Report for Subject Catalog
We’ve just enabled a new report in QuickSchools that allows you to see all current subjects for the active semester:
Existing Summary Reports take into account whether a student is enrolled into the subject. In this report, all subjects will be displayed regardless of whether students are enrolled.
Subjects will be sorted by their Grade Level. NOTE: If you find that the grade levels are not sorted the way you want then, be sure to Configure your Grade Levels from the Students Listing:
Read more…Reset Fee Tracking
With the new school year starting soon, you may have Fee Tracking balances carried forward from the previous year. And for some schools, you may want to reset the Fee Tracking balances for all your students/parents. To do this in QuickSchools, it’s simply a matter of exporting the existing balances for each student/family, and then re-importing the balance as a new transaction. When crafting the Excel file for import, you’ll need to set a date and description for each transaction.
Here is an article that details the steps for resetting the Fee Tracking balances in your QuickSchools account:
For further assistance, please feel free to contact our support staff via email or chat.
New Release: Sprint E14
Here’s a list of the latest improvements in QuickSchools that was released yesterday:
- Google Classroom Integration Framework Improvements
- Axiom Integration App supports SFTP
- Mobile App Framework Improvement
- Additional API Support for Gradebook
- API Support for Navigation Tree
- API Support for Attendance
- Miscellaneous Bug Fixes / Improvements
- Lesson Plan settings to enable “Lesson Plans” tab
- Copy Lesson plans respects non-school days
- Bug loaning books under “Books” module in Library module
- New admissions fields now included in confirmation email during invite process
- Orange Default Columns are now accessible in Gradebook Formulas
We’ll be posting more about the upcoming Mobile App for Teachers, as well as our new Google Classroom Integration feature in the coming weeks.
New Release: Sprint E13
Here’s a list of the latest improvements in QuickSchools:
- Mobile App Framework Improvement
- Support to add/edit and delete Gradebook columns
- Master Scheduler Bug Fixes / Improvements
- Fix New departments loading in real-time
- Fix for Step 4, Sections no longer scheduled on Breaks during “Load”
- Fix for Course Constraints
- Clean-Up Distribute Courses from E12
- Miscellaneous Bug Fixes / Improvements
- New “Date of Birth” field in Admissions module (see below)
- Report Creator fix to filter by Application Status (for Admissions module)
- Bug when searching for student names with apostrophe
- Default Gender is now “N/A”
- Warn against changes to reports in Report Creator linked to Emails (see below)
- Bug sending emails to deleted teachers
- Bug fixes to upcoming Advanced Discipline App
- Upcoming Interventions module now supports attachments
New Date of Birth field in Admissions
By default, the Inquiry module within the Admissions feature only displays an “Age” field. However, this field gets stale for inquiries that persist longer than a year. And so we’ve introduced a new Date of Birth field which will auto-calculate the age for you.
To turn it on, go to “Settings” > “Turn Features On / Off” and configure the Admissions module:
Once enabled, you’ll see the new “Student Birth Date” field, and the “Student Age” field will be greyed out (and auto-calculated):
Read more…Onboarding with an Expert
Most of our customers start on QuickSchools on their own with a little help from support from time to time.
But onboarding into a new school management software can be quite intimidating if not at least a little confusing at times. Even the most experienced school admins might find themselves frustrated if the new product do not have the same menus or options that they are used to in previous systems.
I just want to start taking attendance!! Where are my classes? How come my students are not showing up??
For schools which are on the small side and fairly new, starting on QuickSchools could not be any easier. You can add students, teachers and subjects on the fly and using the ready templates available, you’re firing on all cylinders on Minute 3 of your journey. 😉
However, if you are a school with a few hundred students and more and have established many core processes to manage your day-to-day operations, things might need a little bit more organization in order for you to experience QuickSchools more smoothly. We recognize there is a need for a more structured approach to the onboarding process and we want to help!
We have since established a highly collaborative process to onboarding for schools who need it. We work with you to discuss your objectives so that we can prioritize the areas that should come first, second and so on.
We will use a common checklist that contains all the documentation and the timeline that starts from kick off through training and going live. What is great about this approach is the clarity that it brings you and to the team at QuickSchools right from the start. Any questions are dealt with at the beginning and in a very timely fashion so that we are both always 2 steps ahead during the implementation phase.
The line items that we review look a little bit like this:
| THE BIG CHECKLIST!! |
| School logo |
| Add Teachers/Staff Will the school need to separate teachers and staff as a category? |
| Configure Settings A lot goes on here once you start exploring options. |
| Enable Features Always exciting to see the features come to life! |
| Configure Access Never granular enough! 😉 |
| Add Students/Parents Will you be using student id numbers, naming convention, access? The list goes on… |
| Add Subjects Have more than one section in a grade? We support that! |
| Add Enrollment (subject enrollment) And here’s where it all comes together. |
| Additional Setup/Customizations |
| Report Cards So many to choose from and of course, we customize to you! |
| Transcripts Ditto for transcripts. |
| Scheduling Easy straightforward scheduling for elementary right through complex master scheduling can be implemented in QuickSchools! |
| Advanced Config. More configuration. This one is usually for the most complex of schools. We do have many obscure capabilities that we deliberately hide from the stock account as we think that will just confuse the bulk of users most unnecessarily. |
| Other (See Notes) |
| Historical Data/Additonal Imports This is probably the most costly part of onboarding whereby we assign an engineer to work exclusively on your data sheets and importing those in. |
| Attendance How do you like it? Daily? By period or subject? Any other rules. This is when we find out. |
| Gradebook The centerpiece in many SIS is the gradebook. Ours have plenty to offer from grading scales edits through fancy formula customizations. |
| Fee Tracking Another area that could and maybe should be a standalone software on its own! |
| Others Yes, we have a place for the catch-all others. 🙂 |
| Training |
| Session 1 – Admin We recommend working with a team of 3-5 people who can then help all other users use QuickSchools more effectively. |
| Session 2 – Teachers Here’s when we do a direct training for the rest of the team. |
| Project Management |
| Frequent, regular touch base We work with the person in charge at the school to track the progress of how things are going on a weekly basis. Progress, issues are highlighted at these meetings. |
In closing, if you think your school will require a more programmatic approach as you onboard with QuickSchools, let us know and we can craft a plan out for you. Prices start at a super affordable $2,000 for the base case.
Support for Alternate Bell Schedules
The QuickSchools Master Scheduler app now supports rotating schedules via the Alternate Bell Schedule function. This can be used for rotating schedules, A/B day schedules, test days, etc.
The alternate bell schedule is used to tell the system when certain periods are offered. You can move periods around, update the times, uncheck the boxes to remove the period, etc.
In the example below there are two bell schedules one for “A Day” and one for “B Day”:
Once the schedule is copied over you can show a daily schedule or show a schedule based on the bell schedule:
As with any organization, employees (including teachers) come and go. When a teacher resigns (and is deactivated from your QuickSchools account), the teacher record is retained and remains linked to all subjects that the teacher taught. This is obviously helpful for historical records. So just because a teacher resigns, we still keep track of the courses and grades linked to that teacher.
But what happens if a teacher resigns during an active term?
Typically, subjects assigned to resigned teachers would be re-assigned to an active teacher. But depending on circumstances, school administrators may not update the subjects in QuickSchools in real time. So here we’ve built a new report that identifies active subjects linked to resigned teachers. This new report called the “Active Subjects/Lessons with Resigned Teachers” is available under “Summary Reports”:
Active Subjects/Lessons with Resigned Teachers Report
This report ONLY lists active courses linked to resigned teachers. However, there is a filter to determine whether the course is “Active” or “Orphaned”. An “Active” course is essentially a course that has been successfully re-linked to an active teacher. While an “Orphaned” course is only linked to a resigned teacher, and needs to be re-linked to an active teacher.
Read more…
