ClaSS for King's

Location: King’s College School La Moraleja in the ICT suite

When: Monday 10^th at 14:30 – 16:00

Audience: Anyone who might associate their responsibilities with the job titles Curriculum and Assessment Manager or Director of Studies.

We’ll look at how assessments are defined and managed in ClaSS, cover grouping assessments into profiles for tracking student progress and learn to make use of the tools for defining the assessment structure for a course for a full year. New features for generating reports from assessment profiles will be covered.

To access the training sites: Group 1 and Group 2

The integration between ClaSS and Moodle has achieved another level of improvement with the addition of sharing student pictures and gradebook assessments.

Student Photos

Both  ClaSS and Moodle allow a student’s profile information to include an uploaded photo. From now on, the photograph only has to be uploaded once and it is shared across all other integrated web systems.

In Moodle there are two different options to upload photos:

(1) While displaying a student’s profile, it is possible to insert or update a photo. This action can be made by the teacher, student or administrator.

(2) The site administrator may prepare and insert a large batch of photos by naming each file with the students EPFUsername. This option populates the Moodle database in one go.

In both cases, an automatic process periodically pushes these photos out to be shared with the student profiles in ClaSS, Moodle and with other web applications.

MarkBook Assessments

Moodle provides a gradebook, similar to the MarkBook in ClaSS, which can record  assessments associated with a Moodle course and in particular can receive scores for self-marking activities like quizzes.  Now ClaSS can automatically read from the Moodle gradebook, displaying a student’s overall Moodle course grade  alongside other grades and scores in the ClaSS MarkBook just as if it was another ClaSS assessment column.

Full attendnace report for a student

The summary button in the register now generates a full attendance report for a pupil. This includes both day-by-day attendance marks for the whole year and some overall statistics for absences and lates. If the same is needed for a previous year or a precise date range then you can use the Attendance option in the Report book.

Firefox has been a good friend to ClaSS over the years and I think our choice to adopt it back when it was in pre-1.0 state has proved a good one. However, for the first time with Firefox 3.6 an update to Firefox broke something in the ClaSS user-interface. The all important preview window was returning blank pages because of an improvement to Firefox’s Javascript engine (its got a lot faster!). While we’d been aware of the issue since testing the first releases of 3.6 it was planned to hold off upgrading ClaSS until the summer and stick at 3.5 until then. But then Mozilla started prompting users to upgrade to 3.6 last week. So, after 48 hours focused on fixing and testing the solution ClaSS updates are now being pushed out which are Firefox 3.6 compatible.

The assessment profiles in ClaSS provide a means of grouping and organising assessments in the MarkBook. Their fundamental function though is to allow for reporting and analysis of student grades and they accommodate any kind of custom template to achieve this. A new template has just been completed for analysis of GCSE grade performance. Developed in consultation with academic staff in one ClaSS school its now available to other schools on request.

Subject level analysis of A*/A and A-C performance.

It provides for both student level monitoring of A*/A and A – C grades at regular intervals during the course, and for summary percentages of A*/A and A* – C at subject level.

View the full example of the sheet gcse_attainment_analysis.

Compare with the custom template performing the same function at Key Stages 1 and 2, and it gives an indication of how flexible and powerful the templating system can be.

A major upgrade to messaging is now available with ClaSS 0.9.11. It’s a complete rewrite behind the scenes which dramatically improves the speed and functionality of sending mass emails and SMS texts to parents and for the first time, students. Available to Office and Admin users working in the InfoBook, the most requested addition is that emails can now be accompanied by attachments.

Options for messaging parents and students

The options are also there to filter the recipients so that only one message is sent per family group or to send one per each contact, so both  mother and father receive the message. The same filter options are also now available when generating address labels.

The email messaging allows an attachment of a reasonable size and its more than recommended that the file is a PDF. If you don’t already PDF then you can grab a free copy of PDFCreator to easily convert any Office document.

Mozilla Firefox has a built-in pop-up blocker which is active by default after being installed. It allows users to stop annoying pop-up windows when navigating unknown web-sites, helping control advertisement pages or malicious web-sites attempting to attack your privacy or your computer.

But this is not the case if you have to use any of the King’s Learning applications: ClaSS, WordPress, Moodle etc.. For example, in some occasions when ClaSS tries to display on line reports, you will be presented with a yellow horizontal bar on top of the main window of your Firefox telling you: “Firefox prevented this site from opening a popup window”, for you to decide if that window should be displayed or not.

To facilitate this we need simply to tell Firefox which web sites are allowed to open pop-up windows by editing Firefox preferences as follows:

Alternative 1: when you are presented with a yellow horizontal bar on top of the main window of your Firefox:
Click on “Preferences” button
You will see a little window deployed on the right
Choose the phrase “Allow pop-ups for kingslearning.net”
Try again to launch the pop-up and now you should see the final result of the requested report.

Alternative 2: if it still doesn’t work:
Do this after installing Firefox

Edit Firefox Preferences:

• for Windows users: click on Main Menu bar Tools > Options; or
• for Linux users: click on Edit > Tools.

Click on “Content” tab
Clik on “Exceptions…” button
You will see an edit box to type the exact address of the site you want to allow po-up windows.

Type “kingslearning.net” without the quotes
Click on “Allow” button.
Click on “Close” button to close the window.

That’s all.

Attainment grid for Year 1

Tracking attainment within the MarkBook has been done for a while now by grouping related assessments together as an “Attainment Profile”. Well new charting functionality has been added to these profiles which makes it much easier to get an overview of the results for a class or even a whole cohort. A great example is the chart used at Key Stages 1 and 2 and shown in the screen-shot.

The example plots the results of four assessments over the course of a year for one class where the size of the dots on the grid indicates the number of students achieving at a given NC Level. The progression over the year (going from bottom to top) is immediately revealed by the shift in the dots from left to right with more students achieving higher levels. The coloured backgrounds act as a guideline with white indicating the target achievement band.

The new charting functions allow for many different kinds of plots and even for a degree of interactivity. In case of the KS1 and KS2 grids you can see demonstrated in the training video how this has been used to highlight individual students within the context of the cohort.

Just a note to remind you about the Firefox spell checker. This tool is set up by default when Firefox is installed in your machine. Using it has great benefits when filling in any electronic form whether for ClaSS, Wordpress or Moodle. You should now be using this spell-checker in ClaSS when writing reports too, its faster and it can work in Spanish.

When you are going to write a post, hover the cursor over the post area and right-click on the mouse (see the example image).

You will see a context menu deployed in a little window.

Check it and look for the phrase “Check Spelling”. If it’s there, you’ve installed it.

If your browser can manage more than one language, a new window will pop up with the word “languages”, where you can see the languages already installed.

You will see one of the languages already ticked which means that this is the active dictionary which is ready to check your post. The tick box can be changed as required.

What to do if no dictionary has been installed? Left-click on the mouse on the phrase “Add Dictionary…” and in the same context menu you will be presented with a page listing all the available dictionaries.

For example, if we decide to install the Spanish dictionary but we do not see it in the deployed list, after left-clicking on “Add Dictionary…”, we will see the following image in our browser showing a large list of dictionaries.

Look for “Spanish dictionary, Spanish (Spain)” on the first column and click on the “Install Dictionary (310 KB)” phrase on the right, in the same line (please, see the images).

Click on the large green “+ Add to Firefox” icon to confirm the installation.

We have prepared this mini-tutorial about how to change the initial avatar to a proper picture (head and shoulders) for improving information sharing in this community. We want to see who you are! Change Avatar (larger size)