Our Google Classroom integration has been quite popular since its introduction back in late 2019. It’s received quite a lot of support from the schools that have it installed, as well as internally from our tech support and engineering teams. In short, the integration allows schools to pull grades from Google Classroom over to Quickschools, where report cards and transcripts can then be generated.

The integration itself can be a great time saver, as it removes the need for double entry into two systems. Of course, as with any integration between two separate system, there’s going to be nuances that may create differences between the expected behavior and the actual behavior. For that reason, we created the following helpful troubleshooting guide:

The Admin Columns feature has given our users the ability to add grading columns to all gradebooks in one go. There are many other benefits to the admin columns that you can take advantage of in Quickschools. Two little known features would be the ability to specify date ranges, and the meta-id field. In the following example, we demonstrate how you can setup your gradebook using only a single yearly term, while having the gradebook broken down into multiple terms.

To that end, QuickSchools offers an add-on service to build custom templates for you. And with a custom Report Card template, you can make use of the Gradebook Default Columns which provide more structure in the way grades are transferred from the Gradebook to the Report Cards.

With ONE single yearly term, each subject will have ONE cumulative Gradebook for the entire school year, allowing teachers to use grades from the entire year when calculating final grades for each academic term and the final school year.

In the screenshot below, we have an admin column for each quarter in the year. These could also be configured as trimester or semester, depending on what’s needed for your academic year setup.

Each of the admin columns has a date range specified, as well as the meta-id. The meta-id is provided by our support team, and designates a particular column in the report card template. This allows the grade in the gradebook to be passed along to the report cards systematically.

An important aspect of the QuickSchools system is the concept of Academic Terms. An academic term is used to manage all subjects/courses that a student is enrolled in within a specific time frame. This containment is important in order to easily manage a group of students that all start/end courses at the same time. It is also important that these academic terms do not overlap, as the system can only support one term to be active at any time.

So what if a school does not have academic terms? There are still courses with multiple students starting and learning together, but some courses run for a week, others for a month, and so on. This is more typical for vocational schools that offer private courses like a Photography School, or a Barber/Beauty School. In this case, we recommend having just ONE academic term, which you can archive on a yearly basis.

This set up works if:

• Students learn together in groups. All students within a course start and end together, but also go through the same curriculum (i.e. not Self-Paced)
• You have courses of varying lengths.
• You want to track students as cohorts, even though the same cohort of students may leave the school at different times (because of the length of their courses)