I had the opportunity to meet with interested teachers from the following divisions this week: four from the Upper School, all of the Preschool faculty and seven teachers from the Middle School, to learn about how they use the Student Information System, and to discover their needs that they may have in the kind of data reports that they might need to pull from a potential system.
As with each of these sessions, I presented them with this slidedeck:
And here was their wish list and particular items of note:
- Upper School Feedback
- Email read receipts; access history
- Grade history
- Absences and tardies history
- Ease of data entry for assignments
- Copy/paste/ data integrity in assignment descriptions
- Yearly rollovers of assignments
- Mapping year-to-year days, rather than dates for assignments
- Summer school issues with non-Harker households
- Collaboration with other teachers; seeing planning guides, etc.
- Who teaches what when; master schedule
- Calendar view options
- Test calendar - who put in what when
- Inputting tests -editing entries doesn't change priority
- Grades - user-friendly and flexibility
- Multiple pathways clarity
- Preschool Feedback
- Printing emergency contacts easily
- Alerts for changes to contact info or other
- Directory - easily organized by cottage
- Interoperability with Kinderlime and Group Spaces
- Signatures in SIS emails
- Auto-fill email addresses
- Middle School Feedback
- Interoperability - open API
- Training plan
- UX
- Latency rates
- Printing class lists ease
- Stock and Custom Reports - what currently exists?
- Smart search (v. dumb search)
- Split screen or multitasking ability
- Email - reply-all function
- Ease of finding sent emails
- Ease of group creation
- Data integrity and control
- Gradebook - multiple assignment creation with multiple dates
- Responsive theme
- Data parameters - score highlights in gradebook, health concerns, other special circumstances
- Multiple grading views
- Easy quick access for student details
- Notifications for missing assignments
- Student notes
- Email read receipts and which email is actually used
I had the opportunity to meet with the Sue Prutton and Lori Villareal, on behalf of Administrative Assistants and Attendance, and because it was recommended by multiple other groups that Sue and Lori would be a good people from which to receive feedback, to learn about how they use the Student Information System, and to discover their needs that they may have in the kind of data reports that they might need to pull from a potential system.
As with each of these sessions, I presented them with this slidedeck:
And here was their wish list and particular items of note:
- Interoperability with Ravenna
- Student, parents and household ID assignment - how does that occur - can they be manually assigned?
- Data control and integrity
- Demographics reporting - stock and custom
- Contract/ Deposit/ ACH Form Notifications & Access
- Ease of use for parents to re-enroll
- Parent to-do list for re-enrollments
- Access to previous years grades, transcripts, report cards
- Ability to archive previous years
- Access to gradebooks from previous years
- UL DL / Latency time when gradebook reports are running (monthly) - takes 2+ hours per grade level
- Parent teacher conference scheduling management
- Bell schedules - we have around 70 schedules @ US - ease of creating new schedules - LS has even more schedules
