Assignments Flow
With the release of the new Assignments module (which is an improvement over the previous Homework module), we’ve expanded the flow for handling assignments over the portals in QuickSchools. Here’s a rough summary:
Posting Assignments
Teachers can now post assignments in real-time, or schedule an assignment to be published at a specific date / time in the future. This means that teachers can plan out and configure assignments for the entire academic term, and the system will publish them automatically:
When creating an assignment, teachers can specify if the assignment requires a submission, and whether the assignment will be graded. For graded assignments, a column in the Gradebook can be created and linked automatically.
Submitting Assignments
Students can very easily view all upcoming assignments. Assignments can be filtered by subject, and sorted by the column headers:
Read more…Communicating with Students
With 2021 now in full swing, it’s important to understand how teachers can utilize QuickSchools to communicate and engage with students effectively. Here we highlight a few sample scenarios, how teachers can communicate with students.
- Group Discussion
- Discussing Assignments
- Private Messaging
- Announcements
Group Discussion
The “Class Discussion” feature (part of the “Homework” and “Assignments” modules) is a great way to discuss topics online. Only students enrolled into the class are able to post messages for any given subject:
As a teacher, you can also post a new discussion thread to multiple subjects at the same time using the “Also post to subjects” box. Simply select one or more subjects from the dropdown:
Read more…2020 Year in Review
We’re now at the end of 2020, and what a challenging year it has been. As with previous years, it’s always good to spend a little time to reflect on what we’ve accomplished, and revisit what it means to be a technology provider for hundreds of schools around the world. And we hope our efforts here at QuickSchools will continue to make a positive and lasting impact to all our customers.
Online Learning
2020 has been particularly challenging due to the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. With that, we’ve focused our efforts towards providing and improving our capabilities for Online Learning. This includes:
One of our new goals moving forward is to provide a simple and easy to use Learning Management System (LMS) that’s in the style and spirit of QuickSchools. And we’ve had a blast developing this feature so far with your help and feedback.
Google Classroom Integration
Of all the Learning Management Systems (LMS) that we readily integrate to, Google Classroom has received a lot of attention, due to its cost-effectiveness and robust application. We’ve added many new features to simplify the way grades are transferred into QuickSchools:
Read more…Temperature Check App
The Temperature Check App which was announced with the release earlier this week, is now available on the QuickSchools App Store:
Key Highlights
You can easily pull up a student record, either by searching for the students name, or by entering the student number. If you have a Barcode Scanner, you can use that to scan the Student Number:
Read more…New Release – Dec 29, 2020
This is the 17th and last release of 2020. Most schools will be on break right now. We’re looking forward to a bright 2021, with awesome new features and improvements. As always, your feedback is important to us, so let us know if there’s anything you’d like to see in a future release.
But for now, here are the latest improvements in QuickSchools:
Master Scheduler
- Fix Department Constraints
- Enhance ways for setting up Course Offering
- New function to Lock All Sections in Step 5
- Show Periods that have been restricted via Constraints
- Set Student Portal Course Requests as INACTIVE by default, when an enrollment period is activated.
- Improve wording of certain phrases
COMING SOON: Temperature App
- Store student temperatures
- Customize Health Screening questions
- Works with externally scanner
Other General Improvements
- Administrator can charge credit cards from Family Billing (See below)
- Increase size limit for files uploads not related to email messaging
- Bug fix when uploading multiple files with the same name
- Improvement to District/Group School, to support more data to be copied over when students / teachers are transferred between schools.
- Improve support for Name Formats when enrolling student from Online Forms
- Report Creator Support for Subject ID (used for data exports)
- Report Summary Support for Gradebook Total Marks Possible
- Improve support for adding/updating subject attendance from the student record
- Support links in template descriptions for Transcripts
- Fix labelling support for Homework
- Fix App Store error when loading reviews linked to a deleted user.
- Various improvements to server infrastructure
- Various improvements to the test environment
- Security login improvement (login counter and timeout)
Charging Credit Cards via Family Billing
In a previous release, we introduced the ability for administrators to charge credit cards that were entered via the Student and Parent Portals. However, this feature was only available for schools using Student Billing. We’ve now extended this functionality to also support Family Billing:
This feature can be enabled when you configure the Fee Tracking module as an administrator:
Temperature App
In response to the year of Covid-19, we are preparing a new Temperature App, that will allow schools to quickly record and track student temperature readings, along with responses to health screening questions that can be customized. Here’s a preview of what the app looks like:
When taking a student temperature, you can use the Custom Fields widget to create screening questions:
More details for this app will be announced soon. Do enjoy the rest of your December Break!
See You Next Year!
Planned Outage – Jan 1, 2021
Despite our previously planned outage on Dec 27, we unfortunately need some additional time to complete some server upgrades. QuickSchools will be offline this Friday, on Jan 1, 2021, starting at 1 am US Eastern Time. The QuickSchools service will be offline for approximately 2 hours.
We hope all users will take this time for a well-deserved break, and enjoy a good start to the 2021 calendar year. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact our support staff via email or chat.
Happy New Year!
Live Chat Closed for Christmas and New Year
Our Live Chat Service will be offline starting 4 pm US Eastern Time (EST) on Thursday Dec 24 in observance of Christmas. We’ll be back online on Saturday at 8 am EST. Please leave us a message, and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can:
Likewise, our Live Chat Service will also be offline starting 4 pm US Eastern Time (EST) on Thursday Dec 31 in observance of New Years. We’ll be back online on Saturday January 2 at 8 am EST.
LMS Survey Results
Many thanks for those who participated in the recent LMS Survey. Your feedback helps us improve the QuickSchools product and services, to better suit your needs:
This survey in particular is to help guide the development of the Online Learning capability we are building within QuickSchools. We hope you’ll continue to participate in future surveys.
We wanted to give you guys a quick summary of the results of this survey, and share our plans moving forward.
Common Requests
There were several commonly requested improvements, such as:
Read more…Planned Outage – Dec 27, 2020
We have a planned outage this Sunday, on Dec 27, 2020. We will be updating our hardware infrastructure to improve general performance and availability. This update requires that some of our servers be taken offline.
The outage will begin at 3:00 am US Eastern time (or 12 am US Pacific Time), and will last up to 3 hours. If we’re able to complete the update earlier, the QuickSchools service will be brought back online immediately.
If you have any questions or concerns, please contact our support staff via email or chat.
SSO via Google SAML
We recently announced that QuickSchools now provides Single Sign-On (SSO) functionality via the SAML protocol. This means that for schools on the Google ecosystem, you can use Google SAML as the Identity Provider (IDP), and have it manage users centrally.
The SSO functionality is still in Private Beta, but schools can start using it at their own discretion. You will need to have the District (or Group) School feature enabled, in order to use this feature. We are looking for feedback to make the experience better. For more information on the new SSO functionality, you can check out this article:
https://blog.quickschools.com/2020/11/20/single-sign-on-sso-via-saml/
For Google SAML in particular, we’ve written up some quick notes on how to set it up (with screenshots and instructions). You can check it out on our support site here:
https://support.quickschools.com/hc/en-us/articles/360053886052
Please note that to set up Google SAML for your school, you will need a Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) account.
