This Month’s Feature
Matthew Brent - NASIS Team Lead

Although he has been involved with the NASIS rollout for every school, you may not know who he is due to the behind the scenes nature of his work.

Matthew is responsible for the NASIS team that manages and supports Bureau schools, the NASIS Support Representatives and Technical Client Executives. He has focused his time with NASIS on training and Support. Prior to joining Infinite Campus, Matthew worked with school districts, community technology centers, nonprofits and partnered with IBM and the United Way of Chicago in an initiative to bridge the digital divide and leverage technology as an educational tool.

Whenever there is a need for database work, a bug to be qualified, or investigation of a level three support case, you can be sure that Matthew is involved. He also participates in weekly status calls and quarterly progress meetings with the BIE core team, as well as the development and testing of requirements, enhancements, and Bureau customized reports. Matthew strongly encourages your school’s contacts to let him know how the NASIS Team is doing in terms of meeting your school’s overall support and account management needs. He looks forward to seeing you soon at the ANA conference in June.

TECH FOCUS

Bureau-funded schools are scheduled to move to a new version release, 2008.2.6, in April. Highlights of new functionality are outlined below. For more information, detailed release notes can be found on the Customer Support Portal and a recorded training to support new Standards-based grading changes is available for download at Infinite Campus University.

BEST PRACTICES
End of Year Checklist

As the end of the year quickly approaches, it is a great time to tidy up and tie off loose ends for the 2007 -2008 school year, as well as to think about strategies to guarantee a successful 2008-2009 school year. As you are busy graduating those kindergarteners and seniors, please take time to go through your end-of-year checklist to properly prepare for next fall. It is more efficient to do this in sequential order, as many of the steps and processes impact your system for the next year.

Listed below are recommended best practices to help you successfully close out your school year. You can also download the checklist document.

Are You Ready?
Spring is here!

Now is the time to start thinking about end-of-year tasks and begin preparing for the 2008-2009 school year.

Here are the first steps for a successful Calendar Roll Forward.

• Create a new calendar and roll items into the new calendar (such as courses, period schedules, etc.)
• Roll students forward

Creating a New Calendar and Rolling Forward Data Elements

Hot Topics
Posting Grades to Transcripts

Looking for a quick and easy way to post grades to your student’s transcripts? You can use the Transcript Post tool located in System Admin>Student Portfolio>Transcript Post. Select the proper Calendar, Curriculum Groups, Grades and Terms for which you want to post grades and click the run button.

The Transcript Post will take a snapshot of the students’ grades and post them to the students’ permanent record, which is the transcript. This tool can be run multiple times without duplicating records, but it will not update existing records. This is to prevent a teacher-changed grade from affecting the permanent record. If a teacher has changed grades, the transcript will need to be manually updated.

Help You Help Yourself
NASIS Support is here to help, and it's easy if you follow a few simple steps.

The best way to get your issues resolved is to open a case on the Customer Support Portal. Ask your school's designated contact to open a case for you. Using this process ensures that your issues are being directed to the appropriate NASIS support person for the most timely and effective response.

When a case is opened, the user is prompted to assign a priority to the case. This helps the NASIS Support staff prioritize the urgency of the issue to balance workload and provide the entire customer base with efficient resolutions to technical issues.

Guideline for assigning priority cases:

• Critical - The NASIS software is not operational. Critical priority issues include global inability to login and connect to the NASIS application.
  
  
• High - The NASIS application is operational, but core functionality is seriously affected. There may be a workaround, but implementing the workaround adversely affects the function of the school. High priority issues include the inability to perform time sensitive tasks such as: attendance, enrollments, ISEP Reports, etc.
  
  
• Medium - (default) The NASIS application is usable, but functionality is moderately impacted. The school can function for a reasonable amount of time before the problem escalates. A workaround may be available and is acceptable. Medium priority issues include Campus Error Messages, Unexpected Results, etc.
  
  
• Low - The NASIS application is usable, but you have a question or would like to submit an enhancement request. Low priority issues include how to, tips, advice, usage questions, requests for data conversion, etc.

We will include a note in the case if the priority is changed to a level other than the level you submitted.

The first part of the two-part process of Certification is to run the Verification Report. During Verification, a trial roster (called a Verification Report) is printed and evaluated by the school and ELO. As errors in the data are found and then corrected in the school’s database, the roster is re-printed and reviewed. This process of running the Verification Report, evaluating the report and correcting errors is repeated until the data is deemed accurate. This report can also be used to check the integrity of data at any time. A description of the data shown in the report is provided in Section 5 (Report Layout) of this guide (.pdf). Samples of the report pages are shown in Section 6 (Sample Reports).