This guide will help schools set up a blended learning schedule in SchoolInsight. Schools create blended schedules, which include both in-person and remote learning, to implement social distancing rules to prevent the spread of COVID19. SchoolInsight accommodates blended learning schedules via the use of customized calendars, e-learning check-in attendance, and COVID-19 screening on the parent and employee portals.
To illustrate a blended schedule example, consider that a school may divide students into two teams. A blue team will attend school Mondays and Tuesdays, and will learn remotely on Thursdays and Fridays. A red team will attend in reverse; remotely on Mondays and Tuesdays and in school on Thursdays and Fridays. All teams will learn remotely on Wednesdays. The school will be able to sanitize the building on weekends and Wednesdays in this scenario.
To accommodate this, the school admin will need to do the following:
- Create a calendar for each team
- Enable e-learning check-in attendance option
- Edit calendars to select in-school and remote learning days
- Mass assign calendars to students
- Enable COVID-19 screening for students and employees
Create a calendar for each team
Calendars allow you to indicate e-learning and in-school days. Therefore, creating separate calendars per group of students allows you to indicate when groups of students are expected in-school vs when the students should be learning from home. Furthermore, the calendar e-learning setting controls the days when students can use the e-learning check-in attendance functionality.
Best practices dictate that you create a separate calendar for each group of students that will receive instruction both in-school and remotely on the same days. Furthermore, we recommend that you create two additional calendars:
- Create an e-learning calendar with all days marked for e-learning to be assigned to students undergoing quarantine.
- Create an in-school calendar with no days marked for e-learning to be assigned to students when in-school instruction resumes in the near future.
To create a new calendar:
- For district managed calendars go to School District Admin Main and for school managed calendars go to Admin Main
- Go to Yearly Setup > Academic Calendars > Create Calendar
- Enter a title that describes the group of students that the calendar will be assigned to
- Enter the dates for
- First day of attendance
- Last day of attendance
- Days school is scheduled
- Select the days of the week that school is in session
- Grade levels
- Choose the grade levels that apply to this calendar
- If at the district level, select the schools to make the calendar available to
- Leave calendar for external school/district unchecked
- Create calendar
For our example we created four calendars as follows:
For more information about creating calendars refer to this KB:
Enable e-learning check-in attendance
This option will allow tracking of period attendance for students who are e-learning. When this option is enabled, an e-learning check-in popup will show on the main page of the student and parent portals asking them to check-in. This popup will only show up for students on e-learning attendance days as indicated on their assigned calendar.
To enable the e-learning check-in attendance option:
- Go to Admin Main > Attendance > Options
- Edit
- Check the option to use e-learning check-in
- Select a Check-in Period Attendance Code
- This will be the period attendance code for students who check-in
- (Recommended) Present
- (Optional) Select a Missing Period Attendance Code
- This will be the period attendance code for students who do not check-in.
- (Recommended) None, leave empty
- (Optional) Select a Check-in Time Frame
- Students and parents will be able to checkin within the set start/end times only. Leave the times blank, if students/parents can check-in anytime during the day.
- Select a Check-in Period Attendance Code
- Save
For our example, we’ve set up the attendance e-learning check-in options as follows:
Note that you can set your Check-In Start Time and Check-In End Time so that students and parents have ample time to login and complete their check-in on e-learning days. In our example, school normally starts at 8:15 AM, but we’ve turned on the e-learning check-in option for earlier in the day, 7:00 AM, so that students can check-in prior to the normal school start time. Also, a school day normally ends at 2:45 PM, however, our end time is set for 3:15 PM.
For more detailed information about E-learning attendance please refer to the following KB:
Edit calendars to select in-school and remote learning days
After creating all required calendars and turning on the e-learning check-in attendance option, edit each calendar to mark the in-school days and e-learning days.
To mark in-school and e-learning days on a calendar:
- For district managed calendars go to School District Admin Main and for school managed calendars go to Admin Main
- Go to Yearly Setup > Academic Calendars
- Click view next to a calendar
- Click edit for a month
- An in-school day will have
- Calendar day code X-Student Attendance Day
- Un-check use e-learning attendance
- An e-learning day will have
- (Illinois) Calendar day code XELD-ELearning Day or XRLD-Remote Learning Day
- Check use e-learning attendance
- Save
For example, here is how August will look like for the Blue group:
And here is how August will look like for the Red group:
For more information about assigning calendar days refer to this KB:
Mass assign calendars to students
After the calendars have been set, you can assign calendars to students. SchoolInsight allows you to filter by grade level and other demographic information in order to balance the student groups.
To assign a calendar to a group of students:
- Go to Admin Main > Yearly Setup > Academic Calendars > Mass Assign Calendars
- Select a calendar to assign
- (Optional) Filter the students by clicking on the menu button next to any column title
and choosing the desired filter
- Check the students you would like to assign the selected calendar to
- Save
For our example, we’ve assigned the blue calendar to half the student population and the red calendar to the other half.
For more information about assigning calendars to students refer to the following KB:
Enable COVID-19 screening for students and employees
This feature allows districts to set up a questionnaire that can be answered online by employees and parents to certify that the employees and students do not exhibit COVID-19 symptoms. This includes creating a custom questionnaire and status messages that will instruct users about school policy and next steps upon passing or failing the questionnaire.
For more information about setting up and managing fever checks refer to this KB: