We have been listening to our district leaders and have some exciting new and upcoming enhancements to share with you. This is a long email but filled with great new features and couple of sneak peaks at a few released later this month. Enjoy!
Blog Topics:
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Message Library
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Text to Speech
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Attendance Settings
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Incoming Students for 17-18
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Lunch Balance Notification
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SIS updates
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Coming in March
Message Library
Use the Message Library to set up recurring alerts so they are ready to go when needed. Our schools piloting this new feature have loved the library for:
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weather related,
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power outage,
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Saturday school,
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late start,
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emergency and so much more.
You can create a new message for the library and create tags to help sort them later. The Message Library is also available at each school site for admins to create their own bank of alerts.
Click on Message Library in the left navigation to get started building your alerts.
Text to Speech
We are excited to let you know that we now have text to speech on alerts. This works great if you have the translated text but don’t have someone to record it. Since we quietly rolled this out a few weeks ago, 50% of all alerts have been using Text to Voice. Users are loving it.
Type in your Test-to-Speech Message in the box and listen to a preview if you wish.
Attendance Settings
For those of you with automated attendance calling, we have a new screen for sites to view their attendance settings. The information provides details on attendance codes, parent notes, integration type, emailed reports and calling times.
Click Admin>Attendance at each site to view this view only information
Incoming Students
Let us know if you need to load your incoming students for the 17-18 school year. We have a great new way to load them so that they do not get all school posts, just those targeted for incoming students.
Once they are loaded you can select the “Incoming” students for posts or alerts
Lunch Balance Notification
We have had some great success in the last few months helping districts with those negative lunch balances. We have seen two districts reduce their balances by half in 30-45 days. We can send out an customized text, call and email help recoup those balances. Give me a call if you want to talk a bit more about automating this process.
District portal view
Student Information Systems Integration Update
User Data – users at SIS synced schools will now have the choice to be able to turn off user edit for email, phone and address on ParentSquare.
Click on Admin>School and check the box shown in this image, fill in one or both of the boxes for instructions
Language Choice – if a parent changes their language on ParentSquare to something other than the correspondence language on file in the SIS, we will not sync it back to the SIS language. We want families to be able to select from all our languages so they can receive the message in English and their chosen language.
Coming Soon
Payment Integration – Easily collect money via Credit Card for field trips, PTA dues, spirit wear, event tickets and more. Payments will be powered by Stripe.
Sneak Peak – seamless integration for users
