Academic module set up
Academic module set up |
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Academic report periods Please note: These instructions are for iWise Professional schools and iWise Link schools who are storing their academic data in iWise rather than Maze. Please speak to Civica for further assistance if you are using iWise Link and storing your academic data in Maze.
What are Academic report periods? As your school prepares for the creation of academic reports one of the first tasks you will need to do is create a new report period. A report period is used to store your academic data and produce your academic reports. Although you can strictly have two reports per report period, Civica recommends a new report period for each report (eg interim report, Semester 1 report and Semester 2 report). Having a new report period for each report gives you maximum control of your class lists, via the use of the report cutoff date.
What is the report cutoff date? Each afternoon, at 3.15pm, iWise creates class lists in the Academic module which match your current timetable. Any changes you may have made to the timetable are then reflected in the Academic module for reporting. It is quite likely, however, that there will come a date where you no longer want the class lists for reporting to keep up with your timetable. For example, if a student changes subjects a week or two before a report is due you will make this change on your timetable but you won’t want to have them included in the new subject for reporting. It is more likely that you will want that student to be included in their old subject for reporting. To stop this sync between your timetable and the Academic module you set a report cutoff date. iWise provides screens for you to make minor tweaks to these class lists after the cutoff date but the important thing is that you are then able to make changes to your timetable without it affecting reports. And once a new report period is created the old one becomes archived. If your class lists are static at that point then you will always be able to pull up old reports, confident that the class lists are unchanged.
What are S1 and S2? As mentioned above, it is recommended that you create a new report period for each report your school produces. However, due to iWise’s history with Maze, each report period is able to store two reports. Traditionally, these two reports were used for Semester 1 and Semester 2 reports - hence the labels and menus S1 and S2. This is fine if you only have two reports per year but not terribly clear if you are including one or two interim reports. Rather than think of ‘Semester 1’ and ‘Semester 2’ try to think of S1 and S2 as ‘Slot 1’ and ‘Slot 2’ (or 'Style 1' and 'Style 2' - indicating interim and Semester style report printing).
Every school’s report set up is different, so please speak to Civica for help with which slot you are using for your reports. But as an example, depending on your report requirements, your school may have a report set up like this:
Term 4 timetable changes and the Markbook In term 4, schools often make a significant change to their timetable – for example moving year 11 students to year 12 - but do not want the academic reporting or existing Markbook tasks to reflect this change. If you are only using the iWise Academic module for reports this is easily managed with the cutoff date. But the cutoff date doesn’t affect the Markbook, so if you are using the iWise Markbook and don’t want to see timetable changes reflected in your class lists there, you will need to create a new timetable term in iWise.
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In a future upgrade of the iWise academic module we will remove the S1 and S2 concept, and only allow one report per report period.