Navigating Forward: Student Management Post-2020

It’s no secret that your school, your faculty and your families are all feeling the pain from this “new normal”. The TADS by Community Brands team recently released a guide that highlights the top challenges schools are facing today and ways to overcome them. We’ve picked out some key takeaways for schools to Navigate Forward with their student management in a post-2020 era. 

Challenge 1: Staff Burnout

Your faculty and staff are not only creating and delivering on their syllabi, but now they’re trying to figure out how to manage their students’ success from a computer while also ensuring the safety of themselves and their students when classrooms are open. They’re learning new software, experimenting with new processes, exploring creative ways to keep students engaged and doing whatever they can to monitor and help with students who are falling short of expectations. Burnout is a common, and rather understanding state your faculty and staff are facing right now. Technology can help. 

• Leverage a classroom management tool, like Google Classroom, and sync it with your student information system (SIS) so data can be transferred seamlessly between systems. This gives your faculty the ability to launch classes for their students within the SIS and keep their data accurate and secured. 
• Implement a cloud-based gradebook that can be accessed from anywhere your staff is working from to avoid duplicate source of records. Teachers and school admins can be connected on students’ grades and monitor who needs attention in real-time, eliminating the need for manual upkeep and potentially inaccurate data. 
• Use an all-in-one SIS that integrates with other school administrative software, like admission and enrollment, to eliminate the need for data to be exported, imported and managed in multiple systems. Streamlining your technology saves not only your staff’s time (and sanity), but saves your school money, too. 

Psssst. Educate integrates with Google Classroom, houses a robust online gradebook and syncs with the TADS software suite. 

Challenge 2: Overwhelmed Families

Perhaps the most important relationship for students’ success is that between parents and the school. In the classroom, teachers work one-on-one with their students, keeping them on-task and facilitating learning. Online classrooms transfer some of this responsibility to students’ parents — and they need the school’s help. 

From streamlining the virtual classroom experience to consolidating parent communications, small changes can go a long way to help families stay up to date more easily. 

 How to ease the burden on parents 

Foster a smooth online experience 

Finding solutions that work together will help flatten the learning curve for teachers, students and parents. Consider an SIS, like Educate, that allows families to view assignment scores quickly, even for work that was done in other tools like Google Classroom. 

Streamline family communications 

With the new safety protocols, learning platforms, etc., parents need clear communications more than ever before. Leverage a tool that allows you to communicate with your families quickly and effectively without having to spend hours of your time doing so. 

Educate offers a dynamic communication tool where parents can get instant updates about absences, drops in a child’s grades, school closings and much more. Its Communication Center allows you to easily send and track important news to families through their preferred method of contact — voicemail, email or even text message. Parents and students can get a real-time view of the information that’s most important to them, quickly and efficiently, through Educate’s online portal. 

Challenge 3: Tight School Budgets

Schools are now responsible for implementing safety measures and virtual means. With the cost of PPE, cleaning supplies, virtual classroom tools, etc., you’re likely looking at where to cut costs.  

One way to do this is by integrating the right software into operations. Using a single system with integrated administrative tools can often eliminate the time required to manually enter student information or transfer data – ultimately driving significant savings. 

Freeing your budget, freeing your time, and freedom from inefficiencies.