I always found it surreal when it comes to writing end-of-year messages. Seriously, is it that time already? Where did the year go?

It’s been 2 solid years since Covid-19 was first detected. The rapid spread and deadly effect it had took the world by surprise. There was fear everywhere, many economies were devastated, livelihoods threatened (for some, vanished), mental health suffered, and worst of all, many of us experienced the loss of a family member, a close friend, or an acquaintance. It’s been absolutely unreal.

At QuickSchools, we saw first-hand how the pandemic wreaked havoc to several customers, especially those operating in places heavily reliant on travel and tourism where the economy simply tanked. Widespread income losses meant reduced enrollment and a severe loss in revenue that made running the school even more challenging. There was much uncertainty about what the future would hold and this was when we witnessed the incredible power of the human spirit, specifically from you, fellow educators.

Schools big and small all had to go online and they did so with a passion. On our end, we intensified our development on our integrations to several LMS, chiefly the Google Classroom app to make it a lot smoother. It is wonderful to see that many schools are using the integration to ensure data between the two systems are in sync.

2021 also ushered in the release of our second product dubbed Orchestra by QuickSchools. We welcome several wonderful schools to the QuickSchools family via Orchestra and we are super excited to help more customers on this awesome online master scheduler product in the years to come.

As usual, we released a ton of improvements throughout the year that we hope have made your experience on QuickSchools a little if not a lot better.

Looking further ahead, QuickSchools will continue with our mission to create useful tools for you, fellow educators! Our LMS, Learn by QuickSchools will be released by Q2 of this year and our CRM for education – Engage by QuickSchools – will follow suit later this year. Finally, we hope and pray that the pandemic will go away soon and may all of you and your families be safe from its harm until it’s truly gone and behind us.

Happy holidays and have a safe and healthy new year!

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.

It’s been a wonderful journey for us at QuickSchools working with educators in over 30 countries, trying to make the lives of teachers and school admins a little easier.

We know we don’t get it right all the time but boy I tell ya, we sure try.

For me personally, to this day, I feel blessed that I get to work with passionate teachers and school leaders doing their best for students and parents. To be honest, most times I feel like I’m the student again and all I’m trying to do is to stay out of trouble until school is out!

Moving on.

In the coming days and weeks, I will be reaching out to you to request your help to give us a (hopefully 5-stars) review so that we can bring QuickSchools into more schools and classrooms. God knows how much all of us at QuickSchools appreciate and value your feedback.

I hope you can spare a few minutes to respond to the campaign and of course, I totally understand if you wish to not participate or just plain swamped with your students.

That said, if you have any feedback about QuickSchools and how we can make your experience a little better, please feel free to reach out to me. I trust you know my email by now.  🙂

And last but certainly not the least, thank you for being our friend.

 

After some 4 years of the previous version of our website, we thought it was time we gave QuickSchools.com a makeover! Though the previous version was a pretty effective website, we thought that being a SaaS company, we really should be more current in terms of style and design of our one and only “storefront”.

The new website project pretty much came out of the blue. We had commissioned our designer to have a go at coming up with some new designs. The early mock-ups struck a cord with everyone and the rest, as they say, was history. Below are images of our previous website and the 2 initial designs that we considered.

 

After getting feedback from some 40 people, the final design came out as a blend between the 2 versions. We hope you like the new look. Tell us what you think in the comments below – we’d love to hear your views.