Scheduling and planning for the new school year

As September rolls in and North America continues to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, administration, teachers, staff, and students, are entering into unknown territory as they return to school. With many parents cautiously opting to send children back to school, and others choosing remote online learning, administration and staff now must reimagine the school experience by finding unique and efficient ways to manage students and their information.

Couple this with the usual issues of student reporting, class schedules, and staff reporting and management, and things could quickly become chaotic.

Some planned measures to manage this new school year include:

• Adoption and tracking of learning cohorts
• Following compliance with new Health & Safety policies
• Tracking daily health checks
• Staggered scheduling of class start times
• Staggered lunches

Learning Cohorts

Nearly every jurisdiction across North America has adopted learning cohorts or learning groups as part of a multi-pronged back to school plan. The cohort model, is intended to limit the number of people each student and staff member encounters, reducing the risk of COVID-19 and allowing for quicker contact tracing by health officials. The number of members for each cohort is different based on school, board, and province.

According to the Harvard Global Health Institute, although remote learning can work for older children, in-person learning cohorts is the best option for younger students. With stable cohorts, children between 4-12 are best served in classroom due to their need for social learning and cognitive development.

Edsembli quickly responded to this need and has added a Cohort feature set to our Student Information System to help schools manage this unparalleled new school year.

How does Edsembli manage learning cohorts?

• Allows users to assign students to a cohort group
• Provides users to take attendance and monitor excursions
• Plan excursions by cohort
• Filter and report by cohort

How Does Edsembli Manage Health & Safety?

The Edsembli Ecosystem helps school districts monitor compliance of Health & Safety policies and improve communication with staff and reporting by:

• Notifying employees of new policies
• Providing information and expectations
• Testing for understanding
• Reporting on compliance
• Recording a Health & Safety incident
• Tracking student daily health checks

How does Edsembli manage student scheduling?

At the best of times, managing student schedules, course selections, and timetables can be a juggling act. Add in the coronavirus, and you could be feeling overwhelmed, especially if your Student Information System isn’t easy to configure or adaptable.

The Edsembli Student Information System supports customized schedules and up to sixteen semesters and terms at a time. This includes the Quadmester schedule, which has become a popular practice in some jurisdictions because it reduces student movement throughout the school. Plus, with class start and end times being easy to customize—schools can provide the proper social distancing measures during class transitions before and after school. Other features include:

• Customizable semester/terms/days/period timetabling
• Configurable period start and end times
• Timetable for cohort learning groups
• Alternating days schedule
• Automatically assign timetables
• Resolve conflicts

Running a school district can already be quite challenging and complex, and with the possible risk of COVID-19, it can make things even more intimidating. But with the adoption of the Edsembli Ecosystem to assist, these problems could become less difficult, and the year more palatable.

Why Edsembli?

Edsembli has been helping schools and districts across the country implement best practices for managing students, district finances and employees for over 36 years. With K-12 customers across nearly every jurisdiction in Canada, we have seen firsthand the challenges that schools, and districts are facing to manage back to school plans safely and we understand that our Edsembli Ecosystem can assist with those plans.

Key Features

There are countless digital solution-focused companies out there for schools and education administrators, but what makes Edsembli different?

• Our software was built specifically for K-12 education needs by the education community
• The Edsembli Ecosystem includes HR, Payroll, Finance and Student Information Management
• Our system is an extremely user-friendly experience. Our icons, tooltips, and functionality work together to create an intuitive user experience.
• All our manuals are online, making it easy to troubleshoot, plus they are all tied into our platform
• With our included Application Programming Interface (API), we can easily integrate with other school business solutions
• Data seamlessly flows between all modules of the Ecosystem allowing for informed decision making

Benefits

The benefits of the Edsembli Ecosystem are experienced by every stream in a K-12 School District including education operations, business operations, and education delivery:

• Easy integration of HR, Payroll, Finance, Student Information data through the included API infrastructure drives informed decision making in the best interest of the student
• Gain a 360-degree view of students, teachers and staff that provides the most personalized and efficient learning experience
• Save time finding more information by drilling down to supporting documentation
• Facilitate communication and engage with students, parents, and employees through portal
• Obtain a more accurate and transparent audit trail through a multi-tiered approval workflow for business processes that align with your collective agreements like staff absences, timesheets, purchase orders and more
• Improve productivity with customizable business intelligence dashboards ensuring nothing is missed
• Reduce the risk of injuries and fines by tracking Health & Safety compliance

Our system has been reimagined to allow all users more fluent use and ease of understanding the data and insights that can be gained across the entire ecosystem. With a completely modern landscape, users can navigate our software and complete tasks quickly and easily, allowing teachers, parents, staff, and administrators to focus on keeping students learning—and safe.