What’s the progress on moving towards a District Registrar?

What’s the status of the district’s progress in moving towards the District Registrar? 

Who is the District Registrar?
Joy Zuber, who currently works in Administrative Services, will begin transitioning after spring break to work in the District Registrar position that will be housed in Teaching & Learning, at the Learning Resource Center.

Will the Registrar start handling new family registration right away?
No.  Our first task is to collect, review, and standardize the different enrollment forms that are used across the district.  We’ll then work with various departments including nutrition, transportation, and others to learn about their needs.  The new enrollment forms will then need to be reviewed by schools and departments.  Once the forms are standardized, then we’ll start handling the new family registration – and we’ll begin transitioning one building at a time.

Why one buiding at a time?
Changing from school based enrollment to a district enrollment is a significant change.   Transitioning one building at a time will enable us to work out issues and challenges along the way.

How long will it take? In other words, how long before all schools are transitioned?
We’re estimating that it will take 6 to 12 months.

Seriously?  This means our school will have to go through our regular registration process in August?
Yes, most schools will still need to conduct their traditional school registration again this August.

Why don’t we just do on-line registration for all of this?
We are moving towards on-line registration, but there are two key problems that need to resolved first, as on-line registration systems are based on…. 1) your district has a standardized enrollment process that is identical across all schools  and 2) your district has a District Registrar who is responsible for reviewing and approving all on-line registrations.   If we can resolve these two issues during the next 12 months, then our next step would be to automate the registration process on-line, which would put us in the summer 2013 timeframe.

What could possibly be so hard about standardizing the registration forms?
With building based registration, each school has had the ability to customize the forms for their own needs.  In addition, most schools use a student based form – which means parents fill out the same form for EACH student.  This leads to lots of repetition.  Instead, we’d like to move to a family based form, so that the family can fill out one form that contains information on everyone in the family.

When the Registrar is ready to transition schools to the new registration, which schools will go first?
Order hasn’t fully been determined yet, but the district will make that decision.

Will the registrar come out to the school to handle kindergarten roundup this spring?
No.  Even in future years, it’s likely that kindergarten roundup will still be run by the school, you’ll just send the forms to the Registrar.  For this spring (2012), please plan on conducting your roundups just as you have in the past.

 Will the District Registrar be accepting fees and handling registration money?
Sorry, this hasn’t been reviewed yet, but it’s likely that this will remain at each schools.

On-line Assessments coming to Infinite Campus!

Information was released today that Infinite Campus is planning to add an on-line assessment feature…

Q1. When will it be available?
A1. There is talk of late spring – but, it’s most likely that we wouldn’t upgrade Campus until summer.   I’ve learned over the years – there’s nothing worse than messing with your grade book during the months of April and May, so if the feature comes out then, we’ll hold until the summer.

Q2. What information is available about its features?
[The following information was provided by CIC, who handles support and implementations for Infinite Campus in Iowa and other area states]    The Online Assessments module will provide teachers and district staff with the ability to create tests and deliver the assessments via the Campus Portal, and after the student completes the assessment, the grade book will be automatically updated with the students’ total scores.

Test Item Bank
The Test Item Bank can be created using several different options:
• Answers to the test items can be multiple choice both single and multiple answer, true /false, short answer and essay.
• Test items can be aligned to standards, assisting teachers and / or district staff in creating local standards‐based assessments.
• Should you choose to create a district‐wide assessment, you can create test items to be reserved for district use only, which could remain unseen by teachers.
• Items can also be deactivated if it is determined that they should no longer be used.

 
Assessment Creation
Once the Test Item Bank has been populated, assessments can be created with the following options:

• Assessments can be created by teachers or can be created by building / district‐level staff and can then be published for use.
• The sequencing of the questions can be controlled. 
• Responses can be randomized.
• Access to specific assessments can be controlled with security rights (reserving district assessments for district use only)
• Details, such as the author, published date, audience and required materials are stored with the assessment

Delivery

• Once created, assessments will be delivered via the Campus Portal
• Assessments can be made available for only a certain testing window/date range.
• A timer can appear at the top of the assessment, indicating how much time is left to complete.
• Once the assessment is saved and submitted by the student, teachers can view the student’s responses via the gradebook.

Things that we’ll have to consider about this feature……..

* Will we use it for formative assessments, summative assessments or both?

* Will we use it for teacher based assessments only? or should we use it to help standardize course or grade level based assessments?