The Parent Message Board is a great way to share information with parents in an unobtrusive manner in QuickSchools. Parents simply see these messages when logging into the Parent Portal. New messages appear at the bottom of the Home screen, just below the Student Updates:

As an administrator, just to go to the “Parent Portal” menu to post messages. Images are automatically displayed on screen. You can also share links and files too:

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.

There is a little known feature within QuickSchools, that allows users to filter the student listing on certain modules based on a custom report from the Report Creator. You’ll need to expand the Search options to view the “Advanced Filtering” option:

Building Reports

You’ll need to have the Report Creator installed and enabled in order to use this feature. With the report creator, you can build custom reports to suit almost any scenario. We’ll illustrate a few examples below.

Here’s an example report that shows all students taking the English course:

Here’s an example report that shows all students with the “Allergy” tag:

Since early on, QuickSchools has been supporting schools grow, by providing a flexible monthly subscription plan that’s simply based on the number of active student records in the account. Especially in these difficult times, if enrollment goes down, your subscription cost will also go down. All you have to do is make sure that you deactivate your students when they leave / graduate:

Deactivating Student Records

To deactivate a student record, all you have to do is open the student record from the Students listing, and select either “Student has left the school”, “Student has been expelled” or “Student has graduated” from the “Actions” dropdown on the top right corner:

Once a student is inactive, the student record no longer appears on the main Students listing.

Accessing Inactive Records

To view inactive student records, use the triangle on the search box to activate the Advanced Search options, and select one of the available options to include inactive students (like “ Show deleted students”, “Show students who have left” or “Show expelled students”):