Introducing school SMS notifications, decimal grades & more

Introducing school SMS notifications, decimal grades & more

This latest release is all about giving you more leeway to adjust DreamClass functionality in your needs. We’ve made several improvements with that perspective in mind; such as giving you the option to add or remove data fields and adjust visibility in a way that serves you best. We’ve also turned prefixed utilities such as performance transcripts into modifiable ones and so forth. As for the SMS notifications feature we’ve been working behind the scenes on — to have it ready in case you’re interested — we’re releasing it at request. So, please, let us know and we’ll raise the curtain for you too.

Send SMS notifications to your students’, teachers’ and guardians’ phones

Up till now, communication with DreamClass was all about our email utility, which allowed you to send emails directly from the app. Now, you’re able to contact students, teachers and guardians without delay, sharing brief information on their cellphones. In particular, you may send personal SMS messages or massively text groups of recipients; such as the students enrolled in a class. This type of messaging is quite useful, in case you need to notify students on a classroom change or if there’s a critical and urgent school issue you need your audience to be aware of.

Improved gradebook functionality, to support decimal grading systems

Now you’re able to register decimal grades, with 3 decimal digits, for both the 10 and 100 grading scales. And, with our Grade Point Average calculations — aka GPA — you’ll have decimal grade averages calculated for you.

Prefixed performance transcripts are now modifiable

Some of you didn’t want the total number of absences to appear in the automatically created performance transcripts; and, so, we made them modifiable. Now, you are able to make them as simple or as sophisticated as you need them to be; by turning on or off certain items. This way, especially in case you plan to print and sign them, you can hide or disclose specific form fields such as: 

  • student id
  • registration date
  • absences per course/total absences
  • score average
  • total units 
  • signature

Attach public and private notes on invoice footers

Added a notes section at the footer of your invoices that allows you to add public notes — such as wire transfer information etc. — and make them visible to your customers (students or guardians). Or, you may add private notes, only visible to admins or people that manage invoices.

Show or hide custom fields on students’, teachers’ and guardians’ profiles

You now have total control over custom field visibility; and, thus, you can store and secure sensitive or confidential information, making it accessible only to people authorized to see it. Custom fields are by default visible only to admins; unless you opt for another combination of viewers (parents, teachers or students). This last action will make them visible from their own portals.

Get your classroom management on-screen

Create digital representations of your classrooms, organize them into groups — if needed — based on physical location (floors, buildings etc.), capacity and the like; and then map them with lessons, during the scheduling process. 

Classroom & teacher conflict resolution

Now, you can detect and resolve lesson conflicts on your schedule, related to classroom booking or to the teacher you have assigned to it. If, by mistake, you try to book a room already assigned to another lesson, we provide you with a warning, so that you can take action and make the pertinent modifications to your scheduling. Similarly, if you try to assign a teacher already occupied by another lesson, you’ll get a similar notification.

Prevent duplicate records of students or guardians

We made another admission management improvement. On the public forms, if a family or student already registered for a previous school period submits an application to the system, your admin will get a warning during the application review process, to prevent duplicate records.

Release Notes

New features

  • Send SMS notifications to students, teachers and guardians.
  • Clone a class you have already scheduled recurring lessons for, into a new period of time; and shift the scheduled lesson recurrence into a new date range. 
  • In Lessons, you can now assign not only classrooms, but also teachers, making it quickly visible who is teaching what and where. 
  • If you book a room already booked for another Lesson, we provide a warning, so you can take action and resolve the conflict.

Improvements

  • All reports are now exportable in CSV or TXT formats, so that you can work further on your data and do any kind of calculations you may need, using Excel sheets.  
  • Set custom fields on admission application forms as optional or required; in exactly the way you’ve been working with predefined system fields, such as personal and contact information.
  • Filter the students’ list by student status (active/inactive).
  • Set up weekly fees for parents and students

Bugs fixed 

  • Fixed an issue with the bulk download of filtered transcripts.
  • Class schedule generic events caused a bug to all accounts that used it and the class schedule was not visible. We fixed that.