Every now and again, when you send out a Parent Portal invitation, the email gets filtered out by the Spam filters on the receiving mail server. In many cases, you’ll still see the invitations in the Spam folders (so be sure to check that first). However in some instances, the emails are completely removed by the mail server and do not even get to the inbox or the Spam folder. In such an event, you have 2 options:

Option 1: Report the problem to our support staff

As the school admin, you can send a list of effected parents to support@quickschools.com, and our support staff will manually send out an email invitation to the parents affected. You can also send out a mass parent email informing parents to send an email to us, if they have not received an email invitation. We can reset passwords for specific users as well, as long as the email request is from the correct user. Please allow 1-2 days to process your request.

Option 2: Manually reset and resend the Parent Portal password

If you’d like to reset the password yourself, school administrators have the ability to do so. Simply go to the “Students” screen, find and click on the student record, and then go to the “Parents” tab. The screen should look like the following:Read More »

Combined classes are a normal occurrence for smaller schools, due to the small number of students in each grade. So for example, instead of having separate classes for 7^th Grade English and 8^th Grade English, you might have a combined English class for 7^th and 8^th grade. So how would you handle that in QuickSchools?

Basically, it comes down to enrolment. QuickSchools uses the subject enrolment information to display students in the various modules, like the Gradebook, the Report Cards, the Transcripts, and even Subject-Based Attendance. However, each subject can only be linked to a single grade level. So in the example above, we would pick either the 7^th grade or the 8^th grade as the base/reference for the class. In the example below, we’ve created a 7^th Grade English class called “English 7-8”:

Using the “Enroll student from another grade” section, you can then enroll the 8^th grade students (or students from any other grade) into the subjects listed. And then use the checkboxes to further refine which students are enrolled into which subjects that you are teaching.Read More »

So what’s possible with the new QuickSchools report cards module? Here we discuss some of the Report Card features.

One of the main improvements is being able to see what your report card looks like as you’re editing it. The screenshot below shows the report card screen. You would simply click on the areas that you want to edit (most of these are pre-filled based on the Gradebook and Attendance modules), and then type in what you want.

The report card above was configured using the Three Four Galore template. There are multiple templates to choose from, each with it’s unique set of configuration elements. Each template is designed to suit a particular kind of style / purpose. Find the one that’s best for you. Here are some other features not highlighted in the screenshot above:

• Subjects can be hidden or sorted
• You can have different templates / configurations for different grades within the same marking period
• You can grade by student (as seen above) or by subject (where all students are listed together)
• Parents do not see report cards until report cards are published/locked
• After report cards are published/locked, you can still hide/withhold specific report cards from parents

If for some reason, after looking over all the various templates, and tinkering with the configuration elements, you still can’t get the report cards looking exactly like how you’d like it, come chat with us. Send us a sample report card, and we’ll see if we can do something for you.

Taking attendance in QuickSchools, whether it’s homeroom-based or subject-based, is pretty straight forward. Just click on the appropriate Attendance menu, and click “Start Taking Attendance”.

After that, a list of all your students will appear. From there, you can change the attendance record for a student, enter remarks, or if it’s not a school day and you want to remove the attendance record for all students, simply click on “Not a school day”.Read More »

Most Report Cards simply display marks and/or letter grades for each subject being evaluated. But some schools want to show evaluations based on additional criteria.

In the example above, we’ve created a report card for Alvin DeSilva using the “Three Four Galore” Report Card template. Alvin is taking English and Math. And under English, you’ll notice that he also received evaluations for Reading, Writing and Speaking. You can configure your own criteria for specific subjects, as this article describes.Read More »

Adobe Flash can be a little quirky at times. It’s a great front end tool, but can be susceptible to browser issues. If you come across problems with how things look like on your screen, you can try one of the following:

Reset your Zoom

Often times, you may have your browser zoom turned on and you wouldn’t even know it. One of the symptoms is that the screen is cut off to the side. A quick remedy to reset your zoom is to hold down the CTRL key and press 0 (the number zero). That will reset the zoom for you.

Reload the Module

In some cases, if you lose your internet connection momentarily, a screen may not have completely loaded, leaving it blank. A quick remedy for this is to reload the module by holding down the SHIFT key and then clicking on the menu item. This will reload the Flash files from the server again

Clear Your Browser Cache

If you’re still having problems despite the fixes above, or if your Live Chat window is missing, you should try clearing your browser cache. Clearing your cache forces the browser to reload web pages again, including the Live Chat widget. The steps to clear your browser cache will differ slightly based on the actual browser. Check out this link for the exact steps:

http://www.wikihow.com/Clear-Your-Browser’s-Cache

Try another browser

If all else fails, try another browser. We highly recommend Google Chrome. Mozilla Firefox is a good alternative as well. And if that still doesn’t work, send us an email at support@quickschools.com, or chat with us, and we’ll do the best we can to assist.

We’re hopeful that a lot of these problems will go away once we upgrade to HTML5. Rest assured our engineers and our support staff will continue to strive to make your experience with QuickSchools a pleasant one.

---

Updated: June 26, 2013

Since moving to HTML5 (from Flash), most of these are no longer an issue, except for Clearing your Browser Cache, which is useful if your Live Chat window does not load properly.

When getting started with QuickSchools, you have the option of importing student and teacher information via Excel. We currently do not support importing of historical information, like grades, attendance and report cards. Here are some videos that describe how to create/import student records:

Watch more videos on our YouTube channel

If you already have your data in Excel format, you can already import your data by mapping the columns in your Excel file with fields in the database. However, if you want to save time with the mappings, you can rename the column headers, or use one of our sample files below:

• SampleStudentImport.xls
• SampleTeacherImport.xls

One thing to note:

If you notice extra fields in the mapping dropdown, which you do not see on screen (like “EPF”, and “SOCSO”), most of these are actually deprecated (i.e. old) fields which we no longer support. These fields currently still exists in the database, but they will be removed in a future release. Other fields like “Race” and “Religion” are hidden fields, which we can activate if needed. For the complete list of active/valid fields for import, please refer to the sample files above.