For internal transfers, you can randomly assign students to a site in K12 Transfers using the Lottery. The lottery view anonymizes students and allows mass assignment. Once in the lottery view you can shuffle the results as often as you like, filter the results to assign at a particular site and/or grade, and then mass approve.
We’re rolling out new features for K12 Transfers. Today, we enabled admins with the ability to change the assigned school. The feature is meant as a way to correct errors and so parents will not receive notification when these changes are made. You will need to contact them directly.
K12 Transfers supports email notifications for parents that allow parents to know the status of their student’s transfer request without having to contact the district office. This makes for a much better experience for parents and reduces support costs for the district. However, one challenge that remains is that parents don’t always enter their email addresses correctly. We can’t fix that but today we’re released a feature that provides a brief audit for email notifications. You can see the addresses emails were sent to, when they were sent, if they were opened, and if links in the email were clicked. Now on every transfer request, you have an audit trail for all the emails that were sent regarding the transfer.
I’d also like to take this opportunity to remind you that there are two features that many of you are not using. The first is “on submission” email templates. This template notifies parents when they submit their transfer requests so that they know their transfer is “in process.” The other is granting sites access to view approved transfers. This allows sites to see approved transfers as and when they are approved so that you don’t have to send them spreadsheets in email.
One of the challenges with managing student transfers is communicating with the sites that are to receive new students. Very often the districts we work with email spreadsheets of the approved students to each site. This takes a lot of time when you have lots of sites and is compounded during busy transfer times. With our inter-district transfer application – K12 Transfers – you can now grant access to sites and they can check for approved transfers to their site when it is convenient.
The user will now be able to see approved transfers for their site. No more spreadsheets to compile and no more spreadsheets to email.
Over the past week we made four updates to K12 Transfers that were made available this morning.
If you sign in with your district Google account, you’ll have one less click to do when you sign in. We updated the sign in process so that you only have to provide permission to your account once. On subsequent sign ins you’ll go directly to the application without having to click the “okay” button.
When you apply for a transfer you now have the option of opting out of receiving email notification. The default is to receive notification but there are some cases where you don’t want notifications to be sent and so now you have that option.
You can now send a notification to parents when they submit a transfer request by creating a transfer submitted email template. This allows you to let parents know that their transfer request was received.
So that you don’t have to add schools manually, we pull school information from the California Department of Education site. The challenge with this is that not all schools in the state’s data are valid for a district at any given time. To help prevent transfer requests to sites that are not currently valid – for whatever reason – we now allow you to hide schools from the transfer form. To update, go into the schools section and update the site’s visibility.
Over the next week or so we’ll be adding
as well as performing general system upgrades.