Starting the Year Off Right with Infinite Campus and Finalsite

The start of a new school year is hectic enough without having to try to remember all the steps involved in setting up your new Infinite Campus grade books and your finalsite web pages. This is why I’ve created a library of tech tutorials for you to refer to on-demand. They’re all kept in the finalsite Community Login faculty portal under the Teacher Resources tab. To save you the step of going there and finding the most pertinent videos for starting the year off right, I’ve posted a few below that should do the trick…

 

Understanding the New Infinite Campus Features

If you haven’t gotten around to checking out the new features in Infinite Campus, I encourage you to do so by viewing two video tutorials I recently put together.  This one is an introduction to the new Assignments module that has replaced the poorly named Lesson Planner (so glad that’s gone). And this one shows you some best practices for starting the year off with new, empty classes.

One particular change that some of you have already noticed is that you can no longer create assignments from within the gradebook by right-clicking on a grading category.  After talking to the people at Infinite Campus about this, we understand that this represents a shift in their thinking about the Gradebook module in light of the new Assignments module. While you can still enter scores in the Gradebook module, they view it more as a place to view grades, while the new Assignments module is meant to be the main hub of your assignment/grading activity.  As you will see in the videos linked above, scores can now be entered without ever leaving the assignments module by clicking the “Save and score” button. The screenshot below shows what this looks like. Notice that you can make comments on individual assignments, and you can drop (Dr) or mark assignments late (L), missing (M), exempt (X), etc. all from this module.

save and score

Being Pro-active with Infinite Campus Student Summary Reports

A teacher asked me earlier today if it’s possible to e-mail an up-to-date detailed progress report to parents from Infinite Campus.  It is possible using both IC and Outlook, and it’s pretty simple.  View the tutorial below to find out how.

Mid-term progress reports will be sent home soon, so this won’t be necessary for the majority of your students. But it offers a way of being pro-active with students who are struggling, and it allows you to honor the requests of the few parents who would like a more detailed report. Regarding the mid-term progress reports, stay tuned for a detailed tutorial on how to post them in Infinite Campus.

Infinite Campus Gradebook Tips

As I roam the district helping teachers with Infinite Campus, a lot of the same questions keep popping up.  Figuring others are struggling with some of the same questions, I decided to put together the following video tutorial.  This one focuses on creating and copying assignments, as well as auto-filling grades.  (I recommend clicking the full screen icon in the player for a better view.) Let me know if there are other demos you’d like to see by leaving a comment below.

Sweet Infinite Campus Feature!

A few people have asked me about printing gradebook spreadsheets from Infinite Campus with student ID numbers instead of names. You know, something a teacher could post to her classroom wall so that students can easily track their progress.  It turns out that this is something IC makes pretty simple and easy in the Reports module. Check out the video tutorial below. (Be patient…you may have to wait a 10 seconds or so before it starts streaming.)