Thursday, August 29, 2013

Why aren't we getting our notification emails?

If you expect to get notification emails from your Edclick product but you're not getting them, it is probably due to one of two causes.

• Discipline Manager: Since lots of discipline referrals can result in lots of notification emails, some schools opt to have them turned off. If yours are turned off and you would like them on, let us know at support@edclick.com.
    
• All other Edclick applications: Most likely, your notification emails are being blocked by a spam filter in your mailer or in your network. The solution is to put your Edclick address into your "whitelist" of addresses to never send to spam.
• All your notification emails will come from the same address. It is in the form website@<myEdclickAddress>. Examples are website@www.sscisd.net and website@ccisd.edclick.com. These are the addresses to put on the whitelist.
   
• To determine if your mailer or network is filtering the messages: Try testing with an address that is outside your school such as Google or Yahoo mail.  If the notification email goes to the outside address but not to your school address, it is likely a spam filtering problem.
   
• If this all sounds like tech nonsense and you just want your notification emails, contact us at support@edclick.com and we'll help you solve the problem.

Posted at 9:43 AM (permalink) 15 Comments View/Leave Comment
Keywords: FAQ: Discipline Manager, tips, FAQ: Intervention Manager, FAQ: Testing Manager, FAQ: School Site Manager, FAQ: Lesson Plan Manager

Monday, August 26, 2013

How can I assign students to different assistant principals?

It is sometimes handy to group students with different assistant principals being notified about events for students in each group. Some schools group alphabetically by last name, some by grade, some by other means.

One way to group students is by House. Each student is assigned to a House. If desired, notification emails are sent to particular email addresses for discipline events concerning students in a particular house. You can enter the House of each student through the Edit Student page. We can help set up which email addresses are associated with each House. You can also set students' Houses in bulk loads of your student body.

Another method is to group students by grade. We can set up grade lists that automatically work like House described above. Let us know each grade list and to whom the notification emails should go. For example, 9,10 to smith@myschool.com and 11,12 to jones@myschool.com. If the grouping by grade corresponds to different campuses, please also send the state campus ID numbers for each campus.

Posted at 10:39 AM (permalink) 0 Comments View/Leave Comment
Keywords: FAQ: Discipline Manager, tips

Tuesday, August 20, 2013

Are there students we can use for testing purposes? Who are Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer?

Yes. You will find two students for practice and testing purposes among your student list, Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer.

Huck and Tom are special. Even if you happen to have living, breathing Huck Finns and Tom Sawyers among your student body, these two are different. For one thing, their middle names are TestStudent.

You can treat Huck and Tom just like any other student. The biggest difference with these two is they will not show up in your reports!

You will see Huck and Tom in student lists, detention rolls and so on, just like any other student, but their hijinks will not be aggregated into reports, data submitted to the state and so on.

So, practice all you want on Huck and Tom. You can even delete them, although they will likely magically reappear in the future.

Posted at 4:40 PM (permalink) 0 Comments View/Leave Comment
Keywords: FAQ: Discipline Manager, tips, FAQ: Intervention Manager, FAQ: Testing Manager

Thursday, August 15, 2013

We want to improve parental involvement. Can you help?

Yes. The best way to keep parents involved with their child's education and with your school is to provide parents with useful, actionable information. School Site Manager is designed to make it easy to get timely information onto your website quickly and easily. One of the most useful fields on the course section pages for parents is How Parents Can Help. Encourage your faculty to help parents help the students by providing specific suggestions.

Discipline Manager, Intervention Manager and Tutoring Manager help keep parents involved by sending specific emails about their child's events and issues to keep parents in the loop.

School Site Manager includes a Newletter feature that can be used to push information to parents about recent accomplishments and upcoming opportunities. Each newsletter automatically maintains an archive of past issues as well as a subscription list that provides self-service subscribe or unsubscribe.

School Site Manager also has blogs associated with staff members, course sections, departments and extracurriculars. One of the handy but often unappreciated uses of a blog is as a specific news channel. For example, a blog for an extracurricular such as the chess club or gymnastics team, is a great place to summarize the results of each competition. Keep parents and fellow students informed and engaged with news specific to a student's activities.

Parent Tips provides useful information on a daily basis. Parent Tips can be used to put a new tip on the website or email a new tip to parents every week day. Not only will parents receive useful parenting information in easily digestable chunks, but they are reminded of the service your school is doing for the students every day.

Posted at 8:16 PM (permalink) 8 Comments View/Leave Comment
Keywords: FAQ: School Site Manager, FAQ: Discipline Manager, tips, FAQ: Intervention Manager, FAQ: Tutoring Manager

Thursday, August 15, 2013

Can Edclick bulk load photos?

Yes. Do you want to upload photos of all your faculty and staff? What about photos of all your students?

We can help! Contact us at support@edclick.com and let us know what you want to do. We will help get it done.

For example, Discipline Manager, Testing Manager and Intervention Manager customers often want to have photos of all their students loaded onto the system. Send us a disk of images indexed by student ID and we can probably take care of that for you.

Posted at 7:51 PM (permalink) 3 Comments View/Leave Comment
Keywords: FAQ: Discipline Manager, tips, FAQ: Intervention Manager, FAQ: Testing Manager, FAQ: School Site Manager

Thursday, August 15, 2013

What is the clip art image collection?

Are you putting a profile on your website and wish you had an image to go with it? Well, you do!

One of the well-kept secrets of School Site Manager is the collection of school-related images ready for use in your image collection. To select one for use, click the View, approve, select or delete photos link, then click the View clip art collection link. Use them whenever and wherever on your website you wish.

Posted at 6:54 PM (permalink) 0 Comments View/Leave Comment
Keywords: FAQ: School Site Manager, tips

Thursday, August 15, 2013

Can we share info among campuses in the same district?

Yes. If you have multiple School Site Manager websites in the same district, we have tools that make it easy to copy photos and calendar events among the sites.

Posted at 9:21 AM (permalink) 0 Comments View/Leave Comment
Keywords: FAQ: School Site Manager, tips

Wednesday, August 14, 2013

A teacher's information space

When I was in school, teachers taught with a book and handouts from the Ditto machine with their intoxicating fumes. Maybe a filmstrip once a year. Some classrooms had a dictionary for reference in case of emergencies.

When I entered college, textbooks were augmented with additional readings from books put on reserve in the library. By the time I left college, books on reserve were replaced by xeroxed (the only term used at the time) copies of papers and articles handed out in class. The volume of those handouts grew to rival the size of the textbook.

Today, thanks to the Internet and per-student computers, tablets and smartphones, the available teaching resources are unlimited. And that's just content resources. There has also been a "big data" explosion of information about the performance of students on each question of standardized tests. Correlate that to special populations, demographics, individual intervention and tutorial history...and the information opportunities go on.

Teachers themselves create their own big data explosions, particularly through the use of video for flipped classes and student assignments that assume video as available as construction paper once was.

How does a teacher manage his or her information space?

Collections

Managing abundant information is not a new problem, although it's new that it has become a fundamental part of the job for so many people. It has become a fundamental part of the job of teaching.

Just as with libraries and museums, the first step is to make collections. If the resources are expected to vanish from where they are now, you'll need collections of copies. Otherwise, collections of links are sufficient and a lot easier to deal with. Google starts as a collection of links, YouTube starts as a collection of copies.

As collections grow they become more useful with meta data:

• Categorization
• Tagging
• Attributes such as date, source, property rights, etc.
• Annotation
• Representative icons or logos
• Social evidence of value
  • Where is this used?
  • How frequently has it been used?
  • Is it "liked"?
  • Is it rated and what is the aggregate rating? 
  • Can the ratings and uses be weighted by the reputations of those making the decisions?
  • Has it been peer reviewed?

Interfacing data collections

Whatever we collect, it's almost certain that there are related collections. How readily can we absorb other collections into our own?

• How readily can another collection be copied into our own?
• In addition to copying items of the collection, can we copy subsets of the collection?
  • Must we copy items one-by-one?
  • Can items be copied by category, tag, attribute or property (e.g., copy the top 10% most liked items)? 
• Can we copy the meta data along with the item? 
• Can we copy on demand or is copying more of a batch process?

An example of interfaced data collections is between Google Calendar and the School Site Manager calendar. Some schools maintain both. We have the ability to pull events from Google Calendar into the database for School Site Manager calendar. The Google and Edclick databases are not integrated (see next section) but they are interfaced.

Integrating data collections

Databases are collections where the data has been structured in such a way to facilitate query and manipulation: selection, updates and joining. That is to say that the meta data in one collection can be mapped to the meta data in another so that an item in one can reliably be matched to an item in the other. Collections are integrated when they can operate as if they were a single database.

Teachers have access to student data in their online gradebooks as well as data about student performance on standardized tests. These databases come from different sources but they are integrated if the teacher can do a query like comparing classroom grades with standardized test scores.

Posted at 10:43 AM (permalink) 1 Comments View/Leave Comment
Keywords: info hub

Tuesday, August 13, 2013

What is MyCalendar and MySite?

MySite is a way to create a custom view of a school website to an individual's needs. For example, MyCalendar can be defined from the MySite page.

For example, student may choose to create a custom MyCalendar that includes the section calendars with lesson plans for the courses she is taking. She can also add athletics teams she's participating in or following as well as clubs and other extracurriculars. A MyCalendar custom calendar makes one's most important events easier to see.

Parents and staff are aslo welcome to create custom MyCalendar pages.

Posted at 4:40 PM (permalink) 0 Comments View/Leave Comment
Keywords: FAQ: School Site Manager, tips

Tuesday, August 13, 2013

Are there options for how lesson plans are presented to parents?

Yes. The default presentation is on the section calendar. Lesson plans are posted automatically. However, if you have created lesson plans into the future, you may choose to click a link to post each individually.

Another option is a lesson plan view that shows summaries of all sections in a department or a list of sections, all displayed on one page. Since some are large and some are small, the large ones are clipped until the user rolls a mouse over it. At that time, it expands to show the whole plan.

Whichever view is used, only the public information is shown. Private information, such as bell ringers, review questions, reflections on how the class went and the classtime schedule are not displayed publicly.

Posted at 4:33 PM (permalink) 3 Comments View/Leave Comment
Keywords: FAQ: School Site Manager, tips

Monday, August 5, 2013

How does automatic student updating work?

We have the ability to automatically update the data about your students to Edclick products. When changes are made in your student information system, they can automatically be mirrored in the Edclick database.

Here's how it works.

• You create a process to automatically pull a file of student data from your student information system.
• We provide you with software that runs periodically that checks whether the data has changed, encrypts the data, then sends it to the Edclick server.
• On the Edclick server, we verify that the data is from an authorized source.
• We then validate the data. If there are problems with the data, notifications are sent. Examples of problems that we often detect are poorly formed email addresses and phone numbers and notations in fields where they should not occur.
• If the data passes validation, it is merged with your current student data. New students are added. Students no longer on your list are archived. Data fields are updated.

If you would like to add automatic updates of your student data, contact support@edclick.com.

Posted at 10:54 AM (permalink) 0 Comments View/Leave Comment
Keywords: FAQ: Discipline Manager, tips, FAQ: Intervention Manager, FAQ: Tutoring Manager, FAQ: Community Service Manager

Monday, August 5, 2013

Does School Site Manager support RSS?

Yes. RSS can be used by students, parents and staff to subscribe to changes made to announcements, profiles, principal's messages and some other things that frequently change on the site.

The address of the RSS feed is http://<your-school-domain-name/RSS.cfm.

Posted at 8:58 AM (permalink) 0 Comments View/Leave Comment
Keywords: FAQ: School Site Manager, tips

Saturday, August 3, 2013

Does Discipline Manager support corporal punishment?

Yes. Only a small percentage of our Discipline Manager customers use corporal punishment as a discipline consequence. There are often special reporting requirements for the use of corporal punishment. For schools that request it, we provide support for tracking the use of corporal punishment to help with the reporting requirements.

Posted at 10:41 AM (permalink) 0 Comments View/Leave Comment
Keywords: FAQ: Discipline Manager, tips

Thursday, August 1, 2013

New School Year Tips

Here are some tips for starting the new school year right with Edclick products. Since our products are integrated, if you enter an item for one product (e.g., the No School Days for Lesson Plan Manager),  it carries over to the other products that use the same information (e.g., No School Days for Discipline Manager).

If you need help, please let us know at support@edclick.com.

Lesson Plan Manager

• Enter no school days
• Enter end of grading period dates
• Ask support@edclick.com to initialize all lesson plan sets for the new year
• Remember the online manual and tutorial movies. If you need more help, let us know.
• Has the contact person changed?

School Site Manager

• Would you like us to delete all student, parent and other accounts but keep staff accounts? 
• Would you like us to reset passwords? Let us know at support@edclick.com.
• There is a smartphone-optimized version of your website at http://<your-domain-name>/m. If you're interested in one customized to your school colors, logo, etc., contact sales@edclick.com
• Remember the online manual and tutorial movies. If you need more help, let us know.
• Try out the Try one of these tasks on the Admin page as an introduction to refresher.
• Has the contact person changed? If so, please let us know at support@edclick.com.
• Do the Lesson Plan Manager tasks if you have it embedded in School Site Manager

Discipline Manager

• You can auto-graduate students on your Configure Discipline Manager page. This increments the grade of each student by one and archives the students in the highest grade. This can be handy if there is a delay before your new student list is available. Note: only do this once.
• Enter no school days
• Enter end of grading period dates
• Send your new student list to Edclick for import. Find out about our automatic student data import feature.
• Remember the online manual and tutorial movies. If you need more help, let us know.
• Try out the Try one of these tasks on the Admin page as an introduction to refresher.
• There is a smartphone-optimized version of Discipline Manager at http://<your-domain-name>/m.
• Has the contact person changed?

Testing Manager

• Send your new student list to Edclick for import. Find out about our automatic student data import feature.
• Enter your key testing dates
• Has the contact person changed?

Intervention Manager

• You can auto-graduate students on your Configure Intervention Manager page. This increments the grade of each student by one and archives the students in the highest grade. This can be handy if there is a delay before your new student list is available. Note: only do this once.
• Send your new student list to Edclick for import. Find out about our automatic student data import feature.
• Try out the Try one of these tasks on the Admin page as an introduction to refresher.
• Has the contact person changed?

Posted at 12:24 PM (permalink) 2 Comments View/Leave Comment
Keywords: FAQ: Discipline Manager, tips, FAQ: Intervention Manager, FAQ: Testing Manager, FAQ: School Site Manager, FAQ: Lesson Plan Manager