In case you missed it with the release of Sprint E20, there is a new Calendar feature in Quickschools that is readily available to all schools.
As an administrator, you can now define the holiday calendar for each academic term that you set up. In addition, the feature can also restrict data entry for attendance. This will prevent teachers from inadvertently adding attendance data on days students are not expected to attend.
Here’s a quick guide on viewing and configuring the calendar:
Under the “New Semester Setup” > “View All Semesters” menu, you should see a new “Calendar” link for each term:
New “Calendar” link when configuring an Academic Term
Clicking on it will bring up a calendar for the specified start/end dates defined for the term:
Set up holidays and other non-school days on the Calendar
2019 has come and gone, with 2020 now in full swing. This is usually a good time to reflect on what we’ve accomplished in the past year, and serves to remind us of what we’re here to do. And for us at QuickSchools, we want to provide an awesome Student Information System that’s a joy to use.
So here are some highlights from 2019:
Continuing Priorities
The following items continued to be a priority for us from 2018:
Chat Support
On-Boarding for New Principals
Engineering Transparency
General Product Improvements
Support and service continue to be the central theme to our offering from year to year. It’s really the backbone to what we do. In addition to helping users understand the vast feature set that we offer, it’s also an opportunity for us to understand the difficulties that users face, and incorporate that understanding into future iterations of our product. Please chat it in with us, if you have any questions or comments about what we do and/or how we do things.
Due to popular demand, we’ve started building apps on iOS and Android for both teachers and parents. These are still in beta. Please check out our newsletter for more information.
With the release of Sprint E21 in late November, the option to access previous term final grades in the gradebook was made available in QuickSchools. In case you are wondering the benefits of this new feature, here are a few use cases you can reference as an example:
Compare Current Grade with Previous Term
The previous final grade can simply be added in to compare with the student’s current final grade.
In the example above, we see that the current Q2 grade has fallen compared to Q1.
Term Grades Averages
With the previous final grade added to the gradebook, custom formulas can now be created to calculate the student’s current semester average (previously only accessible via report card calculations).
So we had a chance to visit a few schools in Boston last week, as we made our way from Albany to Louisville for conferences. We don’t usually come on-site to meet with schools, seeing as QuickSchools is primarily an online service/product (to keep costs low). But when the opportunity presented itself, we were greatly appreciative of the hospitality provided to us.
First off, one consistent feedback we get from schools we spoke to is that the Live Chat support is super responsive. It’s there when you need it, all day every day. The support personnel are knowledgeable and understanding of the issues faced by users. Thank you for letting us know. It warms our hearts that we’re heading in the right direction when it comes to support. But I digress…
The other common theme that we’ve encountered, which is the topic of this article, has to do with the vastness of our product. There’s so much that the system can do, coupled with the fact that new improvements are being released on a regular basis, schools don’t necessarily realize the full potential of our product.
We have just released the new Interventions app in the QuickSchools app store. This app allows you to track notes and files related to academic interventions for students:
You can also use this app to track notes or details on student information that may be specific to your school such as Immigration/VISA information, logging parent communications, etc.
When adding interventions you can track start/end dates, notes, attachments and intervention type:
If you are a new principal or administrator using Quickschools for the first time, we’d like to invite you to schedule a free training session. In your account, you may have noticed the following announcement that was posted today:
This announcement will be available over the next 2 weeks. In order to schedule a meeting, click either the red “Request Form” button, or the “CLICK HERE” link, to complete the form:
We hope to get you up to speed with all of the available features in your account. We’d also like to take this opportunity to learn about the features you are interested in, as well as gather any feedback you may have about your current experiences with Quickschools.
Do note that a typical meeting can range between 20-40 minutes. If you are unavailable to meet, please click here for a helpful guide.
Attendance data management is not just about the students – it’s also for teachers. To create a holistic view of attendance statistics, attendance tracking extends to the entire ecosystem of the school. This means for your teachers too.
The Teacher Attendance App essentially allows you to:
Take attendance for all your teachers in your school
Tabulates an attendance history so you can see a summary of attendance for the active semester
3 types of attendance available (present, absent, tardy)
Configuring Access
Here you can configure access for the Teacher Attendance App depending on which users you want to be able to take attendance for the teachers. Only users who have been configured here will see this app appear on their menu.
Taking Attendance
Just like taking attendance for students, the Teacher Attendance App works in a similar way. Just click the “Take Attendance” button and begin tracking your teachers.
Once the app is installed, it will automatically pull the teacher names and auto populate them into the app.
Just click on any of the 3 predefined options (present, absent, tardy) and the status will update from “not yet taken” to your selected option.
Hit the “clear” button to change the status back to “not yet taken”. This is useful if you’ve accidentally pressed the wrong button or incorrectly marked attendance for any particular teacher.
Viewing Attendance History
So now that you’ve taken attendance, you can see the attendance summary per teacher for the active semester. This is a valuable snapshot for your school to identify teacher absenteeism for your active semester.
Your feedback is always valuable for us to serve you better. So do drop us a message to share your thoughts via the chat function or write to us at: support@quickschools.com! We hope this app comes in handy and look forward to hearing from you.
Thank you for participating in our little survey about renaming the Parent Messaging menu in QuickSchools. We really appreciate the feedback. The results are in! Looks like more than half of our respondents are okay with the proposed name change to “Messaging”:
Survey Results for Renaming Parent Messaging
There were a few alternate naming suggestions like “Communications”, but the second most popular response is actually to keep the menu as-is. We’ll likely be posting other surveys to get feedback on other areas of our software. As always, if you have a suggestion for us, please let us know via email or chat.
