Author: Azreen Latiff

Vote Thomas Cha for QuickSchools Teacher of the Year 2012!!

Azreen Latiff16 Comments

Help Thomas Cha win the inaugural QuickSchools Teacher of the Year award. To all teachers out there, we salute you! QuickSchools.com is a fully-online school management system.

Thomas Cha is a Rockstar Teacher!

Here’s what a parent at Lumen Veritatis School had to say about Mr Cha:

He is awesome as teacher! His kindness, understanding, support, really has helped my son from being a sad boy, because unfortunately he was victim of bullying from another school, and then when we changed him to Lumen Veritatis Academy and met Mr. Cha everything changed! Now he has self-confidence and is again the happy boy he always was, we as parents are so happy and thankful with Mr. Cha. We thank God for having Mr. Cha as teacher!Read More »

QuickSchools Teacher of the Year award details

Azreen Latiff17 Comments

Updated April 27th, 2012

We’re excited to announce the launch of the inaugural QuickSchools Teacher of the Year award. We’ve designed this ‘contest’ so that it can be fun and open for everyone to join in easily. We hope this will be as much fun for you as it is for us.

To get things going, we’ve made the nomination process very easy. Just enter your nomination by filling out the form below. Nominations close at 11.59 pm PST on April 15, 2012.

After we’ve received all the nominations, we’ll share each awesome teacher’s profile and invite you to campaign and vote for your favorite candidate. You are welcome to share stories and experiences about your candidate, so that others can appreciate your candidate better. Everyone will have 4 ways of voting:

1 – Leave a comment on the teacher’s profile page for 6 votes
2 – Tweet the teacher’s profile page for 4 votes
3 – Share/Like the teacher’s profile (via Facebook) for 4 votes
4 – Put together and share a video or article for 20 votes

50% of the evaluation will be based on the votes. So, make sure you get everyone at the school, parents and friends to vote for your favorite teacher!

The campaign period and voting closes on May 18th and the winner of the award will be announced on May 25th on our blog.

From everyone here at QuickSchools, enjoy! =)

p/s. Did we say the winner of the award will also get an iPad3?

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The nomination phase has just ended, so we’ve taken off the nomination form to avoid confusion. 🙂

Search for your candidate on our blog and vote!

Appreciating our teachers

Azreen Latiff2 Comments

*Updated on April 10, 2012. Here’s a shortcut to the nomination form. Nominations close on April 15, 2012 so hurry and make sure your favorite teacher gets a shot at the iPad3 that comes along with the award… 🙂

I was on the Live Chat the other night and helped a teacher with her gradebook question. It amazes me every time I see so many teachers who are logged in to QuickSchools, updating their gradebooks, fixing up report cards and whatnot late into the night and during the weekends. I said to the teacher that since we started QuickSchools, I have developed a whole new level of appreciation for my own teachers as I went through school. I wonder what went through their minds when they had to deal with all the mischief from yours truly. I did get a good caning once though but I am digressing way off course there… 🙂

I think people in general do have a sense of respect for teachers. That said, I personally think society in general underestimate how tough being a teacher really is. And since we at QuickSchools get to see this every day, we think people should know that teaching is certainly hard work!

And on that note, I am thrilled that we’re going to get the QuickSchools Teacher of the Year award off the ground this year.

The QuickSchools Teacher of the Year award is an award that although goes to one person eventually, is also meant to celebrate the teaching community in general.  For a start, we want to bring out the wonderful stories of the teachers within our growing QuickSchools community. Stories that often go unnoticed in our classrooms and schools. It’s an award that we hope will help shed light to the great work that teachers do. And if this can inspire more teachers to become better teachers and great leaders or get more people interested in teaching, that’ll be a nice bonus!

We look forward to receiving your nominations. Let’s celebrate our teachers.

For more info on the nitty gritty of the QuickSchools Teacher of the Year award check out this post.

Thanks for reading!

azreen

p/s – I should mention that the award does come with a cool iPad3. =)

Remember to clear the test data in your account!

Azreen LatiffLeave a comment

Occasionally in some of the newer accounts, users will realize that there are unfamiliar names in the midst of your students’ list. You may have seen names such as Amber Phillips, Alvin de Silva, Felicity Bradshaw, etc under the Students tab.  Why is this?

Remember, when you first start your trial, the account has some test data so that you can see how the major functions of the system work.

And sometimes, as you move from testing the system during the trial to using the system properly to run your school, you may have not realized that those students are still in the list.

To clear the test data, go to the Getting Started page and just click on the checkbox, “Clear test data.”

QuickSchools help - how to clear test data from Getting Started page

Once you remove the test data and the Getting Started page, you may lose some of the Features you may have turned on during the test mode. Do not panic. 🙂 Just go back to the Features screen and turn those back on. All your data will be restored safely e.g. Gradebook, Homework, Attendance, etc.

So again, remember to clear the test data to avoid confusing users in your school… 🙂

Ugly bug.. yucks! :(

Azreen LatiffLeave a comment

Bugs and software go together like butter on toast. There’s just no escape.

We recently encountered a cosmetically ugly bug that got introduced when Adobe upgraded their Flash software. What happens is that text in certain parts of QuickSchools now appears vertically.

We have researched this issue and have contacted Adobe to get it sorted out. Needless to say, this bug has caused a lot of irritation to many Flash users, including users of QuickSchools.

There are a few areas affected by this bug, but most notable is the Homework module, especially if you’re a parent. If you regularly update your browsers, you may have seen this bug rearing it’s ugly head.

For some schools that use the homework module extensively, we’ve put together a temporary workaround to help parents print out homework assignments for their child. We can enable a “Reports” tab for parents to access homework assignments, instead of the previously used “Homework” tab. Parents can then print the homework assignments directly from the browser, or even export it to excel.

We have since rid this bug with a temporary patch but just in case it comes out again (you’ll just never know in software!), contact us so we can turn on the Reports tab for the parents again.

This particular bug is a little annoying to say the least but rest assured, we’ll continue working with Adobe on this, and it will be exterminated! For more information on this bug, check out this link.

https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=2941694

Select a template for your school’s report card soon

Azreen Latiff2 Comments

As we announced last month, the new report cards module is out and since then we’ve been building a bank of templates for you. There are of course various styles and formats to suit the diverse requirements i.e. from pre school right up to college level. We want to start showcasing these templates to give you an idea of what’s available to help you select the right template(s) for your school.

In this post, we’ll go over the 2 distinct template styles e.g.

  • The classic style template which supports marks, grade, effort, comments template.
  • The high school/college style templates with support for credits and GPA values.

The single term template e.g. Classic White

QuickSchools Report Cards template - Classic White

The Classic White template is a single term template that supports the following fields:

  • Marks column (can be automatically filled out from the Gradebook)
  • Letter-grades (also from the gradebook)
  • Effort column (can be filled out via the Report cards module)
  • Comments section
  • This template can also support multiple criteria per subject

Variation of Classic White can be found in the other templates e.g.

  • Adding sections for homeroom teacher and principal comments – see Hot Safari
  • Adding a general section which is not subject related e.g. behavior – see Night Sky III

The college style template

The second style we’d like to highlight is the college style template. This is more typically used by high schools and colleges. The “Classy Clay” example template shown below is perfect if you’d like to show grades for 2 semesters. The template will calculate the GPA automatically and also has areas for attendance and comments.

QuickSchools report card template - Classy Clay

Variations of the college style templates are available in the following:

  • Elegant Blue (GPA, credits, cumulative GPA & credits and also the grades achieved for the term)
  • Contemporary Quarters (supports 4 quarters display)

There are of course more templates available in your QuickSchools accounts. Feel free to check them out and let’s get you up and running on a nice template when school reopens.

Thank you from Team QuickSchools!

Azreen LatiffLeave a comment

Hello everyone,

It’s been a fantastic year for QuickSchools and we just want to say thank you to all of you for your support, thoughtful feedback and warm compliments. The encouragement we receive from you inspire us to work harder and make QuickSchools even better for everyone.

We have also been really privileged to have the opportunity to get to know many of you better throughout the course of the year. And we even had the pleasure of meeting some of you on the road as we make our way through the conference circuit. We look forward to getting to know everyone more as we head into the 2011/2012 school year and beyond.

We are continuously amazed at the dedication we see from the school administrators, the teachers and parents to making sure that students get the best care and wholesome education they deserve. It’s truly inspiring stuff. And we are absolutely excited to be by your side and helping any way we can to improve education for children all around the world.

Looking back, I am sure there were moments when we answered chat a second later than you would have preferred or you felt a feature could be just that bit smoother and many other imperfections. For those moments, we truly apologize.  We’ll keep on improving though and that’s a promise!

As we chart the course for next year, we’d love to hear your thoughts on improvements you’d like to see in QuickSchools. Right now, we’re working on the transcripts module to make it cool and awesome like the Report Cards module and we have a very nice surprise for everyone in a couple of months. Won’t say what it is but we’re super excited about it. 🙂

Ooops I digress. So, please let us have your feedback and thoughts for next year. Already we hear requests for an iPad version, online payments, language support etc etc. Let us know and help us make QuickSchools better for you.

Finally, from the bottom of our hearts, thank you.

Azreen and Team QuickSchools