We understand how busy a Teacher’s day can get, and how this may lead to them forgetting to take attendance in QuickSchools. To resolve this, we now introduce a new feature — the Attendance Dashboard.
This feature is in BETA: If you would want this enabled for your school, please contact our Support Team.
This new feature would display the periods of a given day where attendance is Not Yet Taken. It is applicable for Homeroom, Period, or Subject-Based Attendance, and allow the Global Attendance Takers to either (1) Take attendance on behalf of the teacher; or (2) Send an Email notifying the teacher of the attendance yet to be taken.
To know more about our Attendance Dashboard feature, please see our Support Guide linked below:
Zapier is essentially a GUI interface that allows user to use pre-built, or build your own, integrations to any system that has open APIs. This means that you can readily integrate QuickSchools with any other system, using Zapier as the go-between.
To facilitate this integration, you will need to first establish a link between Zapier and an external system (like QuickSchools). From there, you can create either a Trigger or an Action.
A Trigger is essentially an API call to an external system to search for new/updated records. This would be the event that would initiate a ZAP and facilitate an Action. (Example: Find new students in QuickSchools)
An Action would then be an event performed to PUSH data into an external system. This would essentially add/update the data. (Example: Add a new student into QuickSchools).
Zapier is useful to integrate other systems with QuickSchools, making the process of moving data from an external system to QuickSchools (or vice versa) really easy. The integration is described in more detail in our Support Article linked below:
This guide would cover the following required for the integration:
Setting up Zapier
Setting up API in QuickSchools
Creating a Trigger
Creating an Action
Creating a Zap
If you have any questions or concerns with the setting up your Zapier Integration, feel free to contact us via chat or email us at support@quickschools.com.
THIS IS A BETA FEATURE: To have this feature enabled, please contact our Support Team.
This feature allows you to synchronize your Google Classroom courses in batches. This is ideal for schools will a large number of students and courses.
Some things to note about this feature:
Profiles are dependent on the courses being mapped under STEP 3.
Courses that aren’t mapped in STEP 3, will not be available in the Profile
If a course is unmapped in STEP 3, the course will also be automatically removed from the Profile.
When courses are remapped in STEP 3 at the start of a new semester, the Profile will also need to be updated with the latest mappings. Mappings from the previous term will no longer apply.
To avoid the sync getting timed out, we recommend having a maximum of 35 courses per Profile.
Multiple Profiles can be scheduled to be synced at the same time. However, each profile will be synchronized one at a time.
To know more about our Google Classroom Synchronization Profiles, see our Support Article linked below:
We have a webinar coming up for teachers, focusing on the Gradebook module in QuickSchools. This is part of our new Webinar Series. Be sure to register if you haven’t already.
QuickSchools Gradebook
During this webinar, we’ll be going over some of the more involved features, including:
Gradebook Formulas and Weightages
These are the basics of using Weightages (or Weight Factors) to create formulas.
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:
One of the nice features about the Online Forms module in QuickSchools, is its ability to reduce work by the applicant by prefilling the fields where possible.
For example, if you have a form packet with multiple forms, where several forms make references to the same field (like the students name or address), as long as the fields are mapped correctly, once the applicant fills in the field on ONE of the forms, ALL forms within the packet will be automatically filled with the same information. How convenient is that? And it doesn’t stop there!
We’ve made strides to further improve the experience for applicants. And here we discuss 3 ways where applicants can make use of Pre-Fill functionality within our Online Forms app.
Mapping Fields to System Fields
So for users accessing the Online Forms from the Student or Parent Portal, any fields in the Form Packet that are mapped to a system field are automatically filled when the applicant starts a submission from their portal. This is because when parents / students access the Online Forms from their portal, the system is able to link the form with a student record, and the system can draw information from the linked student record, and pre-populate any fields mapped to system fields.
What this also means is that users accessing the Online Forms through a public URL will not get access to this feature. For that, check out the next section.
Starting a New Application for Public Forms
We have a new feature released recently that allows users to copy information from a previously submitted form into a new form. In order to utilize this feature, applicants simply need to click on the “Start New Application” link after completing a submission:
Applicants can quickly start a new application after submission
Once you start a new application, you’ll see a “Copy from Previous Submission” button for each form, allowing the user to pre-fill that form with all information previously submitted:
Use Gradebook Templates to copy columns between subjects
The Gradebook Template allows you to templatize an existing Gradebook, essentially allowing you to copy the columns in the current Gradebook, and insert them into another subject / course. Here we see several saved templates:
In QuickSchools, Academic Terms (or Semesters) provide a way to contain and separate student data. So for example, when you change the courses for a student within an academic term, it does not affect his courses from a previous academic term. And this extends to many modules, like grade levels / programs, subjects and gradebooks, simplified schedules, report cards, standard charges (from the Fee Tracking module), and so on. In this way, you can easily and safely introduce changes to the student record, while keeping archived data intact.
So when you activate a new Academic Term, it makes sense to copy certain information over, instead of recreating everything from scratch. By default, the system will ask you whether you want to copy data forward:
Choose whether to Copy data from the Previously Active Academic Term
There is an additional area to “Configure” additional information to copy over, like Gradebook Formulas and Admin Columns :
We are introducing a new feature in the Google Classroom Integration app, that allows teachers to manage and pull grades from Google Classroom for their own subjects in QuickSchools. When enabled, teachers will see a new “Sync with Google Classroom” button in their Gradebook:
Clicking on the button will initiate a synchronization with Google Classroom. Some things to note about the Google Classroom Integration:
The school admin needs to install and configure the Google Classroom Integration app for the whole school (available in our App Store). If the setup is incomplete, an error message will appear.
When synchronizing the gradebook, the student enrollment may change, depending on how your school administrator configured the auto-enrollment feature.
Some elements from Google Classroom will not transfer over, namely the category, final grade and comments. So teachers can freely update this information in QuickSchools. This data will not be overwritten by subsequent synchronizations.
NOTE FOR ADMINISTRATORS: The feature will require that the School Administrator configure the Google Classroom Integration app as follows:
For schools in Ontario Canada, QuickSchools actually supports report cards and transcripts required by the province. We have a separate article that describes the Ontario Report Card Template that we posted several years ago. More information here:
For Transcripts in particular, we can produce a PDF document containing transcript information, that can be printed on the Transcript paper document (which contains the Ontario watermark):
Here’s an example of what the final Transcript can look like, once the PDF is printed on the watermarked Transcript document:
