The Book Bag : NetClassroom

Mail Mania: Creating a Simple Mail Merge with NetClassroom Usernames and Passwords

Katie Infinger — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 20:11:00 GMT

Now that you've created your NetClassroom parent videos and customized our parent tutorials to your school's specifications, you probably want to send out a letter including this information and student and parent NetClassroom logins.

To create a custom merge letter, first create the query of students or parents you want to mail, and then include the query in an export. Select Blackbaud Simple Mail Merge as the export format. Let us take a moment to explain the naming convention: Blackbaud because the letter is created, edited, and saved within your Blackbaud software, Simple because it's easy, and Mail Merge because that's what you're doing!

After you've added your query on the Filters tab, select the Output tab and add any other fields, such as student name, address, grade level. If you are creating the letter from a student export and want to include the student's NetClassroom login information, select Online ID and Online Password from the Student grouping. To include parent login information in the same letter, select Online User ID and Online Password from the Relationship section. Oh, don't forget to select the specific parental relationships, otherwise you might accidentally export Endora's login information instead of Samantha's. If you're using an individual export, then you'll reverse those instructions, i.e. filter on the student relationships, such as son or daughter.

Your fields are selected, and now it's time for the merge letter! Click the Edit Word Merge and you'll get a blank Word document. For the folks using Office 2007, select the Add-Ins tab. For those playing at home on version 2003 or lower, the insert fields drop-downs will be on your screen.

To insert a merge field, place your cursor where you want the merge field, and then click Insert Education Edge field, followed by your field selection. Continue this until you've selected all your merge fields, and then click Save and Return to EE7 to Merge, which saves your merge document to the database. You won't be able to access this document through Word; the only way you can edit this document is to open the export and click Edit Merge Document. To generate your documents, click Merge Now on your export screen.

Next time we'll build off the simple mail merge and look at conditional mail merges.

FAWeb Assignments

Nate Hall — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 19:02:00 GMT

I promised I would return and write a follow-up to my last post explaining categories, and here I am, true to my word! Well, maybe a couple of days slower than I originally planned, but better late than never, right? Last time we went over a few options in Categories; this time we'll take a look at Assignments.

Let's start with the different assignment dates. Most of these are self-explanatory; Student Date Due is the last day the assignment will be accepted, Show Assignment and Show Grade control when the information appears in NetClassroom, and Grades Date Due reminds you to enter the assignment grade. After that date, the gradebook icon turns red on your Home page. This ensures there's a grade showing when students check their grades in NetClassroom, so they won't bombard you with questions about how they did on the last test...or it at least reduces the amount of questions you get. I'm back in school now, and I'll admit I want to know my grades ASAP and am probably guilty of asking that question a time or two myself, I won't lie .

If you use NetClassroom and don't want a particular assignment or grade to show, then leave the Grades Date Due date blank. You may have reading assignments that don't have a graded assignment associated with them, but you would like the assignment to show up so students know what reading will be discussed in class. You can enter a Student Date Due so it will show in NetClassroom. Of course, what shows in NetClassroom depends on your assignment feature setup in Configuration. If you have dates entered and the assignments aren't showing for your students, you might want to check with your administrator to make sure the assignment option is marked for students.

As I mentioned last time, factors can be used to weight different elements in a group. You can also use factors to give weight to assignments in a category. For instance, you have a midterm exam you want to count twice as much as a normal test. You can give the midterm a factor of 2 and the other tests a factor of 1, and the calculation includes this factor. Here's an example:

Tests A, B, and D are regular tests and Test C is a midterm counting twice as much. I'll assign the factors as follows:

Test A, B, D: 1
Test C: 2

Erica got a 75 on Test A, an 80 on Test B, an 85 on Test C, and an 81 on Test D.

Test Average = ((Test A grade * factor of 1) + (Test B grade * factor of 1) + (Test C grade * factor of 2) + (Test D grade * a factor of 1))/(Sum of factors)
Test Average = (75 + 80 + (85 *2) + 81)/5 = 81.2

Without weighting the midterm, her test average comes out to 80.25.

As you can see, factors can come in handy if you need to put more emphasis on one assignment in a category. But if they all should count the same, just leave the factors set at 1.

Hope this made setting up your Gradebook a little easier this year and answered some questions you might have. If you found the information helpful, or even if you didn't, let me know by leaving a comment. If you have other suggestions about something you'd like me to write about, please feel free to post something back to me and I'll get to it. Till next time...

NetClassroom Parent Videos

Katie Infinger — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 16:11:00 GMT

Norm Dunkin from Landmark Christian School created several short videos to help parents and students get acquainted with NetClassroom. He was kind enough to share them on our NetClassroom forum. Take a look!

Get the New Year off to a good start and set up Online Course Requests and Enrollments

Nate Hall — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 20:40:00 GMT

Happy New Year! I bet many of you have made New Year’s resolutions to be more efficient, and one of the biggest time-saving features for Education Edge users is the ability to let students request or even fully enroll in classes for the coming year. Through NetClassroom, schools can allow their students and parents to take a look at the classes which are available and then enter these requests. This could potentially save you dozens or even hundreds of man hours against sorting through stacks of paper course requests or wading through emails to find the courses each student wants to take, and then scheduling and entering each request.

Sounds like a spectacular feature, right? “Now how do I get started?” you ask. Believe it or not, something this time-saving is just as easy to setup. In Registrar’s Office, click Configuration, and then click NetClassroom. First things first: check out the Features section and make sure the Registration checkbox is marked for relations and/or students, depending on your school’s particular setup. Without this checkbox marked, any other setup is useless because the Online Course Request feature will not be available to NetClassroom users.

The next step is to go to the Registration Setup section and take a look at the display options and the scheduling exceptions that are checked when students enter requests/enrollments. Marking all of the exceptions can be helpful in keeping students fully informed about why they are not allowed to request a course and making sure the students know exactly which courses they will take when they are finished with the online registration process.

The biggest section in Registration Setup is where the meat of the setup process takes place. This area is where you determine which classes are available to register for each school, academic year, and session. The first screen after you click New contains the most basic setup options, such as what you want to enable for each school, session, and academic year combination. Only one setup is allowed for each combination, meaning that the students will either request courses or enroll directly into classes; you can’t have them do both.

At the bottom of the Setup screen, you can add a New Group. The groups added here allow you to group students and select the classes they can register for. For example, you may want to have one group for each grade level so the seniors are not seeing freshman English as an option, even though I’m sure seniors would love to be able to take freshman English again for credit (seriously, who wouldn’t want the easy A?). The bottom of the Group screen allows users to further group the classes to require the students to select from a group of courses. One option I can think of would be to have a row setup for each type of class. This would go something like this:

One row for the English requirement set up to say ‘Please select an English class’ and the row would include a selection of AP English, Honors English IV, or English IV
One row for the Quantitative Reasoning requirement set up to say ‘Please select a class from the following’ and the classes available would be AP Calculus AB, AP Calculus BC (FYI, one of my personal favorite classes when I was in high school), AP Statistics, Discrete Mathematics, Introduction to String Theory (for the over-achievers).
One row for the History requirement set up to say ‘Please select a History class’ and the available classes would be AP US History (another favorite), AP European History, Chinese History, Honors World History.
And so on and so forth, kind of like this:

Another possibility is setting up the registration to allow students to enter 6 requests but only set up 3 rows as above. The students would then be able to enter 3 more requests from any of the available courses as electives in a section that displays in NetClassroom as ‘Additional requests.’

Anyhoo, that is a brief rundown of setting up Online Course Requests (whew). For more information, I’d recommend checking out Knowledgebase solution BB262304. I’ll also check back periodically to answer any brief questions you may have, but you’ve got to post them as a reply to my post. Be sure to check back periodically for more from the Bookbag!

Publishing Report Cards and Transcripts to NetClassroom

Katie Infinger — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 12:14:00 GMT

Publishing report cards and transcripts online can save you postage, allow parents and students to instantly view progress online, and eliminate the “I lost it on the way home” or “The dog ate it” excuses. Here’s how:

Disable viewing rights to report cards or transcripts for NetClassroom users (BB262798).
In Grades, click Publish report cards to NetClassroom or Publish transcripts to the web.
On the Select a Parameter File screen, choose a file and click Select.
The Publish screen appears showing the status of the process.
When processing is complete, a screen appears listing the number of students with information published.
Enable viewing rights to report cards or transcripts for NetClassroom users (BB262798).

You can find this information in Knowledgebase by searching How to publish report cards or transcripts to NetClassroom. It's BB182630.

Happy to Help – Attention FAWeb & NC Users on Windows Server 2008

Lindsey Robbins — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 16:06:00 GMT

Are you on Windows Server 2008?

If yes, and you are about to update your Faculty Access for the Web or NetClassroom to version 7.77 or install these programs for the first time, you need to hit pause before going forward. When you upgraded to Windows Server 2008, Internet Information Services 7 (IIS7) components were not installed by default. You must install II7 for use with Faculty Access for the Web and NetClassroom.

Before you install Faculty Access for the Web or NetClassroom, you must install the IIS7 roles first.

For more information about how to install IIS7, see Knowledgebase Solution BB521642.

Also, we recommend you review the following two guides on the Education Edge User Guides page.

Administration Guide for Faculty Access for the Web
Administration Guide for NetClassroom

I especially recommend you review the Installation and Security Considerations section before you complete your install or update.