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How To Manage All Your Boarding Houses With Our Improved School Management Tool

Kurt Meyer

March 2, 2016

Working at a boarding school means you’ll be interacting with groups of students of all sizes. Sometimes you’ll just be communicating with individuals or small groups of students, at other times you’ll be managing whole houses or dorms and sometimes you’ll be required to manage your entire school of students.So it’s important you have the right tools to ensure your boarding school is running smoothly at all levels.From day one, Boardingware has focused on providing you with a simple way to manage students as individuals, groups and houses and with our latest update, we’ve also made it super simple for you to organise and manage your students at the school wide level.Find out more about our latest update below:

Separating school management from your daily tasks

In this update, we’ve relocated all your student management features (manage students, manage contacts, manage leave etc) into the school management section.Why?So you can manage all your school settings and databases from a single page.This makes setting up and managing your school settings much easier for your administrators and enables us to provide you with powerful school management tools that’ll make your life a lot easier.It also keeps the main side bar much cleaner and simpler for your staff users and also prevents staff users from viewing or changing important settings without permission.From the school management page you can manage all your staff, student and contact information, create and assign leave types for any house, and create groups with students from any house.

Leave type

Manage leave types across all houses

The school management page gives you a central place to manage all your leave types for your entire school. Now you can create a new leave type and assign this leave type to a single house, multiple houses or school wide.This means you only have to create the leave type once and simply apply it where needed. No more repetitive copying and editing, school wide management takes care of it for you.And this also allows you to consistently edit and manage leave types across all your houses. For instance, if you edit the details of your weekend leave form, all houses with that use that leave type will be affected by that change.

Group

Create groups of students from different houses

Previously, it was only possible to create groups of students that were from the same house. This was good for groups of students that boarded together but most groups often included students from different houses - it was a bit of an inconvenience.But with our new school management page, you now have the ability to create "school groups,” which allows you to create a group of students from any house, perfect for creating year level groups, sport teams etc. School groups can be seen by any house and used to complete your daily tasks.Boardingware still allows you to create in-house groups for more specific, personal groups, like “house seniors” or “study groups”. You can create, edit and manage in-house groups from your house’s main board.Having “school groups” and “in-house groups” provides you with different levels of control and provides you with an efficient way to manage student groups of any size.

Schoolview

See all your students in "School view"

Aside from being able to switch between and view different houses, we’ve now given you the ability to switch to an "all school" view. This means you can view, track and manage your students across your entire school. Easily keep track of all your students, process leave requests, record pastoral notes and anything else you’d do on any other given day.

A few extras

At Boardingware, we’re obsessed about simplicity and providing you with the best experience possible, and that means paying extra attention to detail - It’s the small things that matter 😃So here’s a few extra features that also come with the recent update:

  • Extra “filter” functionality - You can now filter students by leave types to view students on a particular leave as well as by destination see all your students that are at a specific location. This is perfect for when you need a general idea of who’s on a certain leave or at a certain location..
  • The top navigation stays fixed when you scroll down - This means you can scroll through your students, select the ones you want and select an action without having to scroll all the way to the top again.

The best is yet to come

Our main intention with this update was to make it simpler for you to manage the administrative work that’s completed behind the scenes, so you can quickly and efficiently manage your boarding school with ease.If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please don’t hesitate to comment in the section below. I reply to every comment 😃P.S. 2016 is going to be a our biggest year to date and we have some awesome new features coming out that we know you’ll love. Make sure you subscribe to our blog if you’d like to receive our updates delivered right to your inbox.[marketo-fat form="1107"]

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Kurt Meyer

Kurt is one of the Co-founders of Orah, currently based in Japan. He manages the product team to deliver the best possible experience to our users.

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