As we settle into the new school year, we’re excited to introduce a termly newsletter dedicated to keeping our independent schools community updated and connected. These newsletters aim to bring you the latest updates, enhancements, and insights to help you make the most of Compass in your school community.
This edition features important product updates, upcoming training opportunities, and expert tips to streamline your school operations. If you would like to see certain content covered in this termly newsletter, please email our team at customersuccess@compass.education
Stay tuned for valuable content designed to support your team, enhance efficiency, and keep your school ahead with the latest technology.
Let’s make Term 1 a great one!
Recent Product Updates
Custom Period Editor
To help accommodate schools that may have slight period structure changes on certain days throughout the term, we have released a custom period editor for specific calendar days! This will allow you to adjust your period structure for a specific day as opposed to having to manually create activities to accommodate for any assemblies or services you may be holding throughout the school year.
To use this feature, you would go through Configure Schedules, into the Period Structures tab where you would select the calendar icon.
Once here, we have a new icon on the right side of this page which when selected allows you to update the period structure for that specific day.
From here you can copy your period structure from another day, or even create a custom structure! Once this has been created, make sure to reimport or generate your timetable in Compass.
If you think this feature would be useful at your school, please reach out to ‘customersuccess@compass.education’ for this to be enabled.
Email Management
To assist schools with managing any emails being sent directly from Compass, we have created an ‘Email Management’ tool within Administration Tools. This allows schools to have a central log of all emails being sent from Compass, including a section for auditing of attachments that have been sent from your portal.
This feature is already enabled on all portals and can be found under Administration Tools, titled as ‘Email Management’.
Update Medical Details
For schools wanting to provide families with more access to updating their details, we have a new feature that allows parents to update student medical details and action plans directly within the portal. This can be used to ensure that all student medical records and action plans are up to date, without having to constantly send out reminders and update the information based on responses. This functionality allows staff to see these pending changes within People Management, to then update in your SIS, or if Compass is your SIS, you can accept these changes. Additionally, this has the functionality to request parents to update student medical details the next time they log in to Compass.
If this is something you think your parent community would find useful, please reach out to ‘customersuccess@compass.education’ and we will be able to get this enabled for you!
Curriculum Management
You may have seen posts about our new Curriculum Management module on your portal, and we are pleased to let you know that we are taking further expressions of interest for any schools in the Independent space that are looking to trial this module.
The module allows for the creation of coursework, condensing all aspects of a unit into a single location that can be shared between classes to maintain continuity in all summative tasks that students may be completing throughout the year.
If you are interested in learning more about this module, reach out to the team and we can provide further documentation and consultations.
Rubric Uplift/enhancements
In line with recommendations from schools, we have made several improvements to the look of rubrics and added many new features that are now ready to be enabled! This new look focuses on allowing you to streamline processes to further enable staff in the classroom, with new powerful features that will enhance the experience of anybody creating, viewing or marking a rubric.
If you are interested in demoing the new look and features, please reach out to the team and we can enable these for you.
Duplicating Chronicle Entries
Based on feedback from our Independent Schools we have added the ability to duplicate Chronicle entries to support wellbeing and teaching staff. This change looks to allow your teaching staff to spend less time replicating an entry, and more time supporting students by allowing your staff to simply duplicate an entry from the edit window as seen in the below screenshot.
To have this feature enabled on your portal, please contact ‘customersuccess@compass.education’
Enrol into Current Session for Group Activities
To assist with behaviour management and student allocation into these sessions, you can now enrol students into Group Activity sessions that are currently occurring. In cases when a student may need to attend a support session during their regular classes, you can now select when creating a Chronicle entry with an associated Group Activity, that you want to enrol the student into a session currently running, or the next session that is happening.
This is configured on specific templates, so when a staff member creates the entry, the student will be allocated without any further actions needing to be taken. This feature is available in all portals now, with no action needed for this to be turned on.
Independent Schools Webinars
The team has been very excited for our new Independent Schools Webinar series we will be running moving forward. This term our team has delivered two webinars on Conferences and Learning Tasks, with more Webinars to come throughout the year.
If you were unable to make it to either of these sessions, don’t worry! Below are the recordings for both of these sessions:
Conferences: Elevate your Parent-Teacher Interviews!
Mastering Learning Tasks: How to Effectively Record and Track Student Results!
Keep an eye on your portal notifications as the team has many more exciting Webinar and training opportunities coming!
