. Again, if I’m wrong, I apologize; but I think this was rolled out WAY too fast.
@BryanRoti - that was not part of the plan. Additionally, events entered in scoutbook were never linked to logs nor were they ever linked to the JTE reporting portal. The JTE portal has always been a manual effort.
