Any good ideas for automating the notification of parents when a student has an unsatisfactory cumulative gradebook grade?

Geoffrey Goodfellow

My school currently exports the cumulative grades out of class gradebooks (using Gradebook Grades List) to identify students that are not meeting athletic eligibility or who qualify for mandatory tutoring. This list produces the student name, the teacher name, the class name, the section, and the cumulative grade. Currently, this Excel export is used as a mail merge with Microsoft Word to produce an individual letter/memo that then gets delivered to the student in homeroom the next day. The student takes this paper to the teacher of whatever class has the unsatisfactory grade, gets it signed, and then submits the signed paper to the school office who monitors compliance.

I'm hoping that someone in this community has a smarter way to accomplish all of the above without paper and using tools within the LMS.

Thoughts?

Kathy Hannon

@Geoffrey Goodfellow we use Official Notes - you can bulk assign (copy/paste) and for the chronic underachievers we have a link to set up an appointment. This way it's historical also - parents can't deny multiple communications.?

Geoffrey Goodfellow

Thanks for sharing that idea, @Kathy Hannon. Official Notes do sound like a more effective paper trail. Could you explain how the copy/paste works. For example, I produce my list of low-performing students with a gradebook grades list. Am I then able to copy their names from that list and paste into the Official Note recipient field in bulk? And when multiple students are included on the same Official Note, they cannot see one another's names, correct?

Kathy Hannon

@Geoffrey Goodfellow correct, the other students/parents do not see the others. When you send, you will see that it creates an official note for each student individually.

Geoffrey Goodfellow

@Kathy Hannon thanks for confirming. And you can copy names in bulk from a spreadsheet to the recipients of an official note?

Kathy Hannon

@Geoffrey Goodfellow - apologies for official notes with do a Data Import if there is a large list more than 20, Otherwise adding individual names all at once goes quickly, just start the name and it pops up, select, type next name