New Release: Sprint E20

Sprint E20 was delayed due to the extensive testing required for improvements to our core modules, in particular Attendance and Standards-Based Gradebook modules. We hope you enjoy these new improvements.

So here’s a list of the latest improvements in QuickSchools:

  • Standands-Based Gradebook Improvements (See below)
    • Tool Tip when you hover over a grade for a students performance in a standard.
    • Improve the way standards are added/imported to the Gradebook
    • Ability to select specific standards within a Standard Set
    • Organize the way Standards are displayed for Parents
  • New Attendance Calendar (See below)
    • Configure School Days and Holidays
  • Subject Attendance Improvements (See below)
    • Indicator for Taken Attendance
    • Optional Submit Attendance
    • Roster respects students Enrollment Date
  • Updated Data Dictionary for Report Creator now includes support for:
    • Number of Columns in Gradebook
    • Gradebook Comments
    • Homework
  • Miscellaneous Bug Fixes / Improvements
    • Student Importer now supports reactivating existing student records (See below).
    • Course Importer (For Master Scheduler and New Transcripts)
    • Preview Email Fix for WYSIWYG Editor
    • Bug fix for Submit Grades
    • Bug fix for Auto-Fill on Locked Columns
    • Option to show running GPA on Student Portal (BETA)
    • Fee Tracking bug fixes for Payment Allocation

Standards-Based Gradebook Improvements

On the Standards-Based Gradebook, you can now mouse over the grade for a standard, and it will display the calculation for that grade:

Mouse over a cell to see the calculation for students performance for a certain standard

You can still of course click on a cell to see the full detail behind the calculation:

View all Assessments for a Standard, along with calculation for the selected student

We’ve also simplified the way teachers can add standards to the gradebook. Here what you see when clicking on “Add Standard”:

Add standards from a Standard Set, or create your own standard

When adding standards from a Standard Set, you can now select specific standards from within the set:

Select specific standards from a Standard Set to be added to the Gradebook

Attendance Calendar to Configure Holidays

As the administrator, you can now define the holiday calendar for each academic term that you set up. So under the “New Semester Setup” > “View All Semesters” menu, you should see a new “Calendar” link for each term:

New “Calendar” link when configuring an Academic Term

Clicking on it will bring up a calendar for the specified start/end dates defined for the term:

Set up school days and holidays on the Calendar

You can then click on a cell to set that day as a holiday, by applying a “Day Label“:

Apply a “Day Label” to make it a non-school day.

You will then need to configure your Attendance module to “Hide “Take Attendance” button on non-school days” in order to implement the restriction:

Configure attendance to “Hide “Take Attendance” button on non-school days”

Once this setting has been turned on, your teachers will only be able to take attendance on configured schools days.

Subject Attendance Improvements

We’ve implemented a new indicator that will display a green check box if you’ve taken attendance for a particular subject / period:

Green Check Box indicates that attendance has already been taken for a period

This will make it easier for teachers to identify / remember if they’ve taken attendance for a particular period. Please note that simply loading the attendance roster constitutes taking attendance for a particular day / period.

For schools that want a little more control, we have a new option to “Enable submit button for subject attendance”, which can be turned on when you “Configure” the Attendance module:

Configure Attendance to “Enable submit button for subject attendance”

With this option enabled, you will see a new “Submit Attendance” button on the top right corner of the screen. And the green indicator will not be checked until you click “Submit Attendance”:

“Submit Attendance” button for Subject Attendance

The final improvement for this release is that the roster now respects the Enrollment Date for a student. This is particularly helpful for students who will be starting in the future, but have already been enrolled into courses in the system.

Importing Inactive Students

When importing students, if the student already exists, there is now an option to simply “Reactivate students”. This is to avoid duplicate student records in your account:

Option to “Reactivate students” when importing inactive student records

If the “Reactivate students” box is left uncheck, the system will display an error when encountering duplicate student records.

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