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

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

Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Can we create example discipline referrals, intervention plans or testing accommodations for fictitious students?

Yes. We have some test students that you can use for example referrals and for practice in learning how to use the system.

The data about test students will not appear in reporting so won't skew your statistics.

Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer are two test students. And even if you have actual students who have those names, the system can tell the difference.

Posted at 1:41 PM (permalink) 3 Comments View/Leave Comment
Keywords: FAQ: Discipline Manager, tips, FAQ: Intervention Manager, FAQ: Testing Manager

Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Once we've loaded our student list, how can we add new students?

Typically, at the beginning of the school year, schools send Edclick their new student list. We load the new list into the database. (For some schools, we can make this process automatic. Ask us how.)

However, throughout the year, students come and go. How can we keep up? There are two ways.

1. You can send Edclick a new file of student data to load whenever you like.
2. If you have just a few changes to make, you can make those changes individually yourself. There is no problem that changes you make might get out of sync with changes we make.

Of course, if we are doing automatic student list uploads from your school, the right thing just happens and no one has to do anything. 

Posted at 1:35 PM (permalink) 3 Comments View/Leave Comment
Keywords: FAQ: Discipline Manager, tips

Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Does Testing Manager have a way of keeping track of which teachers have signed their oaths of compliance?

Yes. Many states are like Texas in that they require that teachers sign an oath that they will keep starndardized test booklets secure. Every teacher needs to sign an oath and signed oaths must be kept on file for several years. Necessary, perhaps, but it is another paperwork bother for testing coordinators to deal with.

Testing Manager makes managing oaths much easier. Testing Manager 

• Automatically keeps track of whom the oaths were requested,
• Which teachers have signed their oaths,
• Which teachers have not signed their oaths and
• Maintains an online archive of signed oaths without taking up file cabinet space.

It's all done electronically but has the same legal status as a signed piece of paper.

Posted at 1:28 PM (permalink) 7 Comments View/Leave Comment
Keywords: FAQ: Testing Manager, tips

Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Can Tutoring Manager specify tutoring to the level of individual learning standards?

Yes. When assigning a student to tutoring, one often wants to student to master a particular body of knowledge or a particular skill. In assessing the effectiveness of the tutoring (or the tutor), one needs to know what to assess.

Although Tutoring Manager can be used to track generic tutoring assignments (e.g., "catch up in math") it can also be specific to individual learning standards. In addition, tutors can be qualified in general (e.g., "Math") or can be qualified for particular learning standards. The latter opens the possibilities for maintaining a database of students who tutor their peers on specific learning standards.

Posted at 1:18 PM (permalink) 3 Comments View/Leave Comment
Keywords: FAQ: Tutoring Manager, tips

Wednesday, July 31, 2013

How can I verify that emails to parents were actually sent?

Sometimes you want to verify or prove that an email that you sent to a parent about their child actually was sent.

We now have a way to archive copies of all emails to parents sent through Discipline Manager. You can specify a Discipline BCC address. If you have one, every email to parents will also be blind copied to the Discipline BCC address. Simply archive these copies and have a full record of the emails you have sent to parents.

Posted at 1:08 PM (permalink) 0 Comments View/Leave Comment
Keywords: FAQ: Discipline Manager, tips