As Australia slowly begins to ease back into something resembling normality after the peak of the coronavirus pandemic, Compass has continued to focus on supporting schools throughout this deeply uncertain period. With students in every state and territory now back in the classroom, and most schools in Victoria still balancing a mixture of remote and face-to-face teaching, this month’s product enhancements have been designed to ensure that schools have the best possible resources in place to support students and engage parents, wherever they may be.

Student email notifications in Learning Task conversations

We also want to make sure schools feel confident that they’ll be able to return to remote teaching and learning arrangements seamlessly, in the event that this is necessary. As such, we’ve continued to work on enhancements to our Learning Tasks module. This month this included enabling email notifications for students when a teacher replies on a Learning Task conversation. This enhancement will also benefit schools using Learning Tasks for homework, ensuring students don’t miss out on teachers responding to questions about the tasks they have been set.

Custom automated attendance notifications and bulk attendance notes

The pandemic also posed big questions about how attendance can be recorded remotely, and a number of this month’s releases offer increased flexibility within our attendance functionality. This includes allowing schools to customise which students are targeted when sending automated attendance notifications from Compass, and giving schools the ability to add attendance notes in bulk (something we hope will save staff a lot of time and effort!).

Office 365 integration for simplified class management

Integrations became increasingly important over the last few months, and we were proud to assist many schools in using Compass alongside a range of other providers and products, including Zoom and Google Hangouts. This month the team were hard at work making it easier for you to simplify class management in Office 365. Our School Data Sync reads rosters from your SIS and creates classes and groups for Microsoft Teams, Intune for Education, and other  third party applications. You can also now export student, staff, subject and class information from Compass to Office 365.

MSP Photo Ordering Integration and Photo Uploader Tool

The return of school photo day will be a sure sign that things are getting back to normal, and we’ve been working to further our integration with our partners MSP, including the ability to upload photos from a with a drag & drop tool. This will also provide live feedback if one of your photos cannot be uploaded. Want to find out more? Get in touch with our team.