Although the software Infinite Campus has been used for over 15 years in Weston for storing and organizing student information, IC has been under scrutiny for its inconvenience when handling certain school procedures. Even with these concerns about Infinite Campus, the software has potential to improve WHS communication, and this potential should be explored.
One way to better utilize Infinite Campus for communication is to establish a direct messaging system in a way that students will be better equipped to receive information from teachers and from the school. With Infinite Campus, Gmail, and Google Classroom, the WHS systems for communicating information to students are plentiful, but sometimes the overwhelming amount of information shared through these modes proves ineffective for teachers and students who want to communicate.
“I don’t check my Gmail too often,” said junior Matthew Cort. “I just get too many emails of random stuff. It’s not really organized.”
This problem causes a disconnect between the teacher who communicates information and the student who doesn’t receive it. However, Infinite Campus has already emerged as a way to convey important information like missing assignments to student.
“Marking something missing on Infinite Campus has been the quickest and most effective way to remind a student to turn something in,” math teacher Allison Langsdorf said.
Because of this, Infinite Campus would be a suitable candidate for a direct messaging system. While Gmail can’t be replaced as the primary mode of communication, an Infinite Campus direct messaging system could likely be used to convey the most urgent information.
Infinite Campus has a messenger feature that allows not only for messages to be sent by email through Infinite Campus, but also allows for text messages to be sent through the app.
“There is another feature separate from the messenger feature on Infinite Campus that is still being implemented by the tech department. It would let parents and students check in, receive, and maybe even send messages [through Infinite Campus],” administrative assistant Katie Skelley said.
Right now this feature is only used to notify parents of changes, but it could and should also be used as a way to communicate to students if the student chooses to include the necessary contact information. The school’s tech department is already considering ways to incorporate similar features of Infinite Campus into WHS communication. These features could be utilized further to aid in student-teacher communication as well.
In addition to direct messaging, there is potential to improve our methods on how teacher absences are communicated. The software Frontline is used by teachers to communicate to the front office when they are unable to come into school on a given day. Infinite Campus has a strong compatibility with other softwares, which may make it possible to link the program with Frontline in order to produce automated messaging on which teachers are out. While implementing this method may be complicated, a more likely solution comes in a different idea: placing a link in the IC “quick links” section. This link would send students to the Google slide that is projected on the TVs around the school. This method would provide a way to communicate teacher absences directly to students’ phones without introducing new softwares.
“New messaging apps could take years to implement, but a new and simple method [centered around] Infinite Campus would still allow for information on which teachers are out to be more accessible,” technology integration specialist Michael Sanford said.
Although these possibilities are yet to be implemented, Infinite Campus has a notification system that students can already choose to turn on. However, the district turns off push notifications for all students in order to avoid a large amount of notifications being sent. This means that even if a student chooses to turn on Infinite Campus notifications on their phone, they will not receive notifications on their lock screen the same way they would with Gmail.
With this in mind, the next course of action would be to work to implement push notifications in a way that isn’t overwhelming to the student. While some of these methods may be harder to follow through on than others, the key is to make our systems of communication even better through improving the tools that we already have at our disposal.
“[I am] happy to discuss this further. These are worthy conversations and I’m open to getting Mr. Sanford involved and working with students on defining where the problem is,” director of technology and school libraries Lee McCanne said.