Overview

This article will be used by faculty personnel who wish to learn about SchoolLoop's Tracker feature.

Environment

School Loop Plus

Reference Information

Suggested Uses of Tracker

The versatile Tracker tool can prove useful to everyone using School Loop:

• Counselors: Create a Tracker with a caseload, then use the filters to find students with academic issues.
• Coaches: Add team players to a Tracker and monitor their academic performance at leisure without depending on other teachers for grade checks.
• Administrators: The possibilities are endless. Create a track for NCLB Groups, ELL students, students in danger of dropping out, students who have not yet passed the CAHSEE, students with special medical needs (not all Trackers have to be about academic performance), students with attendance issues.
• Teachers: Monitor extra-curricular activities by making a Tracker for club members, students in tutoring programs, AVID students, class officers, etc.

Tracker as a Communications Tool

More than a data filter, the Student Tracker feature is a communications tool that allows users to build a true collaborative community and manage interventions of all sorts. This feature enables Teachers and staff to communicate via LoopMail with parents of students who are showing progress, to track chronically absent students, monitor students' grade progress, and more.

Sending a Message

1. Click on the desired tracker and apply any necessary filters.
2. Check the boxes for the intended recipients. All students from the Tracker, their parents, teachers, and other members of their Education Teams can be included.

3. Click the New Message button when ready
4. Write a message, attach files and links
5. Send the message.

Searching Tracker Lists

Use the Lookup field at the top right of the table of students to quickly find students. The table will automatically update as the search term is entered. For example, entering "Grade 11 + Smith" will return all 11th-grade students whose name includes "Smith".

Filtering Tracker Lists

A number of filters can be applied to any tracker to help teachers pinpoint students in need of attention or to find positive trends. Available filters include the number of zeroes, grades and grade trends. In order to apply a filter, follow these steps:

1. Select the filter type from the Filter Tracker menu
2. Choose the desired settings.
3. Click the Apply Filter button to update the list of students.

The Tracker feature allows to visualize print-ready results in a convenient way, just click on the 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 the applied filter.

Downloading and Uploading Lists

School Loop's toolbox provides a link for downloading a list of students. 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.

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

Since 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, any plain text file with student ID numbers separated by line feeds, spaces, tabs, or commas may be used.

System Trackers

School Loop 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 group students by grade level but allows staff to monitor freshman failure rates and seniors who are in danger of not graduating, for example.
• Course: Teachers have Trackers for each course on their schedule. Course Trackers are based only on the data coming from the 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 the number of zeros in a teacher's class.

Filters are also based on data from teachers' classes. For example, filtering a Course Tracker for students with grades less than 60% will return the number of students with an average below 60% in a teacher's class which allows course trackers to effectively act as a custom report tool.

The Print View button can be used to print a hard copy of a filtered list. Exporting the file by using the Download List link in the Toolbox provides a file that can be opened in Excel. Also, a popup window showing grade details from all teachers can be accessed by hovering the mouse pointer over a student's name.

Detailed Student Information

All Trackers display each student's name, ID number, grade level, percentage average (based on published course averages), the total number of zeros for assignments in all classes, and the number of teachers publishing grades (e.g. 5/6 indicates 5 of 6 teachers have published grades for that student).

Reported columns can be sorted 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.