2019 Year in Review
2019 has come and gone, with 2020 now in full swing. This is usually a good time to reflect on what we’ve accomplished in the past year, and serves to remind us of what we’re here to do. And for us at QuickSchools, we want to provide an awesome Student Information System that’s a joy to use.
So here are some highlights from 2019:
Continuing Priorities
The following items continued to be a priority for us from 2018:
- Chat Support
- On-Boarding for New Principals
- Engineering Transparency
- General Product Improvements
Support and service continue to be the central theme to our offering from year to year. It’s really the backbone to what we do. In addition to helping users understand the vast feature set that we offer, it’s also an opportunity for us to understand the difficulties that users face, and incorporate that understanding into future iterations of our product. Please chat it in with us, if you have any questions or comments about what we do and/or how we do things.
Check out our 2018 Year in Review.
Apps for iOS / Android
Due to popular demand, we’ve started building apps on iOS and Android for both teachers and parents. These are still in beta. Please check out our newsletter for more information.
Read more…Use Case: Term Grades
With the release of Sprint E21 in late November, the option to access previous term final grades in the gradebook was made available in QuickSchools. In case you are wondering the benefits of this new feature, here are a few use cases you can reference as an example:
Compare Current Grade with Previous Term
The previous final grade can simply be added in to compare with the student’s current final grade.
Term Grades Averages
With the previous final grade added to the gradebook, custom formulas can now be created to calculate the student’s current semester average (previously only accessible via report card calculations).
Read more…New Release – Jan 3, 2019
Happy New Year, everyone!
So here’s the first QuickSchools release for 2020:
- Group School Improvements
- Support for Invitations to Admissions Inquiry
- Bug Fix when uploading files to the IEP App
- Fee Tracking Improvements
- Improve Screens for Payment Allocation
- Bug Fixes related to Payment Allocation for Student Billing
- General UI Improvements
- Improve to Semester Activation (See below)
- Improve Email Messaging from Report Creator
- Improve Subject Enrollment Screen from Student record
- Add Classes from the “Classes and Homerooms” screen
- Miscellaneous improvements and bug fixes
- Set Homework assign Date when posting from Lesson Plans (See below)
- Increase character limit for Text Messaging (See below)
- Search Report Cards by Student Tags
- Gradebook Progress Report bug fix when using non-numeric Legend
- Save attachment to Email Messaging History
- Master Scheduler Step 4 bug fix to properly incorporate Breaks
- Fix Time Stamp when sending alert for Recalculate Transcripts
- Fixed billing on App Store
- General Improvements to Android and iOS Apps
We also took the opportunity to run some server upgrades over the Christmas break. We should see some improvements to general performance and stability. We’ll continue to improve our services, in the coming weeks.
Improved Semester Activation
When activating a new empty academic term, you now have an additional option to copy the data forward WITHOUT activating the semester. This process is done in the background. The new screen has been reconfigured as follows:
Posting Homework from Lesson Plans
When posting Homework assignments from the Lesson Plans module, you now have the ability to set the Assigned Date and Due Date:
Read more…We are in Chicago
Just a a quick conference update. We are at the McCormick Place in Chicago for the MAS-ICNA Convention. Come check out the QuickSchools at booth B41:
The convention runs thru Sunday Dec 29, 2019. Happy New Year, everyone!
Live Chat Closed for Christmas and New Year
Our Live Chat Service will be offline starting 4 pm US Eastern Time (EST) on Tuesday Dec 24 in observance of Christmas. We’ll be back online on Thursday 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 Tuesday Dec 31 in observance of New Years. We’ll be back online on Thursday January 2 at 8 am EST.
Happy Holidays
New Release: Sprint E22
The next Sprint E23 will be the last sprint of 2019, and will run an extra week with a scheduled deployment on Dec 30, 2019. But for now, QuickSchools is happy to announce our latest Sprint E22 release.
Here’s a list of the latest improvements of Sprint E22:
- Enable Enrollment Date by Default
- Field is available when adding a new student record
- Field is also available in Report Creator
- Transcript Improvements (See below)
- Improvement to Hiding Grades from Semester In Progress
- Sorting Subjects Alphabetically
- Email Notification for “Recalculate Fields”
- Canvas and Schoology Improvements
- Ability to Search Students when mapping
- Ability to Search Courses when mapping
- Miscellaneous bug fixes
- Gradebook fix related to Term Grades deployed in E21
- Report Card PDF bug fix for Hebrew
- Semester Activation Improvements (BETA)
- Performance Improvement when taking attendance for larger schools.
- Fee Tracking fix when applying Standard Charge for first time
- Library fix for teachers checking out books
- Parent Login bug fix
- Email Messaging History bug fix
- App Store Billing bug fix
- Remarks when deactivating students bug fix
Transcript Improvements
At the request of many schools, our Transcripts module has been updated to include the following new improvements:
Improvement to Hiding Grades from Semester In Progress
This feature has been available for quite some time now. We’ve enhanced the way the “Hide current years/semester in progress” feature behaves, in order to more predictably control the behaviour of generated Transcripts, especially as new academic terms are added and activated. This setting appears as a checkbox under “Transcripts Configuration”:
Sorting subjects alphabetically
Also under “Transcripts Configuration”, we’ve created a new setting to “Sort sort courses alphabetically“. As the name suggests, with this setting enabled, all courses in the Transcripts module will be automatically sorted based on the name of the course.
Read more…Historical Student Records
In QuickSchools you can readily access and view records for students who are actively enrolled at your site under the Students tab.
From this same screen you can also easily access historical records for students who have previously attended your school. Simply click on the tiny triangle in the search bar, check the box next to “Show students who have left” and “Show expelled students“, then the system will display previously enrolled students in your listing:
You can open the old record to access historical report cards, reports, etc. that are in the students file.
