Phone System Change

Last year, there were numerous unintentional 911 calls placed from our phone system. This causes frustration with the county dispatch and our School Resource Officer when dispatch cannot connect with the individual who called for confirmation. The School Resource Officer or another deputy must then check for an actual emergency. With continued false alarms, comes a decrease in effectiveness and timeliness of responses to our school district.

This is a common problem with phone systems that use "9" to dial an outside line. After looking at different possible solutions, we have determined the best option is to make the change to our phone system to use "8" to dial an outside line. This change will happen on Friday, August 6th.

We will run an awareness campaign during the months of August and September in an effort to communicate this change to all staff.

While this solution is not ideal, we believe it is the best option.

As always, reach out to the Tech Department with any questions!

PowerSchool Updates!

We have updated to the new Back to School version of PowerSchool. With this update, comes some exciting enhancements and new features! This update focused mostly on the admin side of PowerSchool, but there were a few changes to the look and feel of PowerTeacher and PowerTeacher Pro.

Teachers

• Updated icons in PowerTeacher

• Student Observations 
• Add time-stamped notes in PowerTeacher Pro
• See the Knowledge Base for directions!

Admin

• Updated alert icons - includes accessibility improvements

• Graduation Plans

• New user interface and format!

                    *All graduation plans will need to be moved to the new version - more

                      information coming soon!*

• Now track Senior Math!
• Use complex & mixed requirements (example: complete Test A with 80% or Course B with C+ or higher)
• Select if test scores should be from same day or combined with other testing instances
• View all courses completed even if not counted toward the graduation plan
• Exclude grades from ineligible years, such as middle school

• Health 

• Input office visits, medications, health concerns, and health plans
• Health module shows when a student is absent
• Multi-select options for office visits (ex. assessments, visit reason, treatments)
• Prevent overlapping health concerns
• Edit monitoring schedule already created
• Copy health plans to a new school year
• Exclude vaccine dose from compliance calculations
• New data sets in Import/Export Manager

• Search

• "enrolled_in" and "not_enrolled_in" now include pre-registered and active any date
• "currently_enrolled_in" and "not_currently_enrolled_in" only include active enrollments as of current day

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The Tech News Blog is Back!

Some of you may be familiar with the Tech News blog, but if not, this blog is intended to provide consistent updates and information about technology at CCS.

To start off, let me introduce myself! My name is Brittany Hice and I am the new Technology Trainer. My role is to create documentation and provide training on technology resources, mostly software programs, used in our schools. I will be using this blog to provide updates and information about technology with a new post about once a month. If you want to receive an email when a new blog post is posted, enter your email in the “Follow by Email” box.

One of the main resources we have for technology is a new Knowledge Base. This is a place you can go to find training and directions for many different pieces of technology, such as PowerSchool, Google, SchoolMessenger, etc. This will be ever-changing with new articles or updates as needed. Before putting in a Helpdesk ticket, this is a great place to check for information!

The Knowledge Base link is available in a few places:

        1. On the main website

                calschools.org > Our District > Departments > Technology

        2. On the blog homepage

        

        3. Link: http://ccskb.calschools.org/

            

                *Highly recommend bookmarking this link*

New features available in the PowerSchool and PowerTeacher update - blog post coming soon!