Intro to Using Infinite Campus
September 2, 2010
Familiarizing Yourself With the Infinite Campus Platform
IC is currently serving over a million students in the U.S. including Half Hollow Hills. It serves as our attendance taker, Gradebook Manager, Communication tool, and data warehouse for student information. Infinite Campus does it all. First, familiarize yourself with the navigation panel on the left side of the page. Click around in each area, expanding any drop downs to explore further.
each class and quarter that you teach. Next, set up your Seating chart to match the way your room is set up. Add rows or columns and exclude seats to customize the shape. Then simply save, auto fill or hand select seating assignments, and print if desired.
Start by exploring your Students, Classes, & Seating Chart options In your Admin Preferences, choose the options that are checked below. Hide dropped students so they don’t stay in the gradebook and seating chart, etc. . Use “Show student Pictures” so their pictures appear in your charts. You may wish to Invert seating chart as I do, so that alpha order starts at the bottom of the page. You may wish to choose “Use seating chart for attendance” as I do, but you must check “Use Canned Comments” to do interim and report card comments that are built into the system. If you have created your eboard already, you can paste the url here to connect the two places making navigation easier for parents and students. Don’t forget to mass assign to multiple classes to copy your preferences to 1
The Rest is Easy
accurate records at all times. The default is Present, so only change it if a student is absent or tardy. If you mark a student absent and he or she comes late, simply change it to Tardy. If you make no notation, it will default to an unexcused lateness. If you report that the student had a pass from guidance, or the nurse, etc. . . , the record will be changed to an excused lateness. It is your responsibility to report excessive tardies by writing a student referral. Infinite Campus will be your record for these tardies, so keep your records accurate. If a student leaves for most of the period, mark him or her absent with a location like Nurse or office. Always SAVE to update.
Now that you’re set up for taking attendance with your seating chart, simply navigate to the current period and mark away. It’s very important to accurately take attendance every period of every day. This data is used for the official records for each student. If a student is marked absent, a phone call home will be made by late morning. Parents can check attendance in real time, so be sure to keep
Setting up Gradebook Your Gradebook is set up with the Lesson Planner. First you need to set up your preferences and copy
them to every section and quarter you teach. Check the box for “Use Weighting on Groups” if you want to weight your groups. This is really the best way to keep your Gradebook organized. The more categories or groups you have, the more information your provide to your students and parents. If you check “Use each score’s percent value rather than points”, you will make each assignment equal whether or not you intended for
them to be equal. You may wish to make one quiz worth 100 points and another worth 50. If you keep this box UNCHECKED, you will be able to do that. Next, choose the grading scale appropriate for your grade level. 8-12th grades use numeric grades, and 6-7th grades use A-F. Elementary school Gradebooks will require a separate training provided in your building. Now you’re ready to set up your “New Task Groups”. Each group is a category like tests, quizzes, Homework, Labs, Classwork, etc. Assign each group a weight, making sure they add up to 100%. Be sure to assign tasks to each group and use each group. If not, your average will still work out correctly but will be confusing to parents and students. In other 2
words, if you don’t give any quizzes during a quarter and quizzes are worth 10% of your overall grade, it will appear as if you did not structure the grade correctly as what appears will only add up to 90%. Check each quarter Grade below the Task Group to apply the structure to future quarters. Once you get your grade structured correctly, you can quickly and easily copy that structure to all of your other sections using the Lesson Plan Copier in the upper right hand corner of your IC screen. Make any and all changes BEFORE copying this so that you will not have to edit changes over and over for each section and quarter. Everything is editable, but Lesson Plan copier can only be used with a blank section, so talk to others in your department first to ensure that your grades are inline with requirements. Familiarize yourself by expanding and collapsing windows to be sure that everything is how you want it.
can count an assignment twice by changing the multiplier from 1 to 2, or use different point values. Due dates link to your calendar- add a date assigned if you like, but it’s not required. If you started from the correct group (ie HW or Tests) your assignment will be in the right group. Sequencing is important for ease of use. Your assignments will be alphabetized unless you sequence them; this will right justify each assignment. You can also sequence your groups so the most frequently used group appears when you open Gradebook to enter grades. I sequence HW as 1 and essays as 5 as they’re less frequent. Finally, you can add links to resources and a description in the boxes below. You can even link back to your eboard where the assignment can be downloadable.
Adding Assignments to your Gradebook Adding assignments is easy. Start in your Lesson Planner; although there is a fast track way of creating assignments from the Gradebook display page, using Lesson Planner allows for many more options. Name your assignment something specific and give it an abbreviation of 5 characters or less. All of the red boxes are required. Do not hide any assignments from your portal as your grades should be available at all times. Choose a point value for your assignment. If you teach multiple sections of the same course, you can copy the assignment from one to another by using the “Copy Assignment” function on the top right corner when you have clicked on the Group. You can copy a single or multiple assignments this way. You
Entering Grades Entering grades is simple. If you’ve sequenced it correctly, as discussed earlier, your Gradebook will open to your most frequently used group, like HW. The assignment you sequenced with the highest number will appear on the right in that category. You can click on the categories (Groups) to collapse or expand them. To enter grades, simply type the appropriate number and hit return. The cursor will move to the next student in the same task or assignment. You must always save. If you wish to use a faster method for checking HW, you could enter zeros for those students who did not complete the assignment. I use the letter “a” as a placeholder for any student who is absent. It has no value and no meaning in IC. It allows me to give students 3 days to make up a HW assignment for reduced points before I change it to a zero. To fill in the rest of the students with a completed point value (I use 10 or 20 for most
as stated earlier, you do not have a lot of options to work with and your assignment information will be limited. HW’s depending on how long of an assignment it was), simply right click on the Task header (cntrl click on a Mac) and choose “Fill empty Scores” with either “Total Points Possible” or another value of your choosing. This will autofill the remaining students’ fields who completed the assignment. If you make an error, simply delete one score or an entire column using “Overwrite All Scores”. This may be used if you accidentally assign the wrong point values when entering grades. You must always save your grades. You may also choose to add a New Assignment from this screen, but 3
Special Scores Infinite Campus has some built in functions, so be careful not to use these letters unless you intend to. Some of these will cause a zero value to be entered in the field.(L, E, M, I, C, D are special scores)
Communication Through IC
of using certain special scores, like cheated, without providing that information in a more personal way like a phone call or note home. Another way to provide feedback or information is to use the “Edit Comment” option while right clicking on an assignment. This will provide you with a field where you can add a few comments about a student’s work. When the student or parent hovers over the commented-on assignment, the comment will appear in a small pop-up window. This is a nice way to encourage students and to provide information about assessment or expectations with very little effort.
Infinite Campus has a number of ways to provide information and data to students and their families. As we just saw, marking assignments with certain letters will give more information than just a numeric grade. When parents log on to the portal, they can generate a list of missing assignments for their child and see all the assignments that their teachers have marked with an M. Be careful
Using Reports & Messenger Using the Reports Options is a great way to provide information, but generating and printing reports is not always the best way to get information to parents. They have access to the portal, so they sometimes may need a reminder to log in and look at their child’s grades. If a parent expresses discomfort using the portal, you can send home a report, or, better yet, you can email it to them as an attachment (always in .pdf). If you are using the Missing Option as discussed above, you should also be using the Infinite Campus Messenger System to send this information through another form of communication, like email. Once you mark the missing
assignments, you can choose “Missing Assignments” report in Messenger. This will allow you to generate an email message which can be customized to meet your style by using the Teacher Comments Box. It is here that you should put your contact information as IC does not identify which teacher a message is from. It is important to be timely, accurate and sensitive whenever using these generated messages as they can appear very impersonal and robotic. If you use this Missing Assignment option in Messenger, be sure to tell students and parents how they can make up an assignment and when the due date is. Your extra time and sensitivity will be greatly appreciated. 4
Failing Grade Report The Failing Grade Report can definitely be the scariest for students and parents to receive via email. These should never take the place of actual, real-time communication with families. They are definitely tempting to use instead of making those timeconsuming phone calls, but unless a parent is made aware of a student’s downturn early on, these grade reports may be received with some hostility. Always double check the list of students who are set to receive this report against your gradebook to avoid any inaccurate messages. Finally, you may wish to take a screen shot of your list and save it with the date as part of the file name. This will serve as a record of your correspondence with families.
A Few Details Worth Mentioning There are many other functions in Infinite Campus that you may find useful. Sending Teacher Messages to inform parents of upcoming assignments or tests is a great way to stay in touch. Your messages will be saved and can be used across all of your sections and again at a later date. The Daily Planner function allows you to see each day’s assignments and attendance at a glance. There are numerous reports you could run to see portal usage by parents, attendance records for students, or even specific assignment data for assessment use.
Rosters When you are in the roster view, you get some important and confidential information about your students. This is where you can find student ID #’s that they need to log in to the school’s network. You also have flags for both medical information and special education information. Simply hover over a flag to reveal a summary of important medical and IEP information. To the far right there is a gradebook link that could be used for conferencing with students. The view provided is limited to individual student grades and is more appropriate than allowing students to see your Gradebook view and doesn’t require portal login.
Miscellaneous Tidbits • To find students quickly, tab to the search function and enter a last name. • If you need a list of your students in excel for some other purpose, you could export to Csv in excel. • You can create groups in your gradebook to differentiate assignments or create groups of students for projects.
More to Come . . .
Using Infinite Campus for Interim Reporting and Report Cards By the time the first Interim period rolls around you should feel fairly comfortable with the system. Look for more information about using Infinite Campus in the coming weeks. If you want to look ahead, see this video on interim reporting from the makers of IC. Another video here will show you how to enter report card grades.
Do You Need More Help and Guidance than this workshop? There are lots of videos available from the makers of Infinite Campus. Here’s one that explains how to set up your Lesson Planner. You can access all of the Teacher Power Videos from the links above. If you have any questions about using Infinite Campus and its many features, you could always go to your Power User in your school. Every school has one, and he or she will be happy to assist you with any questions that you may have.
5