Tracker Features and Uses

Counselors: Create a Tracker with your caseload, then use the filters to find students with academic issues.

Coaches: Tired of running down teachers for grade checks. Add your team players to a Tracker and monitor their academic performance at your leisure.

Administrators: The possibilities are endless. Here are just a few ideas: NCLB Groups, ELL students, students in danger of dropping out, students who have not yet passed the CASHEE, students with special medical needs (not all Trackers have to be about academic performance), students with attendance issues.

Teachers: Involved in activities outside the classroom? Make a Tracker for your club members, students in your tutoring program, AVID students, class officers, etc.

More than a data filter, Student Tracker is a communications tools. Want to send a LoopMail message to the parents of all ELL students who are showing progress. Done! Track chronically absent students and monitor their grade progress. Done! Manage interventions of all sorts, and build a true collaborative community.

To send your message:

1. Click on your tracker and apply any desired filters

2. Check the boxes for your desired recipients. You may include the students from the Tracker, their parents, teachers, and other members of their Education Teams

3. Click the New Message button when ready, write your message, attach files and links if desired, and send away.

Searching

Use the Lookup field at the top right of the table of students to quickly find students. The table of students will automatically update as you type your search.

Hint: Entering "Grade 11 + smith" will return all 11th grade students whose name includes "smith".

Filters

A number of filters can be applied to any tracker to help you pinpoint students in need of attention. Filters include:

• Number of zeroes
• Grades
• Grade Trend

Here's how to do it:

1. Select the filter type from the Filter Tracker menu

2. Choose your settings for that filter. (Less than 60% in more than zero classes, etc.)

3. Click the Apply Filter button to update the list of students.

Note: Trackers are not just about poor academic performance. Use the filters to find positive trends such as students with grades less than 70% in exactly 0 classes.

For your convenience,a Print View button is located at the top right of the table of students in the Tracker. The print view displays all students in the Tracker or just the students who meet the criteria of your applied filter.

A link for downloading a list of students is located in the Toolbox. The download list is a plain text file with comma separated values. Since the download file contains student ID numbers, it can easily be used as an upload file for adding students to a new or existing Tracker.

Here's an example:

1. Use the Grade 09 Tracker (all 9th graders) to filter students based on having 3 or more classes with averages below 70%.

2. After applying the filter, click the Download List link in the Toolbox and save the file on your hard drive. The number in parentheses is the number of students included in the file.

3. Create a new tracker and click the Upload Members button.

After uploading the file you just saved, your new Tracker is instantly populated with the desired students. The Upload Member List page includes an option to delete the existing members, which allows you to periodically update the Tracker membership using a newly filtered list of freshmen having 3 or more classes with averages below 70%.

Because the download list has comma separated values, it can be opened in an application such as Excel where the data can easily be manipulated and formatted for use in other documents. Although the Student Tracker system can make use of this download file for uploading students to a Tracker, you may use any plain text file with student ID numbers separated by line feeds, spaces, tabs, or commas.

For your convenience, the School Loop system automatically maintains trackers which can be used to monitor student performance and populate other trackers.

Less than 70% in two or more classes: This System Tracker's membership is automatically updated each night based on the grades published by teachers.

Grade Level: These trackers simply group students by grade level but allow you to monitor, for example, freshman failure rates and seniors who are in danger of not graduating.

Course - Teachers have Trackers for each course on their schedule. Course Trackers are based only on the data coming from your gradebook. Unlike other trackers that calculate the average of all course grades and the sum of all zeros from all courses, the average and zeros columns in Course Trackers indicate the student's average and number of zeros in your class.

The filters are also based on data from just your class. For example, filtering a Course Tracker for students with grades less than 60% will tell you how many of your students have an average below 60% in your class. Your course trackers are effectively a custom report tool. Use the Print View button to print a hard copy of your filtered list. You can also use the Download List link in the Toolbox if you'd like a file you can open in Excel. If you hover over a student's name, the popup window still shows grade details from all of their teachers.

All Trackers display each student's name, ID number, grade level, percentage average (based on published course averages), total number of zeros for assignments in all classes, and the number of teachers publishing grades (e.g. 5/6 indicates 5 of 6 teacher have published grades for that student). All columns are sortable by clicking on the column heading. Click a student's name to access their student record or use the envelope icon to send a LoopMail message to any or all members of that student's Learning Management Team.

Another nice feature is that the student's current grades by course and teacher are displayed when you hover over the student's name or the grades column.