Share your experience with us

Azroy Kandan1 Comment

If you’re a subscriber of QuickSchools, and are enjoying your experience with us, we invite you to send us a video testimonial. Let us know how QuickSchools has improved the way you run your school. We’d love to hear from you, as would our other customers.

If you’re comfortable putting together your own video, you can simply upload it to youtube and send us a link. Or you can send us your video footage, and we can either post it for you, or make some edits (if the footage is raw). In any case, we’d love to hear from you.

If you need help putting together a video, here are some tips:Read More »

QuickSchools Data Back-Ups

Azroy Kandan4 Comments

One of the frequent questions we get is with regards to backups. How safe is your data, really?

As a software service provider, one of our main priorities is the safety and security of your data. This is one of our core expertises. And we provide this service so that schools can concentrate on their core expertise – teaching our youth. But just to elaborate on some of our data backup features:

As with most enterprise-level applications, our database is replicated. What that means is when you interact with your account, and data is saved to our database, that same data is replicated to another database on another server. So if our main database server ever fails, we can easily fail over to our secondary server with minimal loss of data.Read More »

Course Structure for Non-K12 Schools with Rolling Enrollment (No Academic Terms)

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This article aims to answer the following question:

How do we best structure classes/courses if we don’t have academic terms?

QuickSchools relies on the concept of academic terms in order to archive grades. When an academic term is archived, it becomes read-only, and safeguards your data from inadvertent changes in the future. Here’s how it works:

In QuickSchools, you can define multiple academic terms. However, only one academic term can be active at any one time. All other inactive academic terms are effectively archived (read-only). You can of course activate any academic term at any time, but you’d have to coordinate it with your staff. This is because when users make changes to subjects and grades, it only effects the current activated academic term. You can check out our blog post about “Creating New Academic Terms (and New Gradebooks)”

Only one academic term can be active at one time

So what happens if your school does not have academic terms? For example, if you have a 9-week program that starts in early November, then another 6-week course that starts 2 weeks later (i.e. courses start and end independently of one another), how would I structure my academic terms?Read More »

Only pay for what you use

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At QuickSchools, we believe in keeping things simple. So when it comes to billing, we try to keep things simple as well. Here we discuss how schools are charged based on the selected plan and the number of students in your account.

First off, you can upgrade or downgrade your account at any time, either during your free trial, or even after subscribing. You’d do so simply by clicking on the “Features” page, and then selecting one of the available plans. Upgrades/downgrades are instantaneous, and any data that you have in your account will remain intact.

Secondly, we only charge based on the active number of students in your account. For more information on how to activate and reactivate student records, check out this article:

http://blog.quickschools.com/2011/11/15/activating-and-deactivating-student-records/

Finally, we don’t do any sort of complicated pro-rating when it comes to billing. When you first subscribe, we will simply count the number of students in your account and multiple it with the rate for the plan that you selected.  And every month after that, we’ll again take a snapshot of the number of active students in your account, and multiply it with the rate for the activated/selected plan. The system will not pro-rate anything based on activity in between billing periods.

So for example, if you’re billed today for 10 students on the Apollo Plan, and you add 10 students tomorrow, and then 15 graduate the following week, the system will only count the 5 currently active student records in your account on your next bill. If you decide to upgrade to Athena the following day, you would not be billed for it until the next billing cycle.

If you have further questions about this, please come chat with us.

What is the relationship between Gradebooks and Report Cards?

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QuickSchools comes with both Gradebook and Report Cards modules. They are inter-related. But schools can choose to use one without the other. It is important however to note how these two modules interrelate, so that you get the most out of your QuickSchools experience.

There are TWO key differences, which we’ll discuss first:

Gradebook

Report Card
 Continuous Assessment

  • Grades are posted immediately
  Periodic Assessment

  • Requires report cards to be published
 Basic Assessment Detail

  • Numerical Marks Only
  • Printed format is not configurable
  Rich in Assessment Detail

  • Includes Non-Numerical Assessments
  • Multiple templates to choose from

 

Continuous vs. Periodic Assessment

The Gradebook is mainly controlled/administered by the subject teacher. The subject teacher can define gradebook columns, categories, dates, grading scales and even final grade calculations. Teachers can do this on a regular basis; weekly or even daily. When teachers enter a new gradebook column, it can be made available to parents immediately (there is a configuration setting to make the gradebook entries available to the Parent Portal).

Parent View of Gradebook Entries (if enabled)

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Blog Entries Re-Categorized

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We’ve just re-organized our blog articles to make it easier for you to reference materials posted on our blog. You can now very easily look at all the tutorial-related articles posted on our blog, via the “Tips and Tutorial” category.  There’s a special category to discuss new features and recent releases. You can also look at testimonials, as well as events and conferences that we may be attending. Check it out!

Activating and Deactivating Student records

Azroy Kandan4 Comments

When you subscribe to QuickSchools, you only pay for active students enrolled in your school. However, even though a student leaves the school, you will continue to have read-only access to the student record, for as long as your account remains active with us.

If a student who left the school returns, you can re-activate the student record, and all previous information about that student can be re-instated and modified. Here’s a short video that describes the process of de-activating and re-activating a student record (go to 1:51 or click here):

Go to 1:51 or click here for a direct link

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Managing Parent Relationships

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In QuickSchools, you can already link students as siblings via the “Parents” tab on the student screen. This saves time by allowing administrators to manage/update only one set of parent records (parent records for siblings are automatically updated). Also, when a parent logs in, he/she will have access to all students linked to that parent record, from a single login:

Parents tab on Student RecordView of the Parents tab after opening the Student Record (for School Administrators)

But what happens if a parent should only be allowed access to some of the siblings (because of divorce and remarriage)? This is where it helps to click on the “Manage Complex Relationships” link.Read More »