Approaching the end of the 2015-2016 School Year. A Time for reflection.

Todd DeSchuiteneer

Finals are over, Seniors are graduating, and the weather is slowly getting warmer, all these signs point to one thing: the school year is coming to an end! This means you’ll finally have some time to sit back and relax a bit, right? No, we all know there is no rest for the wicked and the summer is a time to get things done. As you finish up the school year, it’s time to start thinking about any problems or roadblocks that may have come up during the past year, so you can make adjustments to courses, terms, grading, etc. before going into your annual procedures. This article is the first in a three part series to help guide you through setting up your school for less headaches, stress and late nights next year and maybe give you some much needed time to relax before school starts back up again!


A time for reflection:
Now is a great time for you, as an Administrator, to start thinking about all the problems you may have encountered over the last year. Scour your emails, browse through Case Central, you could even reach out to your constituents to determine what really didn’t work for your school this year. This is the time to make a list of all the thing that didn’t work and figure out what changes need to be made to your setup and workflow in the system. We know it can be hard to get started on this, so here are some example scenarios with possible solutions to get you thinking about how to make the ON Suite experience better for your school!


Roster Shuffling:  
Did you find that you were shuffling rosters around a lot at the end of terms? Were you changing teachers or complete rosters to accommodate the new term? One thing you might want to look at is the course lengths for these courses. If you are finding yourself needing to rebuild rosters after each term, you might want to set up these courses as one term courses instead of year long courses. This will allow you to set the rosters during your initial data imports or when first running Schedule Maker and then you don’t have to worry about them again.

Single term courses will also preserve Grade Books for each term. As you likely know, students who are dropped from a course do not have their Grades retained in the Grade Book. With less roster shuffling between terms, you’ll no longer need to worry about getting hard copies of dropped students’ assignment grades or using the Grades – for Dropped Students report.

We often hear from schools that the problem with single term course setup is that content needs to be added to each section independently, but this is a great opportunity to direct your teachers to use the Import Materials option! This handy tool allows Teachers to import Bulletin Boards, Topics and Assignments from one course to the next. This will eliminate some of the misgivings teachers or administrators might have about having their courses set up as one term.


Terms and Marking Periods:
Did any issues arise this past school year where either terms or marking periods overlapped and caused issues?  Now is a great time to start thinking about what dates should be set up for this year so those same problems don’t occur in the coming year.

Letter Grade Scales:  

Have a look at your letter grade scales.  Are these in use?  The end of a the school year is a great time to poll teachers to find out just how many applied this set up to their grade book and see if it’s time to re-work or delete any letter grade scales for the next school year that may be set up incorrectly or not in use by teachers.  If polling your teachers isn’t your thing, you can always run the Grade Book Parameters - By Section Report to view who used letter grade scales.

Communication:
Did any communication issues come up this year?  Parents confused by bulletin board posts?  Students reaching out via messaging and email overwhelming the teachers?  Now is a great time to start thinking about how your academic community communicates with each other and evaluate you current communication strategy.  Communication can be a major stress point for many faculty, especially if there are multiple locations they need to check.  Think about streamlining this process and leveraging the applications built in messaging, notification and push email features to better connect with your community and get them logging in to explore all that the school is offering.

General Set-up:
Remember how crazy the beginning of the school year can be with students returning and all of the potential setup issues? Maybe teachers started adding assignments to their grade books before they set them up. Or students and parents couldn’t access their assignment grades because Grade Access wasn’t set up properly?  These are little things that can be easily missed or overlooked in the Annual Procedures document. This is a great time to start looking through your old Help Desk tickets or emails from teachers to make a list of easily preventable problems and start brainstorming creative solutions for them to start next year off on the right foot!