SIS Update - July 29, 2019

It's been a couple months since we've provided an update and I hope that hasn't made you too misty-eyed.

Rest assured, here's the beginning to your updates moving forward with our SIS integration.

Here are some dates to remind you and updates on what's been happening.



July 1 - Parents and students could no longer login to PCR through their Parent and Student Portals. They were reminded by Office of Communications to update their information and given an alternate means to update their address over the summer.

July 1-16 - The final data migration from PCR to Infinite Campus occurred.

July 22-26 - A series of trainings occurred for people who were tasked with ensuring the data was accurate. They received their login credentials and learned how to navigate to their parts of the system and edit, add and delete as needed, while comparing the data to PCR. The Departments represented at these trainings were:

• Admissions for census, people and household
• Schedulers for scheduling purposes
• Division Heads, Attendance, Admin Support and Deans for behavior, attendance, report cards and transcripts
• LID Team for instructional support
• Nurses for health information and potential
• Office of Communications for messaging and parent portal

Needless to say, there was a lot of information covered in a short five days, but we rallied and are making it work in true Harker fashion!

July 29 - Admissions and Schedulers met to digest the previous week's information, ask new questions and create personal plans to complete the information needed in time for...

August 5 - The Parent Portal will have an updated tile that will direct parents to update their information, as needed.

Additionally, Staff and Faculty will receive information about how to login to your new Student Information System (SIS), along with a couple tutorials that will apply to everyone.

August 5-6 - Some Faculty are choosing to come in for a few hours to work with their LID Director, explore and learn Infinite Campus. This RSVP form went out in the Spring, but you can still sign-up!

As always, feel free to email me (Liz Brumbaugh) or Jesse Lara if you have any questions moving forward. Thank you for your continued patience, flexibility and humor.

SIS Update ~ May 17, 2019

This has been an exciting time for the SIS Transition! Here are the most recent updates:

Administrative Meeting Updates:

The following handout was provided in the most recent Administrative Team Meeting, which provides a clear outline of our summer timeline and trainings:

TIMELINE

• What is the timeline for Migration #3 and Training?
• June 10
• Administrative Assistant’s Training on Infinite Campus Introduction, Campus Community and Schoology
• July 1
• The Parent Portal tile will be disabled with an “Under Construction” blurb
• Parents will be given information about the changes from Jesse and the Office of Communications
• Teachers and Staff will still be able to access and email through Teacher Connect and PCR Campus Portal
• July 17
• Data Review with Jesse, Preeti, Liz and others, as they are available
• July 22 - 26
• Train the Trainers - training with Colleen Hannigan, from Infinite Campus, on-site - invitations for these sessions have gone out
• July 29
• With complete training, Admissions and Schedulers can now fully check all data and make changes in infinite campus - this is also when any parent changes to census info could be updated
• July 30-31
• LID Team prepares new trainings materials
• July 30-August 2
• Buffer room for fixes, adjustments, data clean-up
• August 5
• Official “Go Live” for Parents, Teachers and Faculty
• August 5-6
• Faculty optional trainings for those who don’t want to wait until returning teacher’s week (11 signed up so far)

Date	Training	Length	Topics
7/22/19 Onsite	Student Information Census Ad Hoc	8 hours	1.   Overview of Student Module and Community Account set up (2 hours) 2.   New student enrollments, creating households, census modifications 3.   Census Workshop
7/23/19	Grading Setup Review Course/Section Scheduling Student Scheduling Ad Hoc	AM-Secondary PM-Lower	1.   Course/Section review, Grade Calc, Grading Tasks 2.   Walk-In Scheduler, Roster Setup, Student Gap Scheduler, Roster Copy, Reports
7/24/19	Attendance Behavior Transcript/Report Cards Ad Hoc	8 hours	1.   Classroom Monitor, Daily Attendance, Attendance Wizard, Messenger/Scheduler, Letters (2 hours) 2.   Behavior Management, Behavior Referral (2 hours) 3.   Input & Modify Transcript Entries (2 hours)
7/25/19	Teacher Coach - Lower Teacher Coach - Secondary	AM-Lower PM-Secondary	1.   Campus Instruction Module 2.   Campus Learning Modules taught based on tool rights
7/26/19	Messenger w/Voice Setup Messenger w/Voice End User Placeholder for Miscellaneous    Training		1. Messenger w/Voice Setup-2 hours 2. Messenger w/Voice End User-2 hours

TRAINING ALREADY PROVIDED

• Campus Community Trainings
• ~50 people trained - Faculty & Staff
• 6 opportunities offered
• Schoology Trainings
• MS and US, created based on blending information from Schoology Survey and Known Needs
• US ~12 people at 8 sessions
• MS ~15 people at 7 sessions
• All training materials housed on website, emailed last week
• https://sites.google.com/harker.org/lid-resources-internal/schoology

FAQs

• Why can’t we learn everything now?
• We have been providing Campus Community training. This is largely theoretical and includes self-paced information and is not specific to our needs.
• Best practices in teaching and learning (especially with technology) is that people learn and retain information best if they’re working with the actual interface they will be using. Teaching anything now would lead to:
• Forgotten understandings
• Inaccurate understandings
• Frustration
• Blaming the system
• Why can’t we train sooner than July?
• The longer we wait, the more time we have to ensure the data is as updated and as clean as possible
• Why can’t we wait until August to train?
• This was a major concern from our previous migration - that training took place too late

DATA REVIEW #2 MEETING

Additionally, we reviewed the data from the second migration on May 15, and we're now continuing to review discrepancies and recognizing if the discrepancies are expected or not. Of course, if they are not expected, the Infinite Campus Team and our own Implementation Team looks into why that might be and works to rectify it for the next data rollover.

SIS SUCCESS TEAM MEETING

Finally, the SIS Success Team met to ensure we were communicating a consistent message and that we all had the same, accurate information. The following slides were used for this meeting.

For future blog posts / email updates, you can expect to hear again at the following times:

July 19

August 2

August 30

September 20

December 13

May 15

SIS Update - April 12, 2019

While it may seem like all is quiet on our western front, many people have been busily working behind the scenes to prepare for a smooth transition to Infinite Campus. Here are some updates on what's been happening:

• Our Director of Technology, Director of LID and Database Manager (that would be Jesse Lara, me and Preeti Sharan) have been meeting with the team from Infinite Campus 1-3 times each week (and more as needed), working through the details of each part of our transition and needs.
• We had a successful Data Transition of some preliminary information. Basically, this means that we took some of our data from PCR and copied it into Infinite Campus. Mostly, we copied over household information. 
• We are currently in the process of reviewing how that information copied over, what it looks like and why and identifying if any discrepancies are 1) issues that need resolving and 2) if so, is it best to resolve them now in PCR or to wait until they are in Infinite Campus and "clean" those issues later.
• For those of you who've never worked with databases, this may seem like a logical "YES! Clean it now!" But sometimes, there is data that does not impact anything else, and perhaps cleaning it in a newer system that has methods to update things in bulk, rather than one-at-a-time, is actually advantageous.
• There have been no glaring issues that we don't have time to resolve - yay! 
• There will be a second Data Transition in May, and that will include courses and sections being rolled over.
• As you can imagine, the Admissions Assistants have been invaluable to helping us look at the first round of data. The Schedulers will also be invaluable in looking at the second round of data.

So, what about training?

• I'm so glad you asked! Here's an overview of the trainings that have been on-going, and communicated via email from me or the division-specific LID Directors:
• Campus Community Trainings are ongoing - this platform teaches those who are interested in how to use the self-help website that comes with our Infinite Campus subscription. If you don't attend a training, that's okay, because you'll be trained at the start of nest school year either during Returning Teacher's Week or in a Department Meeting or via the plethora of training materials that your LID Team is creating for all of you.
• Schoology Trainings are being offered at the Middle and Upper School. Check your email inboxes for those emails from Dr. Abigail Joseph and Ms. Diane Main. If you have not been using Schoology, you should go to those sessions. Reach out to your LID Director today! :)

Finally, I received a lot of positive and reflective responses to a couple select slides that I shared at the January All-Faculty Meeting, and while they were also in the slides posted in the most recent blog post, I want to ensure you have them easily accessible here, as well.

Whenever there is a change, it is difficult and requires new learning. New learning is always challenging because it forces us out of our comfort zones. During this time of transition, I ask for your understanding and your reflection on where you are and where you'd like to be in relationship to the chart below. 

Your LID and Technology Departments are here to help you with this transition and appreciate your patience, support and cheerleading. :) If we all cheer for each other and raise one another up, we'll be much happier in the long-run.

SIS Update - February 1, 2018

Here are the slides from the All Faculty Meeting on January 30, 2019, providing updates and preliminary training information for both Schoology and Infinite Campus.

Winter SIS Update

The following are updates and information for all of you to peruse in regards to the most recent developments in our Infinite Campus implementation process.

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On January 15-16, a team of Infinite Campus representatives will be coming to meet with various people across all four campuses for a series of Data meetings and Discovery meetings.

The goal of their meetings is primarily to gain information and get into the weeds of details in everything from bell schedules, grading periods, student number formats, attendance processes, report cards and transcript formats, integration with any and all other systems and so, so much more. In addition, they'll be introducing the LID team to their pre-made training materials, and beginning their work with ITSS and the data migration process.

If you see Infinite Campus representatives on your campus next Tuesday, January 15, please give them a warm welcome, but also recognize that we are on a very tight schedule and if you do see them, chances are that they are scurrying from one meeting to another.

On January 16, the team will be mostly at the Saratoga Campus.

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You should also know that effective August 2019, if you are a MS or US Teacher, you will be using Schoology for all assignments and grading.

The syncing of those scores will happen automatically with Infinite Campus.

The only reasons you will need to go into Infinite Campus will be to 1) take attendance and 2) to align the imported scores to categories that you have created.

• At the start of the year, you will be shown how to create categories in Infinite Campus (often called "Campus" for short).
• Then, you create an assignment in Schoology, assign it to students, and grade it as you usually would.
• On a regular basis, you will go into Infinite Campus and see a list of assignments that need alignment to a category. This process is as simple as clicking two checkboxes (an assignment checkbox and a category checkbox) and then clicking save.

When we have the materials to show you this process, we'll provide those, but for now, I'm hoping my simplistic text-based description is sufficient enough to whet your whistle. Gone are the days of entering all assignment descriptions and grade information in two places. Yay!

***********

The tentative plan for training and the migration of data is as follows, but please remember it is very tentative and much will rest on additional information we'll be given next week and further:

Spring 2019: 

• The LID Team will begin offering Schoology and General Infinite Campus trainings - a schedule will be announced and trainings will be offered at all campuses and also periodically recorded and offered via video conference to accommodate travel needs and viewing afterwards, as desired
• Meanwhile, ITSS will be working diligently to do 1-2 practice runs of data migration, copying data from PCR and placing it into a "fake" Infinite Campus site / instance to ensure that it's accurate, functional and works for us.
• When the school year ends, our data can then be officially ported into our realInfinite Campus instance.

Summer 2019:

• July - The official data migration will take place. This is a two-week process wherein for Week One, all data will be copied from PCR. For Week Two, all of that copied information will be ported into Infinite Campus.
• The process of data migration in the summer will not be the first time this occurs, as indicated above. 
• In lieu of LID Innovation Grants for the last two weeks of July and first week of August, the LID Team will be providing trainings, using our live site. More detailed information about both LID Innovation Grants and Infinite Campus Trainings will be provided as we near this time.
• Finally, everyone will receive training, as usual, during Returning Teacher week. However, this will not be the first time you are offered training.
• In addition, the LID Team will be creating a website that will include all training materials for Schoology and Infinite Campus, in addition to the plethora of training materials in a variety of formats directly from Infinite Campus. Our training website will include text-based materials, guided practice, as well as videos to address all learning preferences.

After the meetings, I'll be able to provide an additional follow-up post and email. Thank you for reading, staying informed and as always, for your support and patience.

Fall 2018 Implementation Update

I just wanted to give you all a little update about our process in implementing our new Student Information System (SIS). Here are some of the things we’ve done since you last heard from me:

• All contracts were negotiated and signed and POs were drawn up
• Last week, the Infinite Campus Sales Team wanted to meet with me, our head of IT (Jesse), Preeti and our Schedulers. We met for about 90 minutes online and they asked for some basic information about bell schedules and attendance protocols and the primary purpose of the meeting was to introduce us to our Implementation Project Manager, Katie Groth, as well as the team of four others from Infinite Campus who will be supporting our transition.
• We created an Implementation Team made of the following people, because they fit the types of roles Infinite Campus indicated would be most helpful:
• Me, Jesse Lara, Jennifer Gargano, Preeti Sharan, Kristin Giammona, Evan Barth, Lori Villarreal, Marianne Rager, Troy Thiele
• The SIS Success Team is still an integral part to our entire process, and will continue to be used as a resource as specific implementation questions arise.
• This Implementation Team will be meeting with all of Infinite Campus’ Team in early November, after which I will provide an additional update about more specific details.

(This blogpost was also sent to AllHarker on 10/19/18)