Jan 23, 2018
The teacher selection criteria indicates how the system will select staff when making bookings. We have included an option to allow selection by subject, however this is more complicated than the default of year levels.
The selection also allows a combination of year levels and subject selection – this is the option we will describe below.
NOTE: This option would only be relevant to secondary schools where staff teach different subjects.
Parent perspective
When the parent enters their child’s name into the system they are also prompted to enter a year level. This simple piece of information helps us limit the number of teachers that are presented for the parent to choose from.
As the parent then selects the option to book interviews in a particular round the application will first present a list of subjects taught by teachers for this child’s year level. The parent will then select from this list of subjects, selecting one or more. The ‘Next’ page will list each selected subject, and more specifically grouping the staff that teach this year level each subject. Hence if my child was in Yr9 and I selected English and Maths from the subjects I would then have a list of Yr9 English teachers followed by a list of Yr9 Maths teachers. The parent can then select one or more teachers to interview with.
Application / Teacher perspective
We need to know which year levels each staff member teaches and also which subjects they teach.
Identifying the year levels taught:
- When a staff member first logs into the Parent/Teacher application the system will prompt them to select the year levels they teach. After this time staff can also select the ‘My year levels’ from the Main Menu to adjust these.
- The SOBS Administrator can also use the Staff page to update the year levels for each staff member.
- If a staff member is checked for every year level then they will appear on every year level list presented to parents.
- If a staff member is not checked for any year level, then they will never appear for selection by parents.
Identifying the subjects taught:
- The SOBS Administrator will have a ‘Subjects’ link in the Configuration menu. Clicking this option will display a list of subjects and the staff associated with each subject. The administrator can maintain these lists of subjects and staff manually
- Alternatively we would recommend that it would be easier to maintain these settings externally and import the information, the following options exist
- CSV
- Accelerus-Markbook
- To enable the import option go to the School Settings page and the PT tab, click the ‘Edit’ button and update the ‘Integration’ option
- To use the import option click on the ‘Import/Export’ page and then the import Subjects or import Teachers and Subjects to view the available options (see below for more details about the format of these files)
Importing with CSV
To enable the import option go to the School Settings page and the PT tab, click the ‘Edit’ button and update the ‘Integration’ option.
SUBJECTS
The file format is a standard CSV with 2 columns. The first column is the subject code and the second column is a subject description (as might be understood by a parent). Typically this import option is only used by secondary schools where a student will have different teachers for each subject they are studying.
An example of the data might be:
| FRM | Form class |
| ENG | English |
| HPE | Physical education |
| LAT | Latin |
| MAA | Math-A |
| MAB | Math-B |
This import is typically used in conjunction with a second import file that specifies which subjects a staff member teaches. Together these two files enable the parent to select a year level and a subject before they are presented with a list of teachers to select from. The subject codes therefore will need to match those used when importing the teacher / subject connections.
TEACHERS & SUBJECTS
The import file connects teaching staff with the subjects taught. The CSV file has a variable number of columns, the first column is an identifier for the staff member, the remaining columns identify the subject code as imported earlier.
The staff member identifier can be any one of the following: The username, the email address, the (unique) short code, the import code (as may have been used with the Resource Booking application).
An example of the data might be:
| john.smith | ENG | LAT | ENC | ||
| jane.doe | MAB | MAC | |||
| alice.jones | MUS | ||||
| trevor.mann | PHY | SCI | MAB | MAC | BIO |
The staff member must be uniquely identified, as must each subject in the list. If a staff member is not identified the record will not be imported. If a subject is not identified it will be bypassed and the next subject will be checked. For each staff member and subject identified a connection will be recorded. Therefore it is important to check the error messages carefully to correct any mistakes in the data.
Importing with Accelerus MarkBook
To enable the import option go to the School Settings page and the PT tab, click the ‘Edit’ button and update the ‘Integration’ option.
SUBJECTS
The file format is a standard CSV with 4 columns as below:
| CODE | SUBJECT | LEVEL | DESCRIPTION |
TEACHERS & SUBJECTS
The import file connects teaching staff with the subjects taught. The CSV file has a variable number of columns, the first column is a class-code, the second a subject-code, all remaining columns are staff-codes.
An example of the data might be:
| CLASS | SUBJECT | STAFF1 | STAFF2 | STAFF3 | STAFF4 |
| 9ACC | MAC | john.doe | |||
| 9HAB | EN1 | mark.p | roger.we | ||
| 9YAA | BIO | terry.ai | mark.p | roger.we | tim.j |
The staff member must be uniquely identified, as must each subject in the list. If a staff member is not identified the record will not be imported. If a subject is not identified it will be bypassed and the next subject will be checked. For each staff member and subject identified a connection will be recorded. Therefore it is important to check the error messages carefully to correct any mistakes in the data.