Striking Out on our Own...

In 2016, our contract with our SIS came up for renewal. Teachers and leadership were unsatisfied with our existing SIS and all of the others on the market. So I was asked, "Why don't you just build one for us? You're halfway there..." I agreed, but on the condition that we find a third-party Learning Management System (LMS) to serve as the frontend for students and to serve as our gradebook.

We selected the Canvas LMS, and I was given one summer to

1. Pull all of our data out of our existing SIS
2. Build a database system to store it, and a front-end for teachers to use to access it
3. Build an integration with Canvas to sync rosters and grades
4. Teach the whole school how to use the new LMS and the new SIS

At this point I was running the IT department solo, but I pulled it off, and the school year began with very few hiccups. Teachers loved Canvas, it synced with the main database painlessly, and the flexibility offered by having a home-grown SIS has been incredibly valuable.

Missing Assignments Mailer

One of our Deans was spending four to eight hours a week manually compiling the number of missed assignments each of his students had, and then emailing parents about them one-by-one. This feature pulls the missing assignments automatically from Canvas, allows the teacher to compose mail merge email home, and then delivers the mail via MailerSend's API.

Asset Tracking

When I started at CJA, we had a single fleet of 30 Windows PCs for student use. Soon after, I introduced iPads and Chromebooks using a cart model, and then during COVID we switched to one-to-one. A robust asset tracking system was required to keep track of device locations and to keep students (and teachers) accountable for how they treated their devices. The asset tracking system talks to Google to pull login information for Chromebooks, including date and time, the logged-in user, and the user's IP address. This has been a game changer in terms of tracking down missing devices. It integrates with our database as well, showing current device assignments to teachers on the student's info page.

Schedules

Early on, I became a resource to other departments for hard problems - even when those problems don't have a necessarily technological solution. My first full school year, CJA moved to a ten-day rotating schedule, where each day would be different. When our principal couldn't manage the complexity on pen and paper, he passed the assignment off to me. With six grades and multiple teachers who taught across grade levels, it was like a four-dimensional sudoku puzzle - but one I relished, as it let me use the schedule as a force multiplier. I was able to get experienced teachers more time with students in situations that benefited their strengths, plus each teacher had a morning or afternoon each ten-day cycle without any responsibilities, so they could make doctors appointments, etc. without requiring a sub.

Of course, creating the schedule was only half the challenge; communicating it and keeping it up to date was a pain point for the first few years. When we moved away from our old SIS and moved to Apps, I included scheduling as a feature. It would let front desk staff know where any student was at any particular point in time for early pickups, print PDFs for students to put in their binders, and even allow our Head of School to view unoccupied faculty for any block so they could be tasked as substitutes (and mark them as such, so if another teacher called in on the same day, a sub wouldn't be double-booked).

Attendance

In 2022, CJA broke ground on a new wing of the building, allowing it to serve girls as well as boys. Unfortunately, this meant that the atrium that had offered plenty of room for students to arrive and for teachers to take attendance became ground zero of a major construction effort, and students began entering and departing through a number of small side doors.

I was tasked with coming up with a way to very quickly take attendance at these new points of entry without slowing down the line of students waiting to enter the building. I came up with an RFID-based ID card system that allow students to simply tap their IDs on a USB RFID scanner attached to a Chromebook at each point of entry. The ID cards also had QR codes printed on them; if necessary, any teacher could pull out their phone and load the Attendance tool, which would activate their phone's camera and let them scan students QR codes nearly as quickly as the RFID reader. Of course, Apps also generates the QR codes and packages up all of the student data and head shots for the ID card printing software.