You may have noticed that we use a lot of Google products: Google login, Hangouts chat, Google Groups, Google Drive cloud storage of audio files, Chrome browser (recommended), etc. It is a ubiquitous platform that offers a lot of flexibility and is very low-cost for nonprofits. We understand that others have a preference for other browsers or email clients for whatever reason, but using Google makes it much easier for us to develop and maintain our production systems. Almost everyone has a Google account these days and you can create one or easily tie a different email account to a Google account as well. 

We use Google login for the Training Site, EasyBooks, and the Literature Portal. However, we see some common issues with login in the Literature Portal that we'd like to cover today. Here are the troubleshooting steps we recommend if you're not seeing what you expect in the portal, i.e., missing PDF Download button or Google Group, or nothing in the My Projects tab when you have assigned projects:

1. Be sure you're logging in at top right with the Google account we added to the Literature community;
    
2. Try logging out and back in; 
    
3. Try using an incognito window to login and see if that helps (in Chrome PC Ctrl-Shift-N or Mac Cmd-Shift-N); if that does help, try logging out by left-clicking the profile image picture at google.com; select Sign Out and then sign in just the account you want to use;
    
4. If third-party cookies are blocked in your browser, you may be able to log in and download the PDF, but the Google Group will fail to display:
   To fix this, you need to allow third-party cookies from Google Groups:
   In Chrome, open the More action menu (3 vertical dots) at the top right of the screen and:
   - Select Settings in the drop-down menu;
   - Scroll down and press Advanced;
   - Open the Content Settings;
   - Open the Cookies Settings;
   - Under Allow, press Add; 
   - Enter groups.google.com and click Add; and
   - Go back to the project site in the portal and refresh the screen

Have you ever fallen in love? As staff member Terrie Noland says, “So many feelings pop up when you fall in love!  You want to spend time together...you get those butterflies in your stomach.”

Bilingual Literacy and Dyslexia Interventionist Maria Luna (above, with fellow staff members at Central Elementary in Lewisville, Texas) writes to us:

I have fallen in love with Learning Ally!!  I have seen it change my students’ reading lives!  They love being able to choose their own books (with a few suggestions from me ), and they also love being able to have book discussion with their peers!  I just have so many good things to say about it!

Terrie adds, “As school is kicking off around the country, we have teachers and students that can relate to those feelings of falling in love to their experience with Learning Ally.  They don’t want to be without us, they want to spend time with us and they quite possibly get butterflies in their stomach when reading so many great...titles.”

Metrics Update for this week:

• Our readers increased (from zero last week) to 16,545!

• Pages read by school readers has climbed to 3,719,966!

Happy Reading, everyone!

*at frequency = students are reading books multiple times during the school year, with a general target of thirty times (more for lower grades, less for upper grades).  Our data shows that most of these students read for at least 20 minutes each time.