I'd like to share with you that Zangle will be going thru some new and exciting updates, transformations and slowly evolving to a newer version of itself…..now called 'Q'.

Earlier in the week, we had the opportunity to represent Pomona at the 2013 'QUE' (Q Users Experience) conference and learned a lot from what other Zangle/Q users in neighboring districts, counties and in other states are doing. 

I truly do believe you will like these new revisions that have been made to Front Office but to TeacherConnect (Gradebook & Attendance), StudentConnect and ParentConnect.  Our biggest goal is to make this evolution to Q as seamless and painless as possible for our users and in order to make this possible a Pomona QUE group is currently in the process of being created to oversee this transformation here @ PUSD.

Stay tuned to the Zangle Blog! Any new and exciting news regarding Q… we will share with you here.

With summer school almost around the corner (June 10^th), some of you might be wondering how to set up your Master Schedule for this year's summer school.  The IT HELP desk has created documentation to support our summer school staff.  It's attached to this blog and contains information that support our folks in all our  high schools, middle and elementary schools. 

If you have any questions, please give us a call @ 4800 ext. HELP or 3780.

Hello Everyone!  Welcome back from Spring Break!! After a few dormant months of not posting on the Zangle Blog, I'd like to say I'm back.  J

The latest in Zangle news is that Summer School 2013 is now available as of 3/25.  You can access it via System button/Summer.  If you cannot see it and you need access to summer school, please submit a Help Desk ticket to Accounts/Permissions and Zangle .  

Here are some key points to remember about Summer Schools in Zangle:

· All students remain in the same grade level they were during the current school year except current  8^th graders are promoted to the 9^th grade.

· Current 12^th graders are not enrolled in summer school. So if you have any returning 12^th graders you will need to manually enroll them.

· You need to create a new course list for the summer Master Schedule.

· Summer School will begin June 10^th and ends July 19^th.

o There will be two(2) terms setup and the first term ends on June 25^th

o Grades for Semester 1 need to be entered by the 27^th and report cards will not be mailed until Semester 2 ends.

· You can create summer school course requests on Zangle so that it copies over to Summer School Zangle. Just verify that you enter Summer School in the Term section.

· You can use Remote Transfer to enroll students that are active at another site but plan to attend your school.

Earlier this week,  a new query view  titled 'Active Students and Siblings' was released in Enrollment/ Reports/Student Query Writer.  This new report lists your students' siblings (up to eight), their grade level and their current school along with a sibling total count.

In order for the Siblings report to work correctly, your students need to have been linked together in the same household.  There are many benefits in having siblings linked to the same household such as:

• Cost effective :  by limiting your mailing to one per household, you are spending less in postage and paper
• District Resources : all children in a family can be easily identified when services are offered or needed
• Accessibility : when parents are using ParentConnect, they need just one username and password to access all their children instead of one unique login per child

On the next blog, we'll explain how to link students together into a household.  If you have any questions or suggestions, please give us a call @ 4800 ext. 3780 or HELP.

Did you know that next week will mark the sixth week since school started in August? Time is surely flying past us way too quickly.  This time to start generating deficiency notices for secondary students.  Below is a list of all the dates for SBC, Deficiency Notices, Quarter Periods and Semester Grades.

 SBC
Trimester 1 - Nov 8, 2012
Trimester 2 - Feb 22, 2013
Trimester 3 - May 30, 2013

For more information regarding report cards, I'd suggest you take a look at the blog entered last year on October 10^th titled ' The 411 on Report Cards' .If you have any questions, please feel free to call us at the Help Desk @ 4800 xHELP or 3780.

WeIcome back Everyone! The 2012-2013 school year officially started yesterday. J

It's a new year and new changes take place as it is expected.  One major change this year are students total graduation credits. Last June, the Board approved the following modifications to students graduation requirements (pic. B):

• New graduation total: 220
• New total # of required Elective credits: 50 

Since this new modification needed to be implemented, it gave us the opportunity to make another adjustment to the Grad Requirements list in Zangle. Due to state requirements, all 9^th graders must take and pass Freshman PE.  So, to make it easier to view if a student has passed 9^th grade PE, we have added Freshman Physical Ed listed right below Physical Education (pic. A).

So as of today, all PE credits (except for 1901 and 2901) are now totaled in Physical Education and Freshman Physical Ed will check to see if students have completed course #'s 1901 and 2901.

Registrars' will be advised to update all students grad requirements so the latest modifications can be viewed/printed. Please be aware, that all students have been designated this new Graduation Requirement.  If you have a student with a special circumstance such as a PE Waiver…etc, please notify your Registrar. 

If you have any questions, please contact the ITS HELP Desk @ 4800 xHELP or 3780.

We want to share with you a few key reminders to help you prepare for the beginning of the school year:

• Run the Master Schedule report (Scheduling/Reports) to verify that non-returning teachers are not assigned any classes. This will prevent having any students be accidentally enrolled in their class(es).

• Run the Unscheduled Period Report (in Scheduling) to identify any students with a missing class or class period(s).
• If you cannot find a teacher on your Master Schedule, use a temporary teacher account such as 'Teacher-A', 'Teacher-B' as a place holder in order to enroll students into their class roster.
• Remember to request ITS to make student schedules viewable in StudentConnect. Currently, they are unviewable since the majority of all sites are busy working on the Master Schedule and making constant updates.  Once your site is done and ready to share with students their schedules, please submit a ticket.

 Enrolling/Exiting

• As of this moment, only Armstrong and Yorba will be enrolling Transitional K students at their sites.
• If a student decides to transfer to another school site, please exit student as of 8/13.  When you use 8/14, you are not permitting the next school site to enroll the student as of the first day of school.
• Do not use 'No Show' exit code unless instructed by Pupil Services.
• Do not exit student using exit code 'Graduated' or 'NonGraduate' for students in grade levels PK - 11th grade. This code is designated only for high school Seniors.

• When exiting, use the following exit codes:
  • Track Transfer - student is going to enroll at another PUSD school.
  • Moved Verified - student is going to enroll at another school outside of PUSD
    (but within the state of California).
  • To an out-of-state School - student is moving to another state within this country.
  • Out of the Country - student is moving to another country.
• If you accidently exit a student using the date of 8/14, please call Central Attendance @ 4800 x3892 or Help Desk x3780 to fix the error. 

In the meantime, have a great summer and we look forward in working with you in getting ready for the new upcoming 12/13 school year.  

Can you believe that in less than four …yes in 4 weeks our PUSD students return for another successful school year.  Truly remarkable!  And as we are all too familiar, when a new school year begins, many changes occur during the transition from one school year to another.  Due to these changes, we have new work colleagues and/or new staff who need training.  Better yet, we could all use a reminder on how things work at the office after having a nice and relaxing summer break.

(Recommended for AP's who oversee Master Schedule, Elementary Office Managers, new Elementary Principals)

Enrollment/Attendance / Behavior / Student Scheduling / Bus Requests / Phone Directory:
(Recommended for new school personnel, Elementary Office Managers, new Elementary Principals)

1. Decide if your Career Plans will focus on courses on just one grade level or encompass courses for all grade levels
   (Example:  8^th Grade Honor Student  vs.  6^th - 8^thGrade Honor Students)
2. Determine which courses are considered 'default courses' for the majority of your students and for each 'group' of students. For example:
   
   6th Honors: English 6 Honors, PE, Science 6 Honors..etc
   7th Honors: English 7 Honors, PE, Science 7 Honors..etc
   8th Honors: English 8 Honors, PE, Science 8 Honors..etc
   
3. Create the Career Plans in Zangle
4. Assign each student a Career Plan
5. Generate the Career Plans (this process creates the course requests for each student)
6. Verify that the Courses Requests were generated properly (Student Editor)
7. Finish entering any other missing course requests
8. Run the Loader
9. Lastly, review your students' schedules

So, if you have determined that you're at a 'cookie cutter' school, in which your site has large number of students being enrolled in the same courses...then I truly recommend you look into Career Plans. Having Zangle generate your Course Requests can save you many long hours of hand scheduling and manual work.  If you would like more information on this topic, please give us at the Zangle Help Desk @ 4800 x. HELP or 3780. 

Summer school is just around the corner. Here are a few reminders and pointers on how to setup your Master Schedule and enrolling your students into the EL Summer Camp program:

• Grades K - 2 are to be scheduled in course #8009
• Grades 2- 3 are scheduled in course #8012
• Grades 3 - 8 are scheduled in course #8080 (K-8 schools)

• Classes are three (3) weeks long. Starts on June 11^th thru June 29^th.
• Teachers are required to take hourly attendance.
• No report cards will be printed for these students but an ELD Student Report will be printed instead.  School sites are responsible in the printing of this report at the end of the term.
• Courses are setup in 3 hour blocks (pic 1 & 2). If you are unsure on how to create a block schedule, please call the HELP desk.
• If you don't see your summer school teacher(s) in the Master Schedule, submit a HELP Desk ticket ASAP requesting that the assigned teacher(s) be transffered to your site. In the meantime, use a temporary Teacher A, B, C account in order to schedule your students.

A new query has been created in Zangle to help support elementary schools with their report cards.  It's located in Mark Reporting / Reports / Query Writer - Marks and the name of the view is 'Active Elementary Term GPA'.  This view will allow staff in the elementary sites to generate reports to view their students' trimester GPA's for the current school year. 

Also included in this week's blog is a How-To tutorial on how to use the Query Writer Excel feature to generate a report that will average a student's GPA.   With the release of this new view, it gives us the perfect opportunity to show you the many functions the Query Writer has to support your everyday needs.  We've had a few phone calls of users asking how they can generate a list where it displays  a cumulative GPA of Trimester 1 and Trimester 2 in order to determine their Honor Roll students.  Well, by using Excel as the Query Output and using the Subtotals function in Excel, creating a list of your students GPA can be done in matter of minutes versus hand calculating each student's average GPA. 

We encourage ALL to view this tutorial, so that you understand the steps in generating a list with 'Average' totals.  It will teach you the fundamental skills in generating your own reports in any of the Query Writer views.

You may be wondering the following questions: 

• What are the requirements for parents?  A parent n eeds a ParentConnect account and an email account in order to receive notifications.
• What does a parent need to do to receive notifications?     Once a parent signs in to their ParentConnect account, on the top right corner they can click on the 'Email Notifications' link.

Then they check each notification box they want to receive notifications for.  Notice, that parents can update their notifications in one location in case they have more than one student in PUSD.

• How often will they be receiving notifications?
  • School News: when selected, School News and Classroom News will be sent to parents when it is available.
  • Attendance Email: daily
  • Report Card Email: once per reporting period -when report is made viewable for the public
  • Assignments Email: daily
  • Behavior Email: once when a behavior incident has occurred.  Will be resent if a subsequent change has been made to the incident.

Click on the link below to view additional information regarding these notifications. If you have any questions, please give us a call @ the Zangle HELP desk.

When submitting a help desk to ITS, users can also request on what date report cards can be viewed on StudentConnect  and ParentConnect.  By default, when a school site does not supply such information, we default it to the day after the grading period has closed.  So, if your school administration has a preference as to when school grades are viewable, please include in your initial Help Desk ticket request to open your site's grading window for teachers along with a 'viewing' date to make the grades viewable to parents and students.

Did you know that any student that has access to Student Connect can submit their own course requests for next school year and for summer school!?  This can save your counselors a lot of input time into Zangle.  To do this, the first step would be to decide which courses can your students' choose from.

Next, if you are an administrator or office personnel that has access to the Master Schedule, then you will need to go to the Course Selection button (located in System button) to turn on or off viewing access to your course offerings.  Put a check mark on the course requests' students DO have access to select in the 'Sel' column. 

If you plan on allowing students to use StudentConnect for summer school, then go to  Summer School Zangle* and follow the same instructions listed above.  *By default, Summer School Zangle course listing is empty.

Once Course Select is set, your students can log into StudentConnect, select next year's track and submit their courses.  Do keep in mind that there is no limit as to how many courses requests can be submitted. Counselors/staff still have the responsibility to review what course requests have been submitted by your students.

If you have any students that have any questions on how to submit their course requests, we have attached instructions on you can help your students submit course requests.  If you have any questions, please don't hesitate on contacting us at the HELP Desk 4800 xHELP or 3780.

Great news everyone! Starting tomorrow  (Feb 17) at  3:30pm New Year Init (Initialization) will be processed. There is a planned Zangle outage from Friday - 3:30pm  thru Monday (Feb 20^th) midnight. How does this affect you??  Well, come next Tuesday, your students will reflect a future record for the 12/13  school year.  So, you'll be able to see who your incoming students are by clicking on the Future button (rainbow button).

All promoting  Pre-K's who are enrolled in an elementary PS track, will roll over automatically as Kinder's  to the E track of the current site they are enrolled at.  Pre-K's in a PS track located in a high school or middle school will roll over to their corresponding school of residence.    

Summer school Zangle will be available so you can start planning your Master Schedule.

Please be aware that any projected student enrollment counts are subject to change based on student mobility caused by lottery choices and student mobility.

The new website from DecisionInsite, has many neat features such as language preference, measuring distance tool (users can draw a route and measure distance from one location to another), view the school boundaries per school level (high, middle or elementary) and many others. You can also click on a school image to view the name of the school. Take notice that each school is highlighted in different shades to make it easier to differenciate and view boundaries in map mode or satellite mode. The image below highlights many of these key components. 

Did you know that Zangle has twelve Query Writers?  Depending on your access to Zangle, you may have access to a few of them or all of them.  And at one time or another, while trying to generate a report you may have asked yourself…. 'I know I've seen that field…but I just can't seem to find it?'.  Well, instead of searching in each Query Writer and in each View…we have a great shortcut for you!  It's located in  Enrollment/Reports/Student Query Writer and it's called 'Query Search'.

When you run the District created Query Search, it will prompt you to enter a specific field name.  I'd personally suggest you make a copy of it so you can modify the 'Filters'…and use the filter options Begins With and Contains . 

T = Sets date to (T)oday's date. Same as current System Date in Zangle

C = Sets date to (C)urrent date. The current on the workstations' internal clock.

M = Sets date to beginning of the (M)onth.

H = Sets date to end of mont(H).

Y = Sets date to beginning of school (Y)ear of current track.

R = Sets date to the end of the school yea(R) of current track.

• Printed three times troughout the school year.
• SBRC can be printed at your school side or submit a HELP Desk ticket to have it printed by ITS.
• To print a prior years SBRC, you need to log into Archive to print the report card.

Secondary Report Card Key Points:

• Deficiency notices are generated 4-5 weeks into each grading period for students. Criteria:
  • Any student who is failing or in danger of failing
  • Any student who is working far below their academic capacity
  • Any student for who teacher chooses to provide a grade
• Deficiency notices shall not be construed as the grade for the grading period.
• All students receive quarter grades - very important for the office to verify that each teacher has submitted grades. 
• Middle school students earn an Overall GPA (4.00 gpa scale).
• High School students earn an Overall Weighted GPA (5.00 gpa scale). Honor and AP courses earn an extra point when a student receives a letter grade between A+ and C-.

• Elementary principals have access to set the grading period for their own schools or can submit a HELP Desk ticket for IT to enter them in Zangle Web Admin.
• Secondary sites submit a HELP Desk ticket. These grading windows define when student report cards are made available for teachers to enter grades in TeacherConnect, and when grades are viewable via ParentConnect and StudentConnect.
• Some sites prefer to submit one Help Desk ticket and list the dates for all grading windows in order for teachers to submit grades. Other sites prefer to submit a ticket a week prior grading term begins.
• By default, viewing access for ParentConnect and StudentConnect is the day after the grading window is closed. If you wish for it to be different, please enter in the HELP Desk ticket the date you prefer report card grades to be viewable.

• Only trimester grades, semester 1, semester 2, and summer school grades are  posted in Academic History.
• All report cards (K-12) are generated from Zangle Archive.
• Transcripts (secondary students only) are generated from Zangle Production.
• Click on the links to download 'Secondary' or 'Elementary' report card procedures.
• After verifying that all your teachers have posted their grades, please submit a HELP Desk ticket to have your report cards printed. Report cards are processed and printed in the order they are submitted.

• Search the enrolling student by their birthdate. It's most likely that a parent will remember their child's birthdate and numbers are more legible then letters.

• Search for a student by partially entering their first and/or last names and using the percent sign (%)  to fill in characters that may meet the search criteria. We have noticed that most errors occur with students last names. Some are only entered with one last name, two last names, or it's hyphanated.  The example below show's how the '%' can be used to search for endless possibilities. 

Yearly, students are assigned internet and wireless accounts that grant them access to the internet and other PUSD technology resources . In the past, Principal's have submitted their approval to give schoolwide access to their students.  This year, all students were granted access as of August 25th. New students to the District will by default have access the following school day. Remember, access to the Internet is a privilege not a right, and unacceptable use may result in the cancellation of that privilege. School sites are responsible of inactivating a student's access if wrongfully used.

To disable access in Zangle, a staff member needs access to the Student Editor. Click the Edit button then go to the Other Tab and select the 'User-Defined Information' button.