Web2School Upgrade, 01/16/10

Web2School server at Currier, Dorset and Sunderland were upgraded to verssion 1.77.1a. See the new features below.


New Features in v 1.77.1a:
Teacher Desk – Taking valuable input from teachers and administrators, we have made some significant changes in the Teacher Desk. Color has been added to the display windows, icons are improved, and frequently-used functions are easily accessible from multiple places. Double-clicking a course now opens to the window you probably use the most often – the Daily Grades window.
New Daily Grades Interface – The Edit Daily Grades screen under the Teacher Desk has been re-designed to put more control in the hands of teachers with fewer clicks. A toolbar is now embedded in the window containing drop-down choices for:

o Assignments – Teachers can use the new Quick Add or Quick Modify to add or change assignments and assignment types. Quick Add opens the assignment type and allows you to quickly enter a new assignment. When an assignment is already selected, Quick Modify opens the assignment and allows you to modify the name or any other information about the assignment.

o Notes – Allows you to view/edit student or assignment notes. Right-clicking in the assignment cell also gives you immediate access to notes.

o Actions – This menu gives you access to the Drop Lowest Grade, Copy Grade, Zoom Assignments, Manage Roster, and Manage Colors features.

o Reports – This drop-down menu combines the previous ‘view text’ screens with Web2school’s powerful grade book reports. View All Students in CSV creates a single spreadsheet with all students and all grades for this term of the course. View Single Student creates a simple text file with all grade data for the selected term/course. The remaining 4 Grade Book reports, Daily Grades, Student Daily Grades, Class Assignments, and Daily Grade Summary, formerly only available under the Grade Book Reports menu, are now easily accessible from within the teacher grade book.

Other display changes – Teachers will see other display enhancements, including:

o The Working Term now displays on the Teacher Desk. For those teachers who are assigned a calendar, the working term will always be determined by the date and term definitions in the calendar. For teachers who are not assigned a calendar, the term will default to the last term worked in on that computer.

o Term Average grades that are not auto-calculated will now display in Bold in both the Daily Grades window and the Averages and Exams window.

o Grades that have been dropped using the Drop Lowest Grade feature will display in italic and in parentheses.

Daily Grades and Student Information– Right-click on the student name to see drop-down menu options including View Student Information, View Grades Detail, View Student Notes, and control of the course roster.

Daily Grades and Assignment Information– Click on the Assignment heading to Zoom, Add or Modify the Assignment, to assign/clear an existing color for an entire column, or to select an assignment whose grades you would like to use for Mid-term, Final, or Custom Exam grades. Right-click on an individual student’s assignment to control cell color, view/edit student and assignment notes, and to add/modify assignments.

Assignment Types and Assignments – The field length has been extended to allow for longer entries.

Averages and Exams Interface – The Averages and Exams window has also been re-designed. Radio buttons are used for number/letter grade switching as well as for turning Autocalcs on/off. A right-click allows you to View Term Notes for a student. Grades for Final, Mid-term, or Custom Exams may be copied from an assignment in Daily Grades by clicking the assignment heading and selecting the Copy Values to Exam. The new Options button allows teachers to:

o Turn auto-calculations on and off for all students at once. When changed to Off, the previously auto-calculated grade remains in bold. You may also turn auto-calcs on or off by student by right-clicking their term average.

o Use View Text button to create a simple report containing term average and exam information for each student.

o Use Export CSV to create a spreadsheet of term average and exam information for the course.

o View configured comments.

Advanced Custom Exports:
Elementary Daily Grades – Teacher, course, skill, and grade data may now be exported from the elementary grade database into a spreadsheet.

Discipline – Discipline data and student data may now selected in one export.

Master Schedule Filters– When a user exports Master Schedule, the Filter option will now give the choice to filter by course name, number, or department.

Master Schedule Course and Sections – There are now several course and section formats to select from in a master schedule export including course/section, course-section, and course:section.

Course Notes:
There is no longer a limitation to the amount of text entered for the Notes field in the Course information window. The course notes will now wrap to the field as there is no longer a size limit.

Attendance:
Class Attendance – The window is enlarged to display more students without scrolling. In addition, a tally now displays at the bottom of the window indicating the numbers of students who have been assigned class attendance categories (AB, DS, etc).

Entry and Withdrawal Membership Information – An option has been added allowing users to copy values from a previous entry or withdrawal field, defaulting to the most recent entry or withdrawal instance. This enables to retain most values and to make only required changes.

Scheduling:
Show Dropped Courses – In the student schedule window, you may display courses that have been dropped.

State Categories and Utilities:
State Categories – Users now have options to tag descriptive and user-defined categories as “Required” or “Hidden”. With the “Required” option, the State Utility window checks to see if a value has been associated with these fields and flags the ones that does not, back to the user. With the “Hidden” option, users can now choose to not display categories which are already displayed in the Attendance section. These options have been added to minimize data entry errors.

State Utilities – Validate Fields – There is a new option on the main search window to validate the fields associated with the list of students in the search window. This window will display all of the Descriptive and User Defined values associated with each student in a spreadsheet type format. Users can scan for missing information and edit the fields to fill the required information.

State Utilities – Attendance – A new tab has been added to the State Utilities window which displays the same attendance information as shown in the Student Information Attendance tab window. This feature was added to facilitate easier input of information for students who move from one category to another which results in an attendance enrollment change (ex. Special Education, Free and Reduced status etc).

SpEdDoc Upgrade to Version 8.0

SpEdDoc 8.0 is out. BRSU SpEdDoc will be upgraded to this latest version on September 18, 2009 after 3:00 p.m. The system will be down for about an hour to perform this upgrade.

SpEdDoc 8.0 includes the final Vermont DOE special education forms which are mandated for use this school year. Forms in versions earlier than SpEdDoc 8.0 are no longer in compliance.

Message Security Login

I have created a shortcut to login into Google Message Security. You can get there directly by going to:

http://ms.brsu.org


Dan

Web2school Upgrade to 1.76.4 on 7/5/09

I am upgrading Web2School on 7/5/09 to version 1.76.4. Here are the new features:

New Features in v 1.76.4:

·Add New Student Window - The Add Student window now features the ability to add multiple students at one time, and optionally, a calendar, entry date, and entry and residency codes for those states requiring that data.

·New Entry/Withdrawal Date Window – The tool for mass assigning entry dates for students has been enhanced to also allow mass assigning of withdrawal dates. Some states require that seniors are withdrawn as of their last day of school, which may be different from the last day of the school calendar. The withdrawal date entered would be the day following their final day of attendance. This tool, which is available from the Tools -> Global -> Student -> Entry / Withdrawal Dates, is especially useful for Maine schools to do the MEDMS exports to the state.

·Homeroom Assignments – You now have the ability to assign students to homerooms randomly or alphabetically. Under Tools – Global – Homerooms – List of Homerooms, you select the homeroom(s) to assign, then select the group of students to be assigned, and choose whether to assign either randomly or alphabetically.


Grade Book / Teacher Desk:

Ability to Drop Lowest Grade – Teachers have the option to drop one or more of the lowest assignment grades in a selected assignment type or across multiple assignment types. Scores will still display in bold italic, but will not longer be part of the calculated grade. You may undo the drop to restore those grades to the calculation.

Pie and Bar Graphs – Assignment data may be viewed in a bar graph or a pie graph format. Simply click on the name of the assignment to display detailed statistics about the assignment, along with your choice of pie graph or bar graph of the assignment grade data.

Mailing Labels from Class Roster – Teachers may print mailing labels for all students in a given class roster. Click the Roster button on the left of the Teacher Desk, then click Mailing Labels. The labels will display on the screen. Click File, then Print.

Class Roster View or Print - Class rosters may be printed directly from the Edit Grade Book Roster window by clicking View Text, then File -> Print.

Discipline From Teacher Desk – The Add Infraction button has been added to the Teacher Desk so the teacher can enter a discipline incident without having to change windows.

Warning for wrong term – In Averages and Exams, the teacher will be warned if they attempt to put grades in for a Term that the course is not offered.


Scheduling:

Course Maximums – You may now schedule more than 250 students in a course. This is useful for schools that mass schedule lunch and other courses.

Modify Master Schedule Course and Teacher Selection - When adding a new course to the master schedule and selecting a teacher for a course, you may type in the first characters of the name rather than scrolling through the entire list.

Student Roster Capabilities Within Master Schedule – Students may be added to or removed from the schedule roster from within the Master Schedule. Click the Roster button for the course, and then Modify to open the Student Roster window for adding and removing students from the course.

Print Mailing Labels Within Master Schedule – Mailing labels may be printed for all students in a course from within the Master Schedule. Click the Roster button for the course, then click Mailing Labels.

Open Multiple Schedule Rosters – You may open multiple course schedule rosters simultaneously.



Reporting:

Additional Report Filters – The full range of report filters is now available for grade book threshold reports, report cards, and progress reports. Filters include Student, YOG, Gender, Categories, and Homeroom.

Schedule Matrix and Students Without Course Requests – These reports now have a Student Filter.


Health:

Immunization and Screening Windows – The age and date of birth of each student now displays on the Immunization Information window and each of the Screening Information windows.

Immunization Windows – Users can now add immunizations with just exemptions without having a date done or due date.

Health Window Performance – Enhancements have been made to improve the display speed of the Health Desk window.

Belated SpEdDoc Upgrade Complete

I upgraded BRSU SpEdDoc to version 7.4 this weekend. Enjoy!

SpEdDoc and FileMaker Upgrade on 5/22/09

I will be shutting down BRSU SpEdDoc at 3 p.m. on Friday, May 22, 2009 to perform upgrades to the system including upgrading FileMaker Pro and FileMaker Server to version 10 and SpEdDoc to version 7.4. I expect to have the system back up later that afternoon.

The new version of SpEdDoc was designed to take advantage of new features in FileMaker Pro 10 including a significant change to the appearance of the navigation tool bars. The DOE forms remain unchanged in this version. New features include:

• A new back button that allows users to navigate backwards (and forwards) similar to a browser, tracing user history in the current session.
• SpEdDoc navigation buttons moved to the left hand column freeing up the area above layouts for new FileMaker menus and toolbars.
• FileMaker menu items that were previously grayed out are now available to users.
• Further expansion of Preferences to customize the way SpEdDoc works in our organization.

Setting Up a Blackberry for BRSU.ORG

1. Disable "push email" for the Blackberry - Blackberry made its name developing a platform to "push email" to cell phones. You do not need to use this feature since Google has developed a solution to deliver email to your Blackberry.




• Log into the provider (AT&T or Verizon Wireless) section of the Blackberry website


• Create a filter for your email address that prevents mail from being forwarded to your device. If you do not do this you will receive a duplicate message to your Blackberry every time you send an email out using Gmail.
  


• Do not configure the default email client on the Blackberry - you will use the Gmail application to check your mail. I hide this application on my home screen.





2. Install the Google Mobile App for Blackberry. Go to the site and type in your phone number. You will receive a text message on your phone with a link to the download page. Make sure to install Sync and the other Google Mobile Apps (Gmail, Talk, Maps).




• Use the Google Mobile App Gmail application to check your mail - your Gmail contacts will be available from within this application as you address email.


• Sync will synchronize your Google calendar and contacts with the built-in Blackberry applications.