A guidance counselor meets with each student and enters course requests. Or, students enter their requests online.
Administrators run the Focus/SIS scheduler. With just a couple of clicks and a couple of minutes, most of the requests are scheduled and a brief conflicts report is displayed.
Using the conflicts report as a guide, administrators make any necessary adjustments to the master schedule. Focus/SIS suggests moving sections, adding sections, removing sections, or altering student requests.
Since the scheduler runs in only minutes, the scheduler can be run as many times as necessary until 100% of the student requests have been scheduled. The Focus/SIS scheduler recursively tries every combination of schedules until it finds the perfect combination.
Focus/SIS balances each section, and won over schedule any section. However, administrators can choose to override maximum seat counts.
Scheduling in a College:
Students register for classes online.
Colleges can also schedule students by hand like a K-12 school. And, high schools can allow their students to register for classes online.
Teachers can take attendance for their homeroom, and have a gradebook for each subject they teach.
Focus/SIS simplifies tracking grades.
The above video demonstrates the online gradebook and displays examples of report cards, transcripts, and benchmarks-based report cards produced by Focus/SIS. This demonstration also highlights how you can give parents and students at your school access to grades and assignments online.
Focus/SIS simplifies student billing.
The above video demonstrates how fees are automatically assessed when students are enrolled (based on your schools settings). It also demonstrates how parents and students at your school can pay for fees online with e-Check or Credit Card. The same online payments feature can also be used to convert paper checks into electronic payments that are automatically deposited into your schools bank account.
All these transactions can then be synchronized with QuickBooks or another accounting package. Focus/SIS even produces 1098-T tax forms for your students.
Focus/SIS provides powerful data tracking tools.
The above video demonstrates how Focus/SIS allows you to define the data you need to track for students. It also demonstrates reporting on the data fields that you create for students.
Focus/SIS simplifies discipline procedures and data analysis.
Save Paper
Convert your paper referral form to an electronic form in Focus/SIS.
Focus/SIS implementation specialists transform discipline referral forms provided by your school into an electronic form like the one above.
Users will feel comfortable transitioning from your old discipline system since the referral form in Focus/SIS is customized to exactly match your old one.
Breakout your data
Focus/SIS allows you to create breakdown reports on your schools referrals based on any of the fields on your discipline form, any student fields, over time, and comparing schools within your district.
Use advanced filters to create complex graphs in pie, bar, or list format. Break out your reports for more information -- filtered or sorted by ethnicity, truancy, or any other combination of criteria. For example, the above pie chart created in Focus/SIS shows a breakdown of Violations reported on all referrals for truant African-American students. Clicking on any Violation on this chart will display another chart of African-American truant students who committed that violation.
Fulfill state reporting requirements with just one click.
State Reporting Spotlight: California
The California School Information Services (CSIS) requires student data to be transmitted in CSV format several times a year. To produce any of these reports, you just choose the report thats due (Annual Maintenance, Enrollment Update, Batch Request for Identifier), and click "Download."
A pre-formatted LEAL NI file is downloaded to your computer ready to be uploaded to the CSIS Datagate.
Focus/SIS also produces a Pre-ID Labels export for the STAR test.
Focus/SISs built-in state reporting engine makes it simple to fine-tune Focus/SIS for any state. When our engineers install your system, fields for your state are added automatically. And we fine-tune the state reporting engine to your states individual requirements.
When reports are due, Focus/SIS will remind you. Our engineers will also automatically update the reports when the requirements change.
Focus/SIS provides essential data to the users who need it in real time.
Take control of user access with incredibly fine-grained permissions.
Focus/SIS system administrators can assign read-only and editing access to any function within Focus/SIS.
These permissions can be assigned to individual users or groups of users.
Students:
View admission status, course schedule, final grades, GPA
Perform degree audit
Pay fees with credit card or e-check
View upcoming assignments
View teacher-supplied course materials (such as the syllabus) online
Take online quizzes
View assignment & assessment grades and track performance in course
Register for classes or apply for admission
Teachers:
Take attendance
Publish course information
Announce upcoming homework assignments and assessments
Create graded online assessments
Prepare paper exams to be printed and scanned for grading
Submit final grades (which are automatically calculated by the Focus/SIS gradebook) for transcripts
Weight grades, exclude assignments for individual students, and customize grading scales
Secretaries & Administrators:
Create student fields to store student information and perform searches and reports on these fields
Add students to the system when they apply, and transfer the students when they are accepted
Print transcripts
Define user permissions
Schedule students into classes
Integrate Moodle into your SIS to provide e-Learning.
Provide numerous course activities including forums, quizzes, assignments, and chats
Automate formative assessment
Create and grade paper exams with scanners
Facilitate communication and collaboration between teachers and students
Develop online lesson plans and monitor student online coursework
Focus/SIS works with Apperson Optical Mark Read (OMR) auto-feed scanners. Paper Exams (with multiple form codes) are created in the e-Learning component of Focus/SIS. When the bubble sheets are scanned, the grades are automatically uploaded back to Focus/SIS.
Integrate the perfect cafeteria system.
Use any hardware.
Our implementation specialists recommend touchscreen point-of-sale hardware and barcode scanners for your schools. However, your schools can use the computers and barcode scanners that you already have to run the point-of-sale terminal.
Integrate Focus/SIS with the open source point-of-sale cafeteria package PSCafePOS
Track student lunch purchases with a point-of-sale installed in the cafeteria
Publish student lunch purchases and nutritional information online for parents
Track free/reduced lunch status
Use student ID cards to debit declining balances. Students can use the same cards for the library. Or, cafeteria workers can use laminated barcode sheets for younger students
Focus also offers customized solutions to schools, districts, and institutions of higher education. If you e looking to switch systems or databases or to transition to an E-Learning system, count on our seasoned consultants to provide everything from advice and detailed implementation plans to train-the-trainers or customized hands-on training. We specialize in assisting faculty with minimal experience in online environments with designing, developing, and delivering E-Learning courses on any platform to mimic the immediacy and intimacy of conventional face-to-face classrooms.
Why Focus/SIS? beCAAUSe:
We built Focus around five principles to create the Focus beCAAUSe: Compatibility, Adaptability, Affordability, Usability, and Scalability.
Compatibility
To maximize its compatibility, we designed Focus to work with virtually any form of data as either inputs or outputs. We also fully integrated every aspect of Focus to ensure that no piece of data every needed to be entered more than once. Instead, users can manage every piece of data involved in every aspect of a student’s life on campus—from classroom to cafeteria—seamlessly within a single application.
Adaptability
Focus is an exclusively web-based, all-inclusive, fully-integrated system. Because Focus uses Open Source code, you can rely on the skills of existing IT staff already familiar with Open Source to make changes to your own version of Focus to accommodate growing and changing needs.
Affordability
Because Focus eliminates the need for the licensing fees for multiple systems, it also represents a highly affordable system for managing student information. And, with Focus aiming to become the preeminent provider of student information systems, our highly competitive pricing strategy ensures that Focus is the market’s most cost-effective solution.
Usability
A highly intuitive interface, customized to meet our clients’ needs ensures that anyone can begin using Focus within minutes—and that information is readily available to all stakeholders, from parents to support staff to faculty and administrators. Fine-grained permissions ensure secure access to data. And full integration with Moodle ensures teachers can manage courses, assignments, and grades without ever leaving Focus, which seamlessly records grades and generates transcripts based on Moodle courses. Of course, administrators and support staff can endlessly customize Focus to accommodate student and campus needs as they develop, adding fields in seconds as needs arise.
Scalability
Focus is also almost infinitely scalable, accommodating the needs of districts that anticipate rapid growth in their student populations, as well as increased demand for different kinds of data, including security and healthcare information.
Stop waiting for your requests to be scheduled.
Focus/SIS schedules a high school in just minutes.
And, Focus/SIS doesn take any shortcuts to schedule so quickly. Focus/SIS incredibly clever recursive scheduling algorithms mean that your school won have to worry about completion ratios ever again. Focus/SIS intelligently tries every possible scheduling combination until it finds the best one.
Focus/SIS schedules even the most complicated or untraditional master schedules.
Block Schedules
Advanced/Remedial Course Weighting
Sections with Multiple Meeting Times
Timetable Scheduling
Multiple Calendars
Gender Restrictions
Get a Demo!
Focus has exceeded expectations.
- Meg Brown
Director of Technology
Flagler County Schools
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