Student and Parent Demographics
We track legal and common names, gender, grade, birth date, provincial/state student number, with optional medical data, school/credit history, plus an unlimited number of user fields and note fields. Documents are imported and maintained in a folder for each student. There are provisions for an unlimited number of contacts that includes their address, multiple phone numbers, e-mail address, and their relationship to the student.
Attendance Tracking
The School Calendar is the basis for attendance taking. Schools determine the start and end of the school year and indicate holidays and special days that occur throughout the school year. We can handle full year, semestered, trimestered, and quadmestered setups as well as any combination of the four. We can accommodate the 7 days of the week as well as evening school hours.
We track full/half-day attendance for elementary schools and period attendance for secondary schools. K-12 schools that use both systems can reside in our database. We provide tools for extracting attendance statistics based on the client's requirements. Attendance letters can be created, saved, and applied to students as necessary.
Report Cards and Transcripts
As well as allowing schools to produce the standard report cards and transcripts mandated by their province/state, we also allow clients to design their own report cards and transcripts in single or multiple pages.
Rather than create printed copies, report cards and transcripts can be created in electronic format to be e-mailed to parents or students. A copy of each report card and transcript can be archived in each student's Document folder and accessed by staff or also by parents using the Parent/Student Portal.
Fee Management
Tuition and other fees can be tracked for each student or for each family if there are multiple students. Invoices and statements can be produced. The school bookkeeper can apply post-dated cheques at the appropriate time and can produce an accounts receivable list when necessary.
Scheduling
With our decades of experience offering scheduling services to schools, we have honed our algorithm so that it is the best available from any vendor. The scheduling system that is part of TOSM assumes that students will be on the 'credit' system and that each student will require an individualized timetable. Our algorithm strives to minimize student conflicts and, at the same time, balance classes. We offer a Builder program to create the Master Timetable based on student choices, staff and room availability, in a multi-period/multi-day environment.
For senior elementary, middle, and junior high schools, we offer a separate product called the Rotary Timetable Builder which will produce non-conflicting class, teacher, and room timetables. This program assumes that students tend to stay together as a group as they move from course to course but the program has the ability to handle splitting students into different groups for optional courses.
Provincial/State Reporting
Our company has grown up with the development of electronic reporting to provincial/state departments of education. In some cases we have worked with the provincial governments as they developed their capability to receive student data electronically.
We were recently contracted by a major US vendor to assist them in implementing their Ontario ONSIS government reporting software. We have some clients who use US-based software for their day-to-day operations but use our program to meet the provincial reporting requirements. We are experts in this field.
Teacher Access
One of the huge benefits of cloud-based software is its accessibility. Teachers can access our system from their classrooms to enter things like attendance or from their homes when entering student marks and comments. The School Administration can control each teacher's access.
Parent/Student Portal
The advent of the Internet paved the way for more and better access to student information by both parents and students. With the proper login credentials, parents and students can access selected data on a student's attendance, marks, credit history, and other information. The school controls what parents/students can see and, at no time, can any data be changed.
Schools have the option to 'go green' by e-mailing report cards and transcripts to parents and by allowing them to access these documents in the student's Documents folder. Prior terms report cards are always available if they need to be retrieved.
Parents and students can also select the student's course choices for the next school year taking into account credits that have already been achieved, credits that are currently being taken, and the requirements of the desired Diploma.
Student Document Portfolio
A folder exists for each student that can hold pictures, PDFs, Word documents, scanned documents, as well as report cards and transcripts. This information is stored electronically and it is available to any authorized user at any time.
Edsby and DesireToLearn (D2L) Interfaces
Edsby and D2L are learning management software (LMS) packages that provide for day-to-day interaction between student, parents, and teachers. Being the administrative software used by the school and board administration, our software can provide information to and receive information from these LMS vendors ... all automatically in the background with little or no action required by the administration.
