Monthly Mentions Newsletter – April 2021

If your school is approaching the 3rd quarter report, then these functions in FastDirect might need to be addressed.

Opening up teacher input for 4th Mid-Quarter Report will require:

• Confirming the mid-quarter dates in ‘Grades’ then ‘Report Card Input Controls’
• Changing input for mid-quarter from ‘Not Yet’ to ‘Allow Input’ in ‘Report Card Input Controls’
• Having teachers go through the mid-quarter report card input process
• Closing the input process by changing ‘Allow Input’ to ‘Input Complete’

Opening up teacher input for 3rd Mid-Trimester Report will require:

• Confirming the mid-trimester dates in ‘Grades’ then ‘Report Card Input Controls’
• Changing input for mid-trimester from ‘Not Yet’ to ‘Allow Input’ in ‘Report Card Input Controls’
• Having teachers go through the mid-trimester report card input process
• Closing the input process by changing ‘Allow Input’ to ‘Input Complete’

We have just released the Phase 2a changes for Virtual Attendance.  In these changes, we have updated the students’ attendance reports to show any Virtual/Virtual due to Covid days, including on the students’ report cards. In Phase 2b, we will release the report that will have all Monitor notes and any Medical Absences.

Here are the virtual attendance report changes in Phase 2a:

1. Report Card Attendance Table
2. The “Short” Attendance Report: This is the report found by:
   • Clicking “History” in Monitor
   • Clicking “Attendance” on a ReportCard
   • Clicking “Print whole class attendance”
   • Under Reports / Attendance / By Homeroom / Short
3. The “Full” Attendance Report: This is found under Reports / Attendance / By Homeroom / Full
4. Individual Attendance Record (more information below)

Individual Attendance Record:
In regards to the Individual Attendance Record, this report allows you to select an individual student and view or edit their attendance data along with their virtual status. You will notice that the notes entered in Monitor will also now appear on this report.

How to Access the Report (two different ways):

1. Reports / Attendance / Individual Attendance Record
2. Calendar / Individual Attendance Record

How to Use the Report:

1. Select a student and click View/Edit
2. To change the attendance and/or virtual status of a date, check the box associated with that date, and scroll to the bottom of the screen.
3. Refer to the drop-down menu that shows “Present” as the default option.
4. Select the appropriate status and click “Change status for…”

The new status options are as follows:

• Present + Virtual: Useful if you need to edit an A (Absent) to Present and Virtual (distance learning by choice)
• Present + Virtual due to COVID-19: Useful if you need to edit an A (Absent) to Present and Virtual due to COVID-19 (distance learning as a mandate)
• Virtual: Useful if you just need to add the virtual designation without assigning or editing the attendance status
• Virtual due to COVID-19: Useful if you just need to add the Virtual due to COVID-19 designation without assigning or editing the attendance status

Tuition’s ‘Show All’ report has been redesigned with filters! The filters for this report allow you to view members or non-members, grade ranges, and a posting filter. For example, if you only want to post to Member families with students in preschool who only get charged on the 15th, now you can make that happen! Here are the steps to view the Show All report with filters:

1. Go to Finance
2. Click on ‘Tuition Setup/Log Receipts/Post Payments..’
3. When the page loads, underneath the option to select individual parents are the new filters.  Chose the information you need and click ‘Show All Families’ Tuition’

Here are explanations for each filter:

• Min/Max grade levels – Allows you to specify which grade levels you want in the report
• Members/Non-Members – For schools that track which families are part of the school’s church
• Allow Post – Posting for families can happen at any time during the month but this filter allows you to choose to only post for families whose specific posting date has occurred or post to any family, regardless of their posting date for the month

We have added a new grade book category to help with teachers who enter grades into a separate Learning Management System, such as Google Classroom. This new grade book category is titled ‘LMS’. This will allow teachers to enter in a grade for that category so that it can be included in the student’s overall course grade. Here are the recommended steps for this feature:

Note: If you are using Category Weighting or Cumulative+Category Weighting, you will want to make sure and give the LMS category a weight in your grade book.

1. Open up a specific course’s grade book.
2. Create a new event with a title of ‘Google Classroom’ or the name of the LMS you are using and then set the event category to LMS; create the event
3. For student’s grades, enter in the overall grade that the student has received in the LMS

This event will now be averaged into the student’s overall FastDirect grade for the course.

When viewing your finance account balances in FastDirect, each balance is a clickable link. When you click on a specific balance, you will see a list of all the transactions (deposits & charges) made to that account. Once clicked, the list of transactions will give you the following information:

• Finance account name
• Date of transaction (when added to FastDirect)
• Charge or Deposit label
• Amount of money in transaction
• Description/note of transaction (for example, check number)

• How can an administrator view and/or print a tax report for a specific family?
• How do I set up Tuition account for next year?
• How do I print labels in the Reports section?

Helpful FAQs from April 2020:

• When creating a new event in GradeBook, what are the ‘Status’ Options?
• How do I add access to FastDirect Communications to the home screen of my smart phone?
• How do I delete a link from the ‘Links’ section?

Helpful FAQs from April 2019:

• How do I create a link to an uploaded file?
• What should I do at the end of the year in relation to keeping records of the student’s history in Nurse?
• How do I edit data fields using the Make Your Own Report?

Watch this video tutorial to find out more about how parents re-register their child online through their parent account:

• Click here to watch the video tutorial as an MP4!
• Click here to watch the video tutorial in YouTube!