The above demonstration goes over taking attendance as a teacher, administering attendance as a secretary, and viewing attendance as a parent.
Focus/SIS makes complicated scheduling seem simple.
Stop waiting for your requests to be scheduled.
Focus/SIS schedules a high school in just minutes.
And, Focus/SIS doesn't take any shortcuts to schedule so quickly. Focus/SIS' incredibly clever recursive scheduling algorithms mean that your school won't have to worry about completion ratios ever again. Focus/SIS intelligently tries every possible scheduling combination until it finds the best one.
Focus/SIS schedules even the most complicated or untraditional master schedules.
Block Schedules
Advanced/Remedial Course Weighting
Sections with Multiple Meeting Times
Timetable Scheduling
Multiple Calendars
Gender Restrictions
Scheduling in a High School:
A guidance counselor meets with each student and enters course requests. Or, students enter their requests online.
Administrators skip the steps involved in creating the master schedule. In Focus/SIS, no one has to enter teacher course requests or build a master schedule. Instead, we start from last year's master schedule.
Administrators run the Focus/SIS scheduler. With just a couple of clicks and a couple of minutes, most of the requests are scheduled and a brief conflicts report is displayed.
Using the conflicts report as a guide, administrators make any necessary adjustments to the master schedule. Focus/SIS suggests moving sections, adding sections, removing sections, or altering student requests.
Since the scheduler runs in only minutes, the scheduler can be run as many times as necessary until 100% of the student requests have been scheduled. The Focus/SIS scheduler recursively tries every combination of schedules until it finds the perfect combination.
Focus/SIS balances each section, and won't over schedule any section. However, administrators can choose to override maximum seat counts.
Scheduling in a College:
Students register for classes online.
Colleges can also schedule students by hand like a K-12 school. And, high schools can allow their students to register for classes online.
Teachers can take attendance for their homeroom, and have a gradebook for each subject they teach.
Focus/SIS simplifies tracking grades.
The above video demonstrates the online gradebook and displays examples of report cards, transcripts, and benchmarks-based report cards produced by Focus/SIS. This demonstration also highlights how you can give parents and students at your school access to grades and assignments online.
Focus/SIS simplifies student billing.
The above video demonstrates how fees are automatically assessed when students are enrolled (based on your school's settings). It also demonstrates how parents and students at your school can pay for fees online with e-Check or Credit Card. The same online payments feature can also be used to convert paper checks into electronic payments that are automatically deposited into your school's bank account.
All these transactions can then be synchronized with QuickBooks or another accounting package. Focus/SIS even produces 1098-T tax forms for your students.
Focus/SIS provides powerful data tracking tools.
The above video demonstrates how Focus/SIS allows you to define the data you need to track for students. It also demonstrates reporting on the data fields that you create for students.
Focus/SIS simplifies discipline procedures and data analysis.
Save Paper
Convert your paper referral form to an electronic form in Focus/SIS.
Focus/SIS implementation specialists transform discipline referral forms provided by your school into an electronic form like the one above.
Users will feel comfortable transitioning from your old discipline system since the referral form in Focus/SIS is customized to exactly match your old one.
Breakout your data
Focus/SIS allows you to create breakdown reports on your schools' referrals based on any of the fields on your discipline form, any student fields, over time, and comparing schools within your district.
Use advanced filters to create complex graphs in pie, bar, or list format. Break out your reports for more information -- filtered or sorted by ethnicity, truancy, or any other combination of criteria. For example, the above pie chart created in Focus/SIS shows a breakdown of Violations reported on all referrals for truant African-American students. Clicking on any Violation on this chart will display another chart of African-American truant students who committed that violation.
Fulfill state reporting requirements with just one click.
State Reporting Spotlight: Illinois
The Illinois State Board of Education's SIS facilitates data transfer from Illinois school districts to the state of Illinois.
Focus/SIS produces every essential Illinois report specifically formatted for the Illinois SIS. Each report is generated in a matter of seconds with just one click:
Illinois SIS Enrollment CSV
State-Assigned Student Identifier Import
ADA Attendance Report
Pupil Transportation Claim report
State Aid Claim report
End of Year discipline report
Free/Reduced Lunch Claim report
Focus/SIS's built-in state reporting engine makes it simple to fine-tune Focus/SIS for any state. When our engineers install your system, fields for your state are added automatically. And we fine-tune the state reporting engine to your state's individual requirements.
When reports are due, Focus/SIS will remind you. Our engineers will also automatically update the reports when the requirements change.
Focus/SIS provides essential data to the users who need it in real time.
Take control of user access with incredibly fine-grained permissions.
Focus/SIS system administrators can assign read-only and editing access to any function within Focus/SIS.
These permissions can be assigned to individual users or groups of users.
Students:
View admission status, course schedule, final grades, GPA
Perform degree audit
Pay fees with credit card or e-check
View upcoming assignments
View teacher-supplied course materials (such as the syllabus) online
Take online quizzes
View assignment & assessment grades and track performance in course
Register for classes or apply for admission
Teachers:
Take attendance
Publish course information
Announce upcoming homework assignments and assessments
Create graded online assessments
Prepare paper exams to be printed and scanned for grading
Submit final grades (which are automatically calculated by the Focus/SIS gradebook) for transcripts
Weight grades, exclude assignments for individual students, and customize grading scales
Secretaries & Administrators:
Create student fields to store student information and perform searches and reports on these fields
Add students to the system when they apply, and transfer the students when they are accepted
Print transcripts
Define user permissions
Schedule students into classes
Integrate Moodle into your SIS to provide e-Learning.
Provide numerous course activities including forums, quizzes, assignments, and chats
Automate formative assessment
Create and grade paper exams with scanners
Facilitate communication and collaboration between teachers and students
Develop online lesson plans and monitor student online coursework
Focus/SIS works with Apperson Optical Mark Read (OMR) auto-feed scanners. Paper Exams (with multiple form codes) are created in the e-Learning component of Focus/SIS. When the bubble sheets are scanned, the grades are automatically uploaded back to Focus/SIS.
Integrate the perfect cafeteria system.
Use any hardware.
Our implementation specialists recommend touchscreen point-of-sale hardware and barcode scanners for your schools. However, your schools can use the computers and barcode scanners that you already have to run the point-of-sale terminal.
Integrate Focus/SIS with the open source point-of-sale cafeteria package PSCafePOS
Track student lunch purchases with a point-of-sale installed in the cafeteria
Publish student lunch purchases and nutritional information online for parents
Track free/reduced lunch status
Use student ID cards to debit declining balances. Students can use the same cards for the library. Or, cafeteria workers can use laminated barcode sheets for younger students
Attendance
Scheduling
Grading
Billing
Student & Staff Data
Discipline
State Reporting
User Access
Course Management
Cafeteria
Library
