Daily Planner

The daily planner provides teachers with a quick overview of the day for a selected class and provides a comprehensive virtual workspace in which teachers may summon information and conduct standard classroom tasks.

For instance, from this view, teachers may take attendance, assign homework, post class notes, and see student averages.

Grading & Gradebook

SchoolFront allows teachers to track all student grades in a virtual grade book. The virtual grade book can be quickly and easily customized to meet even the most complicated of grading schemes or teachers can utilize a district's standard grade scheme.

Grade Categorization

Using the SchoolFront virtual grade book, teachers may weight assignments and group them by type (e.g. tests, quizzes, homework, etc.).

For example, a”Test” category could be configured by a teacher to represent 50% of the student’s grade, a “Quiz” category to represent 15% of the student’s grade, and a “Homework” category representing the remaining 35% of the overall grade.

The lowest grade can optionally be dropped from a selected category as well.

Grade Curving

For teachers with special/custom grading requirements (e.g. those who conduct AP courses), grade curving allows deviation from the typical assignment of a letter grade based on a percentage. Using SchoolFront grading capability, teachers can determine what percentage represents an A, B, C etc. including +/- grades (e.g. A+, A-, B+, and B-).

Rubric Management

By developing and using a set of criteria and standards tied to learning objectives, teachers can assess each student's performance in a more granular fashion, considering each parameter of the student's coursework to make up the final grade that they are assigned.

When a rubric is created and presented to student before they do coursework, the evaluation process is made clear and transparent. Rubrics also make it easier for more than one evaluator grade coursework.

More Information

• For more information about managing grades and coursework in SchoolFront, click here.

Student Attendance

SchoolFront allows teachers to view and input daily attendance on the daily planner or to manage a week's worth of attendance using a monthly view.

Track Relevant Information

The system tracks attendance statuses relevant to the school, for instance present (P), absent (A), absent excused (AE), out of school suspension (OSS), and late with minute intervals (L005, L010, L015). These statuses are color-coded in summary views so that trends in student presence are easy to identify and address.

Teachers can quickly mark attendance using a list of student names or using the classroom (seating chart) layout complete with student pictures.

Seating Charts

SchoolFront allows teachers to quickly and easily create student seating charts. Seating charts can be generated to include student pictures to speed up memorization of student names. Teachers can then take attendance using the seating chart view and can print seating charts out so that substitute teachers can do the same.

More Information

• For more information about managing attendance in SchoolFront, click here.

Classroom Reports

Personalized Student Reports

Teachers can print out customized letters to parents and guardians using SchoolFront mail-merge and optionally include student information like grades and attendance data. For example, students may be sent home with a customized progress report for their parents to review and sign.

This functionality in SchoolFront may also be used to produce quick personalized messages and announcements for students and parents about field trips and classroom activities.

User Login Reports

SchoolFront tracks student and parent login information so that teachers can see which students and parents are regularly accessing the system and can tell which students and parents are downloading class notes and checking up on homework and grades.

More Information

• For more information about communicating with parents in SchoolFront, click here.

Coursework & Homework

SchoolFront gives teachers the capability and flexibility to assign homework during class and/or plan a year's worth of curricula at the beginning of the school year.

Using the daily planner teachers can see the assignments that were issued to students as well as what assignments are due on a specified day.

Teachers can quickly and easily add a new assignment to the system at any time. Instructions, information, and resources required to complete the assignment can be added to the system using text-input or teachers can add attachments (e.g. PDF files, multimedia files, etc.) to assignments which students and parents can download at any time from SchoolFront.

Homework can be graded or non-graded.

Post Class Notes & Reference Materials

SchoolFront gives teachers the ability to post class notes so that students can revisit lesson material and parents and mentors can reinforce instruction. Teachers can attach documents, videos, or any other files to the notes to aid instruction and recall.

Posted materials can be viewed and downloaded by authorized users (e.g. students and parents) from any Internet-connected computer anywhere at any time.

This is a fantastic feature for students who are home sick from school or who are out of school on vacation.

More Information

• For more information about managing grades and coursework in SchoolFront, click here.

Link Course Content

Share / Copy Course Content

Teachers can maintain an unlimited number of course completely separately in the system or can choose to link the courses. Linked courses share a grading structure, curriculum, and coursework (both graded and non-graded), but can have the same or different assigned/due dates, teaching team, and student roster.

Course linking is a simple way for teachers to standardized their own specialized curriculum without doing a great deal of redundant data entry in the school management system.

Instructional Continuity

Prepare for a Substitute Teacher

To ensure that classes continue to function in the absence of the primary teacher, SchoolFront helps teachers and administrators to prepare a substitute teacher to handle the class until the primary teacher's return.

Short-Term

If the primary teacher will only be out for a short period of time a printout of all pertinent course information can be provided to the substitute teacher so that they can take attendance and capture grading without being given access to SchoolFront to do it. When the teacher returns, they can then easily transfer the information the substitute teacher collected into the system.

Longer-Term

If a teacher will be out of class for a longer period of time, the long-term substitute teacher may be added to SchoolFront as a staff member. Once they are in the system, an administrator or the primary teacher can temporarily add them to the teaching team and they will have the same abilities and access and manage course information as other team teachers.

Calendar & Events

Calendar

The SchoolFront calendar allows faculty and administrators to post and update calendarized information about sporting events, field trips, concerts and theater, club schedules, etc.

Students and parents can login to see up-to-date information about what’s going on in the school.

Event Coordination

School staff members can create and collaboratively maintain private or publically-accessible pages for school events like sports, dances, music, or theater.

Collaborative maintenance means that staff members can give other staff members, and even students or parents, permission to help them maintain event content.

Event information, pictures, calendars, etc. can be displayed on the page and event tickets can be sold on and purchased from the page.

Team-Teaching / Co-teaching

SchoolFront requires that one teacher be the primary teacher associated with a course. The primary teacher can add "team teachers" to the course so that the other teachers can edit the course information and manage coursework, rubrics, grading, and attendance for the course with the primary teacher.

This capability is particularly helpful to schools with special education programs, student teachers, and substitute teachers.

Discipline & Merit

SchoolFront facilitates management and tracking of the disciplinary process in schools. In the event that disciplinary action is required for a student, the system supports the logging of details of the incident as well as the consequences assigned to the student.

SchoolFront makes management of disciplinary measures a collaborative endeavor, allowing school staff members to view and process incidents in a single, central, and up-to-date directory.

Disciplinary incidents can be escalated where necessary, tracked to conclusion, and accessed for reference by members of the school staff even after they are closed.

More Information

• For more information about managing discipline in SchoolFront, click here.

Teacher Web Pages

Public & Private / Restricted Pages

SchoolFront's website hosting and content management system allows schools and districts to create and easily maintain school-branded websites. It also allows teachers and staff to create and collaboratively maintain sub-sites within the school website for just about any purpose.

Collaborative maintenance means that staff members can give other staff members, and even students or parents, permission to help them maintain sub-site content. Here are some examples:

Department Pages

Post an overview of the department and charter. List department members and chairpersons. Post course offering and descriptions. Post department member profiles, contact information, pictures, and link to teacher pages.

Teacher / Staff Pages

Teachers can maintain their own homepages with any content they desire. This could include lists of the classes and activities they lead, links to websites with information relevant to coursework, links to course pages, etc.

Course / Classroom Pages

Pages can be created by teachers and teaching teams to support specific courses. As with Teacher / Staff Pages, course pages can host just about any content a teacher or staff member desires.

Activity / Extracurricular Pages

Pages can be created by teachers and teaching teams to support specific activities like sports and clubs.

As with Course Pages, activity pages can host just about any content a teacher or staff member desires. If a club has a student president or group of students who are responsible for the operation of the club, the primary staff member responsible for the activity can grant one or more students permission to edit activity page content.

More Information

• For more information about teacher and classroom webpages in SchoolFront, click here.

Communication

SchoolFront alone, a powerful student information system (SIS), provides schools with instantaneous student academic information communication to students and parents, but the combination of SchoolFront SIS and SchoolFront Portal, a powerful web content management system (CMS), provides users with an even greater variety of fantastic and creative options to handle school communication.

More Information

• For more information about communicating with SchoolFront online tools, click here.

Libraries & Galleries

Photo & Image Galleries

School staff members can create and collaboratively maintain photo galleries on their personal, course, and activity pages. Collaborative access and maintenance means that the primary photo gallery owner (e.g. a teacher or administrator) can restrict who can add, view, and comment on photos in the gallery.

Galleries can be maintained for student artwork, athletics / Hall of Fame, school events and concerts, extracurricular activities and clubs, etc.

Document Libraries

Create a personalized folder structure and store documents and other files online where everyone (or only a specific group of people) can access and download the information.

Document and file libraries eliminate the need for you to circulate paper versions of documents, the requirement that you continually send and resend digital versions of documents and files by email, and ensure that people searching for files and documents in your library always find the most up to date versions.

User Support Portal

User Support

The SchoolFront support portal provides all of the information teachers need to use the system and provides a means for teachers who need additional help to log support requests with the SchoolFront Support Team.

Feature Requests

Teachers who discover bugs or who would like to see new system features (or even adjustments to existing features) can submit requests to the development team through the SchoolFront support portal.

The FrontEdge Inc. Development Team works to continuously improve the features and functionality available in SchoolFront to address the evolving needs of SchoolFront users by means of customer feedback and customer and industry research and benchmarking.

More Information

• For more information about user support in SchoolFront, click here.

Hosted System Benefits

Secure Teacher Access

SchoolFront provides teachers with secure system access using a unique username and password.

To ensure that unauthorized people do not access private information, the system will give users who have been logged in for 45 minutes the option to immediately login again and continue working without losing any unsaved work. If they do not login when prompted after 45 minutes, the system will automatically log them out so that others cannot access their information.

More Information

• For more information about privacy and system security in SchoolFront, click here.

Data Backup

FrontEdge Inc. performs a nightly differential backup of all SchoolFront system data and performs a full backup weekly—this backed up data can be restored at the request of teachers should they accidently delete or otherwise lose information.

More Information

• For more information about the benefits of leveraging hosted SchoolFront, click here.

Centralized System Updates

New features and system enhancements can easily be posted to the hosted site, where teachers login as usual and immediately reap the benefit of the new functionality or system enhancement.

Centralized system updates eliminate the need for teachers to download patches and upgrades.

More Information

• For more information about continuous new features and other ongoing improvement efforts in SchoolFront, click here.