COVID-19 Updates

COVID-19 Updates

9/1/2020

 

Over the past few weeks we’ve been working on our new COVID-19 screening functionality.  We made quite a few changes and wanted to provide an update.

Improved Calendars

Because of COVID-19, in many places education has become more flexible with respect to location.  Sometimes students learn at home and other times they come to school.  Our customers have adopted many different plans, and we built a system to support them.  

 

We give you the ability to create academic calendars where days are marked as in-person or e-learning. Each calendar can be applied to some students (or all).  This provides the flexibility to create an in-person, e-learning, or blended environment.  You can bring smaller student populations into the building at a time, and create rotating groups.

 

With this complexity, we wanted to provide some simple analytics to understand the demographics of students on each calendar (gender, race/ethnicity, IEP, etc).  Schools may want to thoughtfully create student groups.  So we built an analytics page to see how many of each type of student are on various calendars.

 

 

With this flexible system, on any given day we need to communicate to parents whether students should come to school or e-learn at home.  We improved the graphical quality of the calendar, to make it clearer.  Each student (or day) has an icon to indicate their location for learning.

When setting up each calendar day, we give you the option of explicitly setting the location (in-person or e-learning).  For convenience, we default the value based upon the attendance code selected.   As seen on the last screenshot, the location will show to parents.

 

Parent Mobile App

Our first release a few weeks ago was targeted to desktop.  Recently we added COVID-19 screenings to the mobile app.  Parents can enter and view screenings from their mobile device.

 


Unified Parent Check-In

When students come to school, parents need to complete a COVID-19 screening.  If students stay home, they need to check-in to e-learning (either by parents or students).  Since something needs completed for each student, regardless of location, we unified the check-in page for parents.  It shows all their students, and walks them through completing the appropriate form for each student.

 

 

Please note that the unified workflow is currently available on desktop only.  We’ll add it to mobile shortly.  In the meantime parents can fill out COVID-19 screenings on their mobile device, and students can check-in when they start e-learning (typically on their school issued device).

Teacher/Admin Mobile App

We’re making improvements to the teacher/admin mobile app too (not yet released, but will be out shortly).  The first is the ability for employees to enter COVID-19 screenings for themselves.  They get a popup when they enter the COVID-19 Screening page.

 

 

They can easily create COVID-19 screenings for students on a mobile device (click the + button).  They can view individual screenings too.

 

 

When viewing a student, we added today’s COVID-19 screening status to basic info.

 

 

We added a page to view COVID-19 screening history for a student.  Swipe left to access it when viewing a student’s status.

 


Announcements

We added the ability to send announcements based upon COVID-19 screening status.   You can send an announcement to parents who haven’t filled in today’s screening, perhaps to remind them for tomorrow.  You could also send an announcement to parents who did fill out a screening, thanking them for their effort.

 

Various Small Improvements

We added configurable text for employees when they pass/fail a screen.  Showing them the student text seemed sub-optimal.

 

We added a COVID-19 screening page to Student Single View.  It’s under the “Health Records” tab.

 

We added admin permissions for COVID-19 screenings.  Permissions now control whether an admin can view and/or modify a screening.

Upcoming Efforts

We’re still not done with COVID-19 work, and have another release or two.  We plan to work on the following features.


  • Be able to mark students and employees as “self-isolation/quarantine.”  This will allow individuals to stay home for a period of time without needing to adjust calendars.  We’ll add a separate icon for this daily status.

  • Add the unified check-in page to the parent mobile app.  They’ll have one place to enter COVID-19 screenings AND e-learning check-in.

  • Allow employees to edit COVID-19 screenings. Sometimes parents accidentally enter data incorrectly, and employees want to fix it (enter notes for documentation).

  • Add instructor permissions too.

 

We hope our COVID-19 functionality has supported the processes in our customer’s schools.  Feel free to send us feedback.

 

 

The Common Goal Team