Category: News and Announcements

New Release – Mar 5, 2024

Azroy KandanLeave a comment

We’re back to a normal flow for engineering improvements. Today’s QuickSchools release focuses on the Gradebook, with some minor improvements to the Master Scheduler, Attendance and API. 

Full list of improvements are below:

Master Scheduler

  • Relabel Step 4 button to “Import External IDs”
  • Relabel the “Lock Sections” checkbox in Step 2 to be more descriptive
  • Bug Fix “Bulk Course Requests” in Step 2 for locked course requests in previous Enrollment Periods
  • Bug Fix Advanced Search in Step 5 for Students with unassigned duplicate course requests

Gradebook Improvements

  • Low Grade Alert for Gradebook (see below)
  • Gradebook expanded option to share or copy columns between different subjects
  • Bug Fix Minimum Score from Admin Column
  • Option to submit grades from ALL gradebooks to Report Cards (Beta)
  • Option to bulk show/hide Gradebook in “Manage Subject Availability” (Beta)

Other Beta Improvements

  • API Improvements for Engage CRM and Mobile
  • Option to Bulk Set Attendance for Subject-Based roster
  • Report Creator support for Total Attendance by Period
  • Bug Fix Teacher Listing when a school is removed from a Group School

Low Grade Alert

We have a new Alert for the Gradebook, allowing you to notify parents of low grades. This feature currently works only for the default Grading Scale. Here’s how it works:

  • Enable the School-wide Alert under “School Profile”
  • Configure the low grades under “Grading Setup”
  • Notification for teachers when saving the Gradebook
  • Notification for Parents
  • Opting out of alerts for Parents

Enable the School-wide Alert

Under “Settings” > “School Profile”, there is a setting under “School-wide Alert Settings” for “Gradebook – Low Grade Alert”:

Enable the School-wide Alert

The alert is disabled by default. You can opt parents in or out by default. Parents can still opt in/out individually once the feature is enabled.

NOTE: This first version currently supports Email Alerts only. In the near future, we’ll be adding support for this alert to the “Home by QuickSchools” Mobile App

Configure the Low Grades

Under “Grading Setup”, there is a new setting called “Low Grade Alerts” where you can configure the Letter Grades and Codes that warrant an alert:

Read More »

New Release – Feb 16, 2024

Azroy KandanLeave a comment
quickschools software release feb 16th 2024

Our focus for the past few weeks has been on the New Policy for Sender Email. And so the QuickSchools release for today is limited to improvements our API for Zapier and Engage, plus some general bug fixes and improvements to our general Student Information System: 

General Bug Fixes / Improvements

  • Bug Fix Gradebook Comments with Special Characters from Canvas
  • Bug Fix Private Messaging when called incorrectly from the browser
  • Improve experience when choosing “Other Balance” for Online Payments

Beta Improvements

  • API Improvements for Engage CRM and Zapier (WebHooks)
  • New Report Creator calculations for Section Attendance

New Zapier Integration App

We’ve been focusing on adding WebHook support to our Zapier Integration App over the past several releases. We finally introduced Instant Triggers in v2.0.0 earlier this month. With this latest release, v2.0.1 will now support district-wide webhooks. You can export more documentation on our Zapier Integration App in the coming weeks.

New Policy for Sender Email

Azroy Kandan1 Comment

What you need to know

ALL EMAILS sent through QuickSchools will use QuickSchools.com in the Sender Email Address. 

This change is primarily in response to Google and Yahoo beefing up their policy for handling spam. This change also improves email deliverability – emails sent from QuickSchools will no longer appear in the spam folder.

In addition, emails sent through QuickSchools will still have the original sender’s email address in the “Reply-To” field. This means that when a recipient of your email clicks “Reply”, the email will be directed to the original sender.

We are still working on the ability for schools to use their own domain name in the sender address. If you’re interested in this feature, please let us know via email or chat, and we can contact you once the feature becomes available. 

Read More »

New Instant Triggers for Zapier

Azroy KandanLeave a comment

Our QuickSchools Integrations on Zapier is undergoing a big change. The new version 2.0.0 introduces support for Zapier Instant Triggers, where changes in QuickSchools can immediately trigger a zap. There are also several improvements to the available Searches and Actions.

The new version will unfortunately deprecate several of the existing functions. Schools on the existing version 1.3.4 will have until Jan 1, 2025 to upgrade to the new version. Zaps would need to be recreated using the upgraded methods.

Support for the QuickSchools Integrations on Zapier (version 1.3.4) will end on Jan 1, 2025

Summary of Improvements in Version 2.0.0

Here is a summary of improvements:

  1. New Triggers and Actions:
    1. Triggers
      1. New Student Record (INSTANT)
      2. New Teacher Record (INSTANT)
      3. New Parent Record (INSTANT)
      4. Updated Student Record (INSTANT)
      5. Updated Teacher Record (INSTANT)
      6. Updated Parent Record (INSTANT)
      7. Updated Student Custom Fields (INSTANT)
      8. Updated Parent Custom Fields (INSTANT)
      9. Updated Teacher Custom Fields (INSTANT)
    2. Actions
      1. Create Parent Record
      2. Link Siblings
      3. Re-activate Student Record
  2. Ability to add optional fields in the response for specific Triggers and Actions
  3. Modified deduplication key to ensure that updated records will trigger the zap
  4. Modified search parameters – ability to search either by ID or by keyword
  5. Option to select name format (Full Name or Complex Name) when creating Student/Teacher
  6. Refined Dynamic Dropdowns, Input Fields and Output Fields for all of Actions, Triggers, and Searches

Summary of Deprecated Functions in Version 1.3.4

If you’re using any of these functions, we recommend upgrading them to the latest version:

Read More »

New Release – Jan 24, 2024

Eruani ZainuddinLeave a comment

We’re thrilled to unveil the latest update to our software. Key improvements include:

General Improvements

  • Extensive improvements to our API for Zapier
  • Improvements for Email Deliverability

Master Scheduler

  • Support Frequency more than the number of days
  • Enhanced Support for Import Duplicate Course Requests

We’ve been steadily improving our APIs for Zapier over the last several weeks. A new upgrade to our Zapier App is on the horizon. Stay tuned for further details.

We’d like to thank you for choosing QuickSchools. Please do not hesitate to reach out to us if you have any suggestions or comments. We value your feedback and appreciate your continued support.

New Release – Jan 4, 2024

Azroy KandanLeave a comment

We’re happy to announce our first release for the year. This QuickSchools release contains improvements to the Orchestra Master Scheduler and API improvements for Zapier and Engage, with some general improvements to our general Student Information System: 

Master Scheduler

  • Daily Schedule Support for Year-Long courses
  • Support Frequency more than a week
  • Import Duplicate Course Requests
  • Show Caseload from Course Requests tab on Student record
  • Bug Fix “Student Schedule Listing” report

General Bug Fixes / Improvements

  • Extend Enrollment Date Widget to 3 years
  • Subscription Billing with Debit Notes
  • Improve Cut-Off Time for Lunch Ordering App
  • Transcripts support for Semester Start/End Dates
  • Fix Email History for Mass Email Messaging with BCC

Beta Improvements

  • Improve Enrollment Periods screen without Master Scheduler
  • API Improvements for Engage CRM and Zapier (WebHooks)
  • New Parent-Teacher Conference App
  • Daily Status from Attendance Codes App now shows in Program Attendance
  • Display GPA and Class Rank for Chronos Transcripts
  • Option to exclude courses from GPA for Chronos Transcripts
  • Bug Fixes to Learn LMS (Student Activity and Assignments)
  • Bug Fix District-Wide Teachers

We’ll continue to make improvements to our infrastructure and product. If you have any suggestions or comments for improvement, please don’t hesitate to let us know via chat or email. We look forward to working with you.

Happy New Year!

2023 Year in Review

Azroy KandanLeave a comment

I can’t believe that the last time I wrote a “Year in Review” was for 2020 for QuickSchools – a whole 3 years ago. How time flies! Azreen wrote one for 2021 – Bringing 2021 to a close. So I guess we only skipped a year.

Orchestra Master Scheduler

The big focus for 2023 has been the Orchestra Master Scheduler. We made several improvements to the module, and beefed up its overall performance, robustness and usability.

Some of the new features to highlight include:

  • Course Load (i.e. Caseload by Teacher and Course)
  • Room Assignment and Room Conflicts
  • Section Assignment by Tags (Course Request Tags, Student Tags and Teacher Tags)
  • Improved Email Notifications to Students and Teachers
  • Expanded Functionality for Add/Drop History
  • Support for Duplicate Course Requests

Payment Plan App

We introduced a new Payment Plan App that allows schools to schedule automatic charges to credit cards.

Read More »

Updated Operating Hours during the 2023 Holiday Season

Eruani ZainuddinLeave a comment

Dear QuickSchools Community,

We at QuickSchools would like to send our heartfelt warm wishes to you and your family. We hope you’ll be enjoying the upcoming festivities with loved ones!

During this holiday season, our customer support hours will be scaled back as per usual.

From Dec 16th to Dec 23rd, our support service (i.e. Live Chat, phone support) will only be available from 08:00 AM to 08:00 PM US Eastern Standard Time (EST). We’ll be fully offline on Dec 24th and 25th in observance of Christmas. We’ll resume with limited service on Dec 26th at 8am EST.

In addition, our support service will be fully offline again on Dec 31st and Jan 1st in observance of New Year. We’ll resume our regular support hours (24-hr Monday-Friday and 8am to midnight EST Saturday-Sunday) on Jan 2nd.

Please be aware that you may experience a delay in response time during the above period.

Dates

December 16 – 23

December 24

December 25 (Christmas Day)

December 26-30

December 31

January 1 (New Year)

Operating Hours (EST)

8:00 AM – 8:00 PM

OFFLINE

OFFLINE

8:00 AM – 8:00 PM

OFFLINE

OFFLINE

Read More »