ProgressBook User Group Meeting
October 22, 2009
Attendees: Central Square – John Meyer (Turn-Key Teacher)
Tully – Jennifer Newton (Guidance)
Skaneateles – Georgette Hoskins (High School Principal)
Mike Major (Assistant High School Principal)
MJ May (Turn-Key Teacher)
Margaret Culkowski (Department Head)
Shelly Hutson (Guidance)
Hannibal – Tom O’Neil (High School Turn-Key Teacher)
Dan Rupert (Middle School Turn-Key Teacher)
Pam Winchek (Guidance)
ProgressBook – Angelo Costa (Sales Executive)
Deanna Leeders (Program Architect)
CNY RIC – Lori West (Department Manager)
Eric Hovater (Department Consultant)
Marcia Fenocchi (ProgressBook Trainer)
Brenda Wiseth (ProgressBook Trainer)
Meeting Details
Top 5 Concerns:
Accumulative Averages reflecting Year-to-date information needs to be made available.
Comments entry is cumbersome and the current process leaves a lot of room for errors to be made. Deanna made a suggestion to incorporate “click lists” into this field to allow users to type the number of the code, but only those codes in the list will be accepted. Marcia and Brenda will test at the RIC and if this works, will communicate with the users to see if they want to have this change made in each of their report cards.
SAVE improvements need to be made by adding SAVE button locations in convenient locations and in a consistent fashion, and by displaying warning messages for users trying to navigate away from a page without saving their work.
Improving upon the Class Alias Script for classes with a second meeting time (i.e. Lab) to easily identify which is the primary class to ensure grades are entered into the correct class.
Parent Access Address filtering to allow for students with parents in separate residences to each be sent a Parent Access User ID, Password and details at their own residents and not the students address.
ProgressBook User Group Meeting – Page 2
Other District Concerns and/or suggestions:
Add a report option to allow teachers to create roster type report that contains contact information for their students like those currently available in SIS.
The inability to see all of their assignment grades with the current GradeBook because of the size of the columns, way that it scrolls and date driven marking periods is cumbersome.
They would like to be able to move the curser around the Gradebook with the use of their Arrow Keys.
Some teachers would like to be able to print more reports with student numbers on them in place of the student name.
They would like to see the reports that could be rounded like the Report Card does.
Schedule changes show as “W” student and they have to be manually hidden. Discussion took place to see if teachers could select to view their students by “All”, “Active” or “Inactive” students which hide the “W” students automatically when “Active” is selected.
We also discussed the use of the “transfer tool” to transfer assignments when a student transfers from one class to another session. Deanna overviewed this tool and discussed some of the features it offers if the assignments in both classes match.
Teachers asked for easier ways to print a student’s Report Card from the Report Card page. The current format can be very long with several pages of wasted space.
An Administrative tool has been requested that would allow school administration to have the ability to view the staff usage details to determine which staff members are currently using ProgressBook for assignments, posting grades and posting student progress to the Parent Access portal.
Districts were reminded of the necessity of consistency of their Reporting Cycles. Please verify all dates are correct in SIS and communicate with us any date changes made to the Report Card processing steps.
Parent Access issues and/or suggestions:
Currently – Central Square is using Parent Access for its entire Student Body. Skaneateles is about to begin a pilot with a couple of High School teachers and has concerns about the competitive nature and final averages calculations that they want to test before launching to all students. Hannibal High School has teachers that are ready to pilot once they get the administrative approval to move forward, and the Middle School has requested Parent Access be turned on for some of its teachers in the very near future. Since it has to be done by district, the schools in Hannibal will need to work together on this timeline. Tully would like to launch Parent Access in the 2010-2011 school year.
The text file is hard to use. Could it be made into a Data (.dat) file instead?
User ID’s and Passwords are very long – some are more than 20 characters for each field.
There are concerns about the addresses used. Deanna advised that ProgressBook uses the Students address and addresses it to “the parent of” the student at the student’s address. We discussed future options where different forms of filtering might be used to determine the contact address and also the use of SIS addresses to create the mailing details for the letter and enclosing a card with the ProgressBook details for the Passwords and User IDs in the with letters for mailing.
ProgressBook User Group Meeting – Page 3
Overview of ProgressBook Upcoming Enhancements:
Deanna advised that with the next release, due on or after October 28th, there will be a correction made to the GradeBook paging problem where the hyperlinks to additional pages will work to display pages in the same marking period that had been requested. (no longer jumping to the marking period we are currently in). Also, ProgressBook will track the changes made to report card and assignment marks, ip addresses used to access ProgressBook accounts and also staff log in and logout details (in the Administrative application).
The Winter Release, scheduled around February 24th, will introduce the new Self Service Reporting tool that will allow for the customized creation of some of their reports (Student Demographics, Assignment Marks, Student Progress Graphing and Report Card Marks – which will include an option to view Year-to-date averages). This new tool will allow users to add and remove columns, easily filter information, change sorting, export data and create and save customized report types so that they can re-run them anytime without having to re-create them each time. Eventually, it is hoped that all current reports will be added to this tool as well as customized reports created by our users could also be shared with other users.
In the next year, the GradeBook will see some major improvements with locking the student name column to allow teachers to easily scroll to end of the marking period assignments and still be able to view the student’s name. Deanna will also check on the possibility of anchoring the assignment details across the top, but did not know if it could be a double scroll. There were also issues about the way the text and averages wrap – creating wider rows, and Deanna will look into those concerns as well. Late flags, Retake Marks and Progress Report sorting options are also being planned for this future release.
As a reminder to users, when new versions are sent out, they are loaded here at the RIC, which requires us taking down the server. We try to schedule these outages during down times (after hours) and never during Marking Period grade entry periods. We make every effort to advise our user team in advance with the details of the outage and also the overview of the changes that will take place with the new version. If you have any questions with this process, please feel free to let us know.
Next PBUG Meeting:
April 15, 2010 - from 9-11 AM, at the RIC
We hope to see you there!