Why Use School Information Software?: Keys to Making Sense of K-12 Software

By Sue Lloyd

For anyone involved in implementing or upgrading a Student Information System (SIS), or for those who simply want to maximize the benefits of their existing SIS, this practical guide by noted expert Sue Lloyd is your first resource.

Why Use School Information Software? answers many key questions school staff may have about their (SIS) software. In clear, direct language, Lloyd explains how to reduce the costs of data management and make staff training more effective. She highlights key concepts of SIS software and explores the following topics in-depth: Defining data management Working within a district Building your schools data foundation Constructing your staff resources Managing attendance data And much more In addition to Lloyds own experience, she also uses real-life stories to demonstrate how schools have underestimated the costs of such SIS systems, and how this has negatively affected the district as a whole. Lloyd provides workable solutions to these dilemmas, and challenges educators and administrators to analyze how SIS systems impact leadership in education.

Essential reading for teachers transitioning into administration as well as current administration officials, Why Use School Information Software? serves as an indispensible tool for the educational community.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Apr 30, 2010
• ISBN: 9781426959509

Sue Lloyd

Sue Lloyd gained unique international experience implementing school administrative software in both small schools and large school districts across North America and Europe. She graduated from McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, studied International Business Management in Paris, France, and earned a master’s degree in adult education and human resource management from Leicester University in the United Kingdom.

Book preview

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1

Overview of Data Management

Chapter 2

Working within a District

Chapter 3

Build your School’s Data Foundation

Chapter 4

Build your Room Resources

Chapter 5

Build your Course Catalogue

Chapter 6

Build your Staff Resources

Chapter 7

Build your Student Data

Chapter 8

Key Scheduling Concepts

Chapter 9

Steps of Scheduling

Chapter 10

Managing Attendance Data

Chapter 11

Report Card Data

Chapter 12

Teacher Grade Books

Conclusions

About the Author

References

Preface

This book is a labor of love for all the educators and Administrators that I had the pleasure to work with over the years. Charged with training many people who, due to lack of time and opportunity, never had the benefit of an overview of the material I presented, I sympathized as they struggled to put into context one detailed data entry screen after another. We all agreed that such training was tremendous information overload without a data map or greater context.

Student Information System (SIS) software is a kind of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system software used in the business world. The challenge of implementing and training for these systems is clearly expressed by John Conklin, VP and CIO of World Kitchen, Elmira, NY:

I separate training into two parts – education and training. Education is all the why, who and where issues. Training is the how part of the equation. And of the two, education is the bigger piece of the puzzle. If people don’t go through this education, you won’t have their hearts and you won’t have their minds.

–cited by Wheatley, Malcolm in CIO, ERP

Training Stinks, July 7, 2000

Introduction

Today it is rare to find a School District, state or province that is not using a computer-based Student Information System (SIS). Many of these systems were introduced into schools with little education or training for their users. Faced with a world of continually increasing demands, educators question how they will find time to learn their current SIS, let alone upgrade to the next version of software.

Important issues of staff satisfaction, student safety, school funding and fairness in school processes are at stake. Education on data flow and management in schools is the key to successful implementation of such systems. A Principal once said that he needed the Gestalt[1] of the SIS–a quick dash to a dictionary confirmed he recognized this need and was asking for an overview of the software.

Few Administrators have the opportunity or adequate time to explore the capabilities of their SIS and effectively plan its implementation and maintenance. How do they know what they can safely delegate? What data components need their personal oversight? Is it appropriate to hand over the task of choosing the school’s Attendance codes to an Attendance clerk? Who should decide which weighting formulas for student Grades should be used? Why should Teachers who are focused on teaching their students be encouraged to use computers for administrative purposes? Who can explain why the technical requirements or limitations intrinsic to the software often dictate data flow that may mean organizational changes?

The goal of this book is to provide educators and Administrators with answers to such questions. The integrated nature of data management in SIS software facilitates, indeed, demands a collaborative sharing of data elements requiring a different approach to staff organization and management. Why Use School Administration Software? shows how a school’s data may be gathered, manipulated, shared and ultimately reported to the various interested parties.

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Chapter 1

Overview of Data Management

Key Questions

• What is a Student Information System (SIS)?

• Why use an SIS?

• Why does the software continually change?

• What is a Data Dictionary?

• How does a relational database work?

• Why is security management so important?

• What should an Administrator know about data backup?

• How can Administrators manage data costs?

What is a Student Information System?

A Student Information System (SIS) is computer software that allows the school staff to input and share information about all aspects of running their school including:

• Student information

• Teacher information

• Course data

• Room data

• Class Scheduling

• Student Attendance

• Report Card information

• Integrated Teacher Grade Books

• Transcripts

The software organizes school and student information into many tables that relate to one another, that is, a relational database that shares data thus reducing data entry. Users can generate complex reports or, given the proper security access, view on one computer all the information of the school. The goal for optimal management of these systems is to have the data entered once and shared by many according to password security level.

KEY Understanding the data flow in a system and how the many tables are related to each other is important because altering data in one part of the system may affect data in many other parts of the database. A good overview of the school’s SIS will prevent mistakes or omissions of data input and promote correct backup procedures.

Why use a SIS?

SISs allow each District and school to customize the data they collect to reflect their unique way of operating and reporting school information to their own students, parents and government authorities. Set up optimally, these systems offer powerful tools for grouping and sorting data to allow more efficient data manipulation and faster reporting.

By limiting the number of times data is captured and edited, the chances of errors are diminished. If, in addition, responsibility for the data is given to specified staff, greater control and accountability for the data is ensured. SISs promote consistency and fairness in school policy and procedures through the use of standardized lists and defined rules and formulas for Attendance and Report Cards for each school or District.

SISs facilitate the time-consuming task of organizing a school into Homerooms and Classes. While many schools simply manually enter their existing Master Schedule into the software, the more sophisticated SISs offer mathematical algorithms to build school’s Master Schedules. Regardless of the method chosen, using a Scheduler component offers many tools for reporting and locating students and staff and managing Class resources.

There are many timesaving benefits for everyone but a good understanding of each person’s role and responsibilities is necessary for the system to function optimally. Senior school Administrators are the ones with the best overview of how their school should run and the best knowledge of their own staff’s strengths and skills.

Why must software continually change?

Software is developed for specific computer operating systems and hardware that use specific hardware chips that respond to specific network software and hardware (desktop computers, modems and servers). These various components are complex and must be integrated. The software developers (programmers) are constantly improving the software to eliminate errors (bugs) and enhance its functionality while the hardware providers are striving to improve performance. As a result, continual change cannot be avoided since delaying the upgrading or changing of one component will eventually lead to an impasse whereby a new upgrade of one component cannot be installed on the outdated component.

Each time a component changes, the other parts of the system must respond. As a result, schools must budget both time and money to keep their systems up to date. The reality, however, is that it is often easier to find the money than the time for hardware and software upgrades and usually training gets short shrift.

Since public schools were created over a hundred years ago, school Administrators had to keep student records. First there were simple handwritten Class lists and later, Attendance records. As school systems expanded with financial support from government, school accountability increased. Today there are many legal reporting requirements for school data. Their school’s funding at stake, the ultimate responsibility for the accuracy and completeness of this data falls on the shoulders of school Administrators.

Capturing and storing school data increased markedly with the inclusion of students’ academic achievement measured in percentage and letter Grades or marks, Grade Points, Grade Point Averages and Earned Credits. As students move from one school to another and later attend colleges, tracking and storing students’ Transcripts has become very important.

As the demand for data continues to increase and the methods to capture and store student data expands, school Districts demand further enhancements to the software. Often these enhancements are to add functionality unique to their data capturing for government reporting. Some of these requests involve significant changes in the software that must be adequately tested to ensure that they do not provoke unintended consequences elsewhere in the software.

Mainframe computers

The first use of computers to help manage school data began in the 1960s with the development of the mainframe computer. Administrators of large school Districts often rented computer time from city or corporate mainframe sources. Although these systems were a good start, they had several major limitations.

Change of any kind in the mainframe system was costly and time-consuming. It took specialized programming to build a new report or introduce any change of codes or data flow. Since all data was gathered from multiple schools in the District, there was little room for individual school needs. On the positive side, the centralized nature of data management ensured more data consistency across the system.

The first mainframe computers were not capable of building Master Schedules for schools but they could track the Classes students were taking and the Grades the students were assigned during the school year. Any change to the school or student Class schedule had to be requested from the Information Technology (IT) department and often took days to receive.

Collecting and recording Attendance for thousands of students in large school Districts presented major challenges. Mainframe computers were adapted to be able to read scanning machines to contend with the volume of data. The computer would print out hundreds of Class lists that would be distributed to the appropriate Classrooms. The Teachers would mark which students were Absent or Tardy and the sheets would be collected and scanned into the mainframe which could deliver individual and school Attendance reports.

Desktop computers

In the early 1990s, technology advanced to the point where a desktop computer became a viable option for student database management. Simple programs were developed that allowed Teachers and small schools to manage their own data more cheaply than the cost of a mainframe. Icon driven commands on the first small Apple© computers allowed users to avoid the onerous task of learning the difficult typed sequenced commands that until then were the norm for most personal computers that had Disk Operating Systems (DOS©).

When Microsoft Windows© operating system arrived, the use of icons became available for all personal computers (PCs). Soon the software developed enough to allow desktop computers to be networked together in Local Area Networks (LANs). These developments directly challenged the mainframe programmers’ job security. They resisted the implementation of PCs arguing that the school Administrators could not be trusted to manage this important data. However, the lower costs of ownership, flexibility and faster access to the school’s own data promoted the move to PCs and away from mainframe technology.

Smaller schools with simple data tracking needs often opt for simple database or spreadsheet programs suitable for desktop computers. These are sufficient for generating Class lists and even tracking Attendance but may not be adequate for District or government reporting.

Improvements to technology and declining cost of ownership allow schools to build networks within their own school and even use Wide Area Networks (WANs) to connect to the District office. More recently, the Internet allows total interconnectivity of the computers sitting on a Teacher’s desk to the central District office, the government agency and the parent at home.

Technology now offers a better balance between centralized management of data elements and flexible, individual school data needs. However, this increased integration of data management requires a greater level of understanding of data, its management and its security by all levels of school staff.

Why choose commercial school software?

While education remains the domain of individual Districts, states or provinces, developing software that adequately responds to these varied requirements remains a challenge. Individual schools and even some states have chosen to develop their own software to respond to their unique data collecting needs, but the high costs of maintaining such systems often become too onerous. Some problems are that the hardware and connectivity software continually change, users demand frequent enhancements and the constant updating of the software documentation is costly. Choosing commercial software may not satisfy all the needs of a school or District but these differences can usually be accommodated one way or another.

Why there is never a dumb question!

The explosion of computer and software development has resulted in much specialization in the computer industry. There are now many kinds of computers, monitors, routers, software, Internet browsers, etc., each with their own versions and upgrades such that no individual can be expected to know everything. Even if one has much computer experience, there are often pieces of knowledge that fall through the cracks or have become obsolete. Today, many people may have experience using a computer for word processing, others may use spreadsheet programs, others have experience with some database systems and now the Internet has added yet more programs to learn and manage.

Few