We are pleased to announce that schools using the Pearson E1 and Integris G2 MIS products can now export attendance data once or twice daily via USO-AutoUpdate to use in conjunction with USO-AutoText.
Once data is exported, unauthorised absence reports are available to view through the USO-AutoText interface and notifications can be sent to all parents/guardians’ mobile phones with just a few clicks.
In order to make use of the attendance reporting functionality, the school’s Head must first go to the AutoUpdate settings page in the support site and accept the Atomwide Attendance report. A school must also subscribe to USO-AutoText to use the available data for contacting parents and guardians.
After the attendance report has been accepted via the support site, the Head or Nominated Contact can schedule when the export(s) should be run by using the scheduling tool provided on the left-hand side of the AutoUpdate Settings page. Full details on how to schedule exports are available in the support site manual.
All schools using USO-AutoUpdate to export attendance data either once or twice per day, can now be notified when their exported attendance data has been processed. This added feature is optional and is intended to eliminate guesswork by letting schools know exactly when their exported data is ready to be used in USO-AutoText to contact parents/guardians of absent pupils.
To make use of the new feature, the person who takes responsibility for sending absence notifications via USO-AutoText will need to have the Role of “Attendance Officer” added to their USO account profile. This role can be added to a user’s USO account by a Nominated Contact or another user with higher-level permissions.
Once the role has been added in USO, the Attendance Officer will receive automated emails from the processing system letting them know that the most recent attendance export has been processed and results can be seen in USO-AutoText.
Anyone using AutoText to notify pupil contacts of unauthorised absences now has an additional report available to use. The new “Absent for pm session but present for am” option allows you to send alerts to contacts of pupils who were marked “present” for the morning session but then marked “absent” for the afternoon session.
This option presumes that all pupils marked “absent” during the morning session have already had notifications sent to their contacts and therefore filters them out to produce a list of those pupils who are absent in the afternoon only.
This will mean that pupils’ contacts will not receive two absence notifications on the same day if this is not desirable.
This option is different from the “PM absences” one in that the “PM absences” report shows all pupils absent in the afternoon, regardless of whether they were absent or present at morning registration.
A full explanation of all the options can be found here.
AutoUpdate can now be used with RM Integris G2 MIS products to export data to the USO database.
Schools do not need to install any software at their end. Instead, they will need to fill out a form and send it to RM who will then provide the school with instructions on how to create a G2 web service user.
The school’s Head will also need to enable the reports for export via the AutoUpdate settings page in the support site.
Full instructions on what needs to be done can be found in the user guide.
With the current uncertain financial climate affecting both schools and LAs the Atomwide USO-AutoText school level pricing has been reduced. This will make the service more accessible and cost-effective for individual schools whilst still ensuring that an aggregating LA purchase of the service remains the best value for money option.
The new pricing is as follows:
Secondary Schools: £300 per year (Includes 1000 Message Credits)
Primary Schools: £200 per year (Includes 1000 Message Credits)
Message Credits: 6p per message
More detailed service and pricing information can be found at http://www.atomwide.com/products.html
It is now possible to use USO-AutoUpdate to export data from a Pearson E1 MIS.
Schools do not need to install any software in order to do this. They must simply obtain the relevant details from Pearson and inform the Service Desk of that they wish to export the data.
For full details on the process please see this page in the Support Site User Guide.
The support site offers all users a place to securely store usernames and passwords for all the various websites they may need to access.
My Account >> USO Password Vault provides a page where anyone with a USO account can keep a record of any personal or work-related passwords that they are not meant to write down on bits of paper that can get into the wrong hands. Full details can be found here.
Two new features have been added to AutoText.
1. The option to group pupil contacts by House has been added. This grouping will only apply to and be selectable by schools that use the House system. Schools that don’t group pupils by House will see the option but will not be able to select it. The grouping relies on pupils being grouped correctly in the school’s MIS.
2. You can now send messages to specific groups of pupil contacts that have been defined in SIMS. Groups of pupil contacts can be exported via the Atomwide Student User Defined Groups report, provided that this report has been enabled. The predefined groups would then be available to the SMS Sender when accessing AutoText >> Send SMS or Send Email page. This function is found under the Predefined Contact List tab. Instructions can be found here.
School OpenCheck status can now be updated by text.
Schools that subscribe to AutoText and have message credits available can now update their OpenCheck status by text message.
The person making the change needs to have a mobile phone registered to their USO account and must also have the appropriate permissions enabled in their account profile. Users that meet these criteria can then simply text the school’s status message to the specified number. If the status change is successful, a confirmation message gets sent to the sender’s mobile. This costs one credit. If the status change fails no charge is made.
Full details of how this works can be found here.
Couple of new features on the texting service.
You can now select AM or PM attendance marks, or a combination of them, from within the attendance part of the texting service.
Pre-defined staff lists now have a tick box to allow senders to remove individual recipients from the list along with the same functionality on the pupil contacts page.
Warning messages which are now configurable when the number of message credits for a school fall below an LA limit have been added to the send sms & email page