Half a year gone .. or to go ...

The first two terms of 2019 have certainly had their fair share of events with teachers gaining their hard earned salary increase and improvements in conditions. As well the flu season arrived early with plenty of schools having many students away .. and of course measles is trying to make an unwanted come back.

In amongst all that Edge had a very successful and well attended conference in Queenstown and we are already looking ahead for a 2020 North Island venue .. details will be out shortly.

Edge SM also continues to have incremental updates with the July 9 release squashing a good number of bugs as well as adding features including:

• allowing Vistab to post back lateness and attendance info to Edge when students sign-in and sign-out using the Vistab tablet at schools .. if you are using VizTab this feature can be turned on via Admin>School Settings.
• Implemented an NZQA Change where all papers in a standard had to be submitted digitally if one was to be submitted digitally. No more mix and match between digital submission and non-digital.
• Dashboard Notifications are now grouped by date.
• Users can now filter Dashboard Notifications by type, and choose to show only unread or all Notifications.
• A "Mark all as read" link has been added to the Dashboard Notifications UI to allow Users to clear their unread notifications.
• Clickable links have been added to Pastoral Dashboard Notifications to navigate directly to a student's pastoral records (in Teacher Only mode) or to edit the pastoral record (in Admin Mode if the User has the Pastoral Officer role).

Feature reminder:

Widgets:

These are tiles displaying live information that you can add to your Dashboard page.

eg. 

- End of term countdown (ie. days to go).

- Student birthdays

- My Class

To add .. on the Dashboard page click Add Widget then click Add after the description. NB. the available widget list will vary depending on the roles you have in Edge.

- Widgets can be dragged to different positions if required. 

- Click Save when done.

MyClass page button (Teacher mode) .. View Classes and Groups (Admin mode .. People menu)

- A sortable grid display of Classes, Groups and Year Levels that includes student's core details, contact information and notes .. that be clicked to view

- Buttons to access Print Lists and view Billable Items .. teacher mode

- Email and Push Notification functionality .. if enabled by your school.

Entering Staff Details in edge

In the light of recent events, it has become very important to keep details on students and staff up-to-date.

As important as student details, staff details are often left, or only minimal data is entered.  I encourage schools to enter as much detail on staff as they can.  Edge now has emergency contact details on each staff member. 

Where to go? – Click on People – Under Staff column, Click on View/Edit Staff. Select staff member. Enter all the details you have.

Once finished, you have the choice to export this to Excel or print to pdf.

As always, we are here to help you get the best out of edge software!

Quick Tips for Adding Notes on your Smartphone 

by Bruce Graves

Most (if not all) Smartphones, have microphones and speech to text facility.
If you wish to add an:

• Attendance Note
• Assessment Note
• Learning Note
• Enrolment Note
• Sensitive Note
• Pastoral Note

...you can go to the 'Note' field and your keyboard will appear. An image of a microphone will also show. Click on the microphone and you can dictate the contents of the note (up to 2,000 characters).

Please note that your speech to text is not always perfect (you may have to modify some 'mishears'), particularly with spellings of names. 

Don't forget to stop recording as it will continue to convert your speech, which could make for some 'interesting' notes.

I'm always learning new things. Yesterday, during one of our trainer meetings, Phil came up with a use for edge Mobile for office administrators...

If you are sighting birth certificate, court order, immunisation document, etc. you can take a photo of it on your phone and attach it to the relevant note. You will need to put something in the 'Note' field.

I liked this last idea so much I added it last minute to the Seminar notes for our upcoming Administrator Seminars starting next week. It isn't too late to register...

New Year New Features

Just in case you missed it .. we have deployed the following changes in January which should improve the user experience and reduce the clicks.

My Class Page

• Added Age of Student
• Added MOE6 Ethnicity
• Able to click on Learning Support icon and get list of learning support notes

Student Details Page

• Able to click medical icon and see list of medical notes
• Able to click on Learning Support icon and get list of learning support notes
• Able to click on all “bubbles” (Attendance, Pastoral and Notes) on the Student Enrolment Summary page and see the list, or in the case of attendance, the details as popups or in a new tab (Attendance)
• Able to edit notes from the popup (if you have the rights)

Finance

• Finance users can now reverse transactions from the student transaction summary page
• New Aged Debtor Report ..The Aged Debtor Report can be generated as a CSV or PDF file from the Debtor List page. It shows Student Debt/Unallocated Credit categorised into columns:
• Current (Debt/Credit in the past 30 days)
• 30 Days (Debt/Credit between 31-60 days)
• 60 Days (Debt/Credit between 61-91 days)
• 90 Days (Debt/Credit from 91+ days)
• Total

New Year .. New Digs ..

A slightly belated Happy New Year to all with 2019 seeing us here at Edge Learning in a newly fitted out office in Terrace End. Very different from our previous tree and lagoon bordered rooms on the old Massey College of Education campus. We now have a wide variety of other commercial entities dotted around us, very convenient in many respects, but I do miss the wide variety of bird song from our previous feathered neighbours.

For many schools students will return next week and our Support and Service teams have been been busy assisting school staff in getting ready for the start of a new year. 

Quick reminders:
- activate your calendar and add Event and Teacher Only Days.
- check your staff list, adding and end dating as required as well as configuring user rights.
- Edge automatically changes pre-enrols to Enrolled based on their Start Date Here field. Once new students have started update ENROL using the ENROL widget on the dashboard.
- If you know a pre-enrolled student is not going to turn up, and it is before their Start Date Here, delete them on the People>Pre-Enrolments page. If it's after their Start Date Here, change that date to the future then delete them on the People>Pre-Enrolments page.

If you have any queries or questions please don't hesitate to contact Support on:
- 0800 600 159
or
- support@edgelearning.co.nz