We’re back to a normal flow for engineering improvements. Today’s QuickSchools release focuses on the Gradebook, with some minor improvements to the Master Scheduler, Attendance and API. 

Full list of improvements are below:

Master Scheduler

• Relabel Step 4 button to “Import External IDs”
• Relabel the “Lock Sections” checkbox in Step 2 to be more descriptive
• Bug Fix “Bulk Course Requests” in Step 2 for locked course requests in previous Enrollment Periods
• Bug Fix Advanced Search in Step 5 for Students with unassigned duplicate course requests

Gradebook Improvements

• Low Grade Alert for Gradebook (see below)
• Gradebook expanded option to share or copy columns between different subjects
• Bug Fix Minimum Score from Admin Column
• Option to submit grades from ALL gradebooks to Report Cards (Beta)
• Option to bulk show/hide Gradebook in “Manage Subject Availability” (Beta)

Other Beta Improvements

• API Improvements for Engage CRM and Mobile
• Option to Bulk Set Attendance for Subject-Based roster
• Report Creator support for Total Attendance by Period
• Bug Fix Teacher Listing when a school is removed from a Group School

Low Grade Alert

We have a new Alert for the Gradebook, allowing you to notify parents of low grades. This feature currently works only for the default Grading Scale. Here’s how it works:

• Enable the School-wide Alert under “School Profile”
• Configure the low grades under “Grading Setup”
• Notification for teachers when saving the Gradebook
• Notification for Parents
• Opting out of alerts for Parents

Enable the School-wide Alert

Under “Settings” > “School Profile”, there is a setting under “School-wide Alert Settings” for “Gradebook – Low Grade Alert”:

The alert is disabled by default. You can opt parents in or out by default. Parents can still opt in/out individually once the feature is enabled.

NOTE: This first version currently supports Email Alerts only. In the near future, we’ll be adding support for this alert to the “Home by QuickSchools” Mobile App

Configure the Low Grades

Under “Grading Setup”, there is a new setting called “Low Grade Alerts” where you can configure the Letter Grades and Codes that warrant an alert:

NOTE: For this first version, you can only select grades from the Default Grading Scale. However, the system will still match the selected Letter Grade to all gradebooks. This means that even if the teacher is using a different Grading Scale, as long as the Letter Grade matches, the system will still send an Alert.  Please let us know if you need the options expanded to additional Grading Scales.

Notification for teachers

Once configured, whenever a teacher saves the gradebook, the system will check for low grades and notify the teacher that an alert will be sent. This is to allow the teacher to double check whether the grades were entered correctly:

The teacher has the option to disable the notification for his/her subjects. To enable the notification, click on the Gears icon and select “Show “Sending Out Alerts” Notification”:

Alert Message for Parents

Here’s what the alert looks like for parents who have opted to receive the alert:

Note here that for low grades, the system will include the name of the column. Here’s another example based on a prescribed Gradebook Code:

When using Gradebook Codes, the alert will include the full description of the code. The school should provide a suitable description for all codes, since these will be shared with parents.

Opting in/out of alerts

As with all School-wide Alerts, parents can opt in/out of alerts on a per module basis under the “Alert Preferences” section of the “Settings” page in the Parent Portal:

And that’s it! Please reach out to our support team for additional help, or for feedback / suggestions.