To get started with Orah’s attendance tracking for Blackbaud and Veracross, you can sign up for a trial account on the Orah website. From there, simply connect your school’s data via API keys, and the system will walk you through the setup. Once connected, Orah pulls in attendance data automatically, and you’ll be able to explore insights and set up alerts within minutes. If needed, Orah’s team is available to assist with any setup questions.
Note: This transcript was automatically generated and manually reviewed, but may still contain errors.
Kurt Meyer: Welcome everybody. my name is Kurt and I'm here with Tiago we're excited to go through a few of the updates that we've been working on here at Orah.
Tiago Penteado: Yeah, I encourage everyone to put, um, questions in the chat throughout the session. I'll, um, I'll field them and then put them to Kurt when it makes sense.
Kurt Meyer: Cool. All right. So let's, jump into it. So a little bit about Orah for those of you who don't know. we were founded in 2015, so been around for almost 10 years now. we operate in over 20 countries and work with Over 300 of the top independent schools around the world. and what we, strive to help schools achieve is to improve their duty of care.
and also we started out working with boarding schools. So predominantly, we help boarding schools, manage the day to day operations within, the boarding environment. but we've also been doing a lot of work recently to help, extend The duty of care,functionality and scope to the day school as well.
and I'll be talking a little bit more to that today. But firstly, what does duty of care mean to us at Orah?so for us it means being able to account for students both physically and mentally.so that schools can create a more secure and supportive environment. And that really comes from our boarding school origins.
And It's based on this, idea of, you're like the parent or the student, while they're away from home. And you want to make sure that they're taken care of, and that's what Orah is about and that's what we aspire to help schools achieve.within duty of care, we see three main, pillars, and that's, attendance, being, and communications.
so being able to answer some really important questions. Fundamental questions about your students, like where are they? How are they? How do we communicate with them? And if you can answer these questions, to a high level, then you're probably providing best of class duty of care. But even these simple questions can be As I'm sure a lot of you would know, it can be quite difficult to, answer for every student, at scale.
And so today we want to be talking, we're going to be talking about bridging the gap between the day of boarding environments. So quite often there's a few,pain points when it comes to just getting across what's happening with the student, both between the day of the boarding school, particularly around where they are.
so a few examples are, who's in the, who's. At school or in the dorms right now, and as a boarding school, you need to know that at any given time, whether it's the start of the school day or the end of the school day, who hasn't left. Or who hasn't returned from school and just having that constant pulse of who's here right now.
also if a student, within the boarding school isn't going to go to the day school for any reason, say if they're sick, how can you excuse them from class?and also, how are your boarders so typically these are things that the parent would, be responsible for or have some involvement with. If it's just a day student, but because within the boarding school environment, the board, the boarding school staff are pretty much the,the parents, so they, take responsibility for these things.
If the student is going to be sick. Then it will be the boarding school that will be the ones that communicate with the day school to, let them know. But, there's a lot more students to worry about,to look after. So there's, more room for error, bigger need to streamline and systemize things.
Which is what Orah is, yeah, has been working on.most of these things can be done within the SIS. So you could go to your SIS and say excuse a student from class or, send an email to your attendance manager or something along those lines. But Orah is designed to help support and facilitate boarding school operations.
So we want these things to be achievable within Orah itself without having to switch between different systems. And so we can also streamline and make those processes a bit more efficient.
So I'm just going to talk through a few, examples of how you can achieve,those improvements through Orah, and I'll give a demonstration of how each of those work. And the first one is informing the day's school, when a boarder will be absent from school. And from a high level, how that would work is that you can set up a particular task within Orah, and whenever that task has been created, It can automatically excuse a student, from their academic classes, through the integration.
so I'll show how that can be enabled. So I'm just here in our demo account, and the first thing we want to do is create a pass.so I'm going to go to my admin console,
passes, and I'll create a new pass. I'll call this boarding day excuse,
and you can call it whatever you want.but the idea is that whatever this excuse is created will be excusing the student from their academic classes. So for locations, I will enable
in class for this example, under the day campus. You can customize these locations,
assign them to all students, and under the form builder, I will include a start time and end time, which is required to, excuse students from class. And I also include an optional reason.so this provides a little bit more detail, within the passport, exactly why that student's being accused. so it could be a trip, it could be sick, it could be, a parent emergency or something like that.
so those are the three main fields that you need. reason, start time, end time and location is required for any pass. So I'm going to go ahead and save that.
So that's the first step is creating that pass. And the next thing you want to do is head over to the app directory integrations. And if you don't already have an integration set up, it will provide a list of the different SISs that we integrate with.at the moment, the. The pass syncing is only for Blackbaud and Veracross.
But if you have a different SIS, just let us know and we'll be, happy to work with you on enabling that integration feature.so I'm using Blackbaud as an example. So I'm going to go to my Blackbaud integration settings and go to pass records.
And within pass records, I can define some rules for how passes should work. be sent to Blackbaud. So for this example, I'm going to look for the, pass that I just created, boarding excuse. And I'm going to map that to a pass within, or a reason within Blackbaud. And so you would have all of your reasons that have been created within Blackbaud.
So that list, this list would be unique to you. But I'm just going to choose one from my demo account. Let's just use reason. So whenever the boarding excuse pass has been created in Orah, I'm just going to use reason. Then it's going to,show up in Blackbaud as an excuse, within the student's classes between the start and end time.
and it's going to give them the reason attendance category as to why they've been excused.once you hit save, then, that integration will happen automatically. So if I went back to the home board, and a student said that they weren't going to come into class today, or they were feeling sick, so they were going to stay.
At the dorms, you could just select the student, hit pass, fill out the boarding excuse pass that we just created. Reason being sick. you could put the start and end time for the whole school day and that's going to automatically sync to Blackbaud so that, the student will automatically be excused from their classes.
You don't have to email the attendance manager or anything like that. It'll just sync over directly. So it streamlines that whole process.
Tiago Penteado: Hey Kurt, while we're on this as well, I just had a question from Art. he said, are there plans to, for a start and end date option with no time for full day passes?
Kurt Meyer: That's a, yeah, that's a good question. definitely something that we're open to. And we've been trying to figure out the best way to approach it. And a couple of things that we have at the moment is being able to set a, start and end time, which would save you from having to. pick the time every time you create that pass.
And that can be done within the roles section of the pass settings. So I can say start time role can only start at, let's say,
8am. And end time role can only end at, 3. 15pm. So every time this pass is created, the start and end times will be defaulted to 8. 15pm. 8 a. m. and 3 15 p. m. and they won't be able to change. So that would save you from having to enter it.so that's how most schools have been managing that so far.
and yet we're open to any other ways to improve that, whether it's, just removing that entirely, this, having some other way to,turn off the times.
Yeah, thanks for the question.
All right. so that's the first example that I wanted to go through.the next thing is being able to monitor your boarding students academic attendance.so as a boarding school, once the students leave the dorms and they head over to class, it was sort of,unless you go into the SIS to check how they're going, you don't really know how they're going in terms of attendance.
If you have the integration set up with Veracross and Blackbaud,
we can generate this dashboard, using the SIS. To provide you some insights around, how your students are going from an academic attendance point of view.
So you can see here, the last sync happened 13 minutes ago. And during the school day, this will have to occur every hour. And it slows down in the weekends and after. but it should be fairly up to date when you look into it.you can filter by different time ranges and filter by different, student groups as well.
So you might have a dashboard for different houses or,different, types of students, borders, international students, that sort of thing.and it just gives you like a really clear overview of how students are tracking and attendance. So I extend the date range a little bit. You can see the most unexcused absences.
So which students had missed the most classes and how many full absent days it had as well.you can see which students are the most hardy students. And this is a helpful one, especially in the day school environment, because it's an indication of, how long it takes them to get from the boarding house back to.
And if they're always showing up late, then there might be, an issue there.also which students have the most excused absences. So it just gives you a good high level of,which students who, might need a bit more attention. And you can also, see all this information on a per student level and, filter the information in different ways.
So if you wanted to see the students who had a low attendance rate, say less than 90%, then you can easily create a filter to see those students. And you can bring up the, specific records to see which classes they've been missing, which classes that they've been,taught y for, and things like that.
So it's a really good way to just keep a pulse on how students are tracking, once they've left the day school, the morning school to head to class.The other thing you can do is also set up alerts. So instead of having to check the dashboard, you can also create, alerts that would automatically trigger once a certain criteria has been met.
so we can say students and you're able to filter down to most student groups. So you can say particular houses or particular student types. So let's just choose one else, for example, are tidy, excused, abstinence, unexcused. Or any course three times in total within two weeks. So that's the criteria.
And as you can see, it's quite customizable. There's a lot of different ways that you can target different student groups for different situations. And then you can send the alert to staff, contacts, like parents or guardians and students themselves. So under staff, you can say specific staff. So in the case of Adderall, maybe it's just the dorm parents or the head of boarding for that house.
you could also do assigned students. So that's students who are connected.I'm sorry, assigned staff. So that's staff members who are connected to that student, either through their academic classes. Or through their houses. And you can also do start by user roles. So you could set up user roles in the admin view.
And you could have say, like an advisor or dorm parent for example. and it would be based onthe roles that are connected to specific students. So it could be advisors for Abbott House for example, that would.be the ones who, receive the notification. So there's a lot of customization that you can, do here.
And, you'd also get a view of all the alerts that have been triggered. And that's just an easy way to just have a record of, yeah, what's been sent out and to who, and also which classes, met that criteria.yeah, so those are the two ways that you can keep a pulse on how students are tracking from an attendance point of view.
You've got the dashboard and then you've got those alerts and, all of this will work automatically, as soon as you've enabled the Blackbaud Ender across integration.
Tiago Penteado: Yeah. Awesome. I think one thing I'd add there too, Kurt, is, the ability to filter down the dashboard and save your view as well.
So particularly for boarding stuff, you can save your student view. So if you just want to look at boarding school students, you can save that and then just reference back to that anytime you want.
Kurt Meyer: Yeah, absolutely. So I can filter down to just my borders, and I can set a default range for, say, last 30 days, for example.
And I can save that to the new view, and we'll call that borders. And so now this view will always be here, ready to go. So whenever I click on it, it automatically filters to borders with that date range. So you could have one of these set up for each house or, different cohorts that you want to keep an eye on.
You could use tags as well. So if there's like a tagging system to monitor students, more closely, you can tag those students to,specific tag and only those students will be visible on the dashboard. so yeah, there's a lot of ways to customize it so that you can just.have eyes on the right students.
Awesome. And so the third and final area that I wanted to cover is how to keep track of who is at school versus who is not. who's in the dorms. And so this is really core to how Orah works is really knowing where your students are. but I just wanted to talk through a few examples of best practices of how you might configure Orah, to achieve that, to keep track of students at both the day and boarding environments.
I'm gonna head over to admin console and go to the location manager. So you can customize slides. Your locations, however makes sense for your school.but typically having, what we call a zone, which is like a group of specific locations, having a zone for campus, the boarding campus and the day campus as two separate zones is, best practice.
so within the boarding campus, I've just got dining hall and dorms, but you might have more specific locations, like your individual. Houses or dorms and things like that. And in the day campus, there could be a number of different, locations. It's not due to my account, so we have quite a few, you've got your house center, your gym, in class, which I think is a good standard one to have.
And then any other locations you might want to keep track of, within the day house.it's also good to have one for home and then off campus. So whenever they're, Neither in the day or the boarding campus, but they're still under your sort of, your care, but they've just gone somewhere out in the world and just knowing how bad that is.
What this, zone would be for. so generally those are the good, the best, zones to set up. And, in a typical day, what you might want to see is that when students leave the boarding house to go to school, that they, update their location that they left the boarding house and they're going to school.
so within the day campus zone, you can pick a location, let's just say in class for example, There's a few options you have around the check in methods. so it can be initiated by a staff member, through the student app, or the NFC checkpoints.for those of you who aren't aware, the NFC checkpoints are these little tiles that you can stick to.
Different locations in your school and the student would walk up to those and tap it with their phone to check into that location. but you can actually set the NFCs up for arriving. And departing.so it might be that a student scans it in the boarding house when they're departing, and it asks them to check into the day school, and then when they arrive back, we'll turn this one on here, Sorry, in the day house, you'd have the arriving option turned on.
So when they come back, then they'll scan it to return.most, yeah, quite often we see the, kiosk checkpoint app being used, which is a separate iPad app.so you could set that up as a kiosk at the,main entrance of the boarding house, and students would go up to that and just, Check out to, in class or,day school when they leave the dorms.
so there is a, there's a few ways to slice and dice this depending on, how your processes work. And, we'd love to work with you if there's, yeah, anything that you'd. like us to help with or try to figure out in terms of how this might work in your environment. But I think typically just having a kiosk where students walk up and check into the day school is the most straightforward approach.
and so on the other side of that, you'd also have The boarding campus and say dorms, so you can enable the dorms to be checked in either by a staff member or again by kiosk when they return.and so once you've set up those two main locations. then you'll have a way to just get an overview of where students are in real time.
So our location overview page gives a summary of which locations students are currently taken to and which active classes they have and you'll also be able to visualize that. on a map view. So throughout the day you'll get an up to date understanding of,which students are checked into different locations, and most of the time it's probably going to be, are they in the boarding house or are they in the day school and have they returned on time?
Have they left on time? as the people who are here, do they have a sick pass or a day off? Aborting absence pass, like we mentioned before, assigned to them. And if they don't, then you know, why are they still check them? And that might be something that you need to follow up on.so we have this, table view here where you can see all the studentsand where they were last checked into.
So we can see these students were last checked into in class. you can sort this by check in time as well. So if you're at like 3 or 4 p. m. or 4 or 5 p. m. and you still have students in the day campus. And they, checked in at the start of the day and that might be something to follow up on. And you can also see if they have a pass assigned as well.
So as I mentioned, if they're still at the dorms, but they don't have a pass. then they're probably not supposed to be there or there might just be something worth following up on. So this just helps you keep eyes on, who's here right now and if they're not, where are they and who should be followed up on.
So yeah, there's a lot of different ways you can configure Orah to support your school and we'd love to work with any of you to help improve that and streamline things if there's any. questions or concerns that you have, but that's, those are the main three areas that we, typically see where Orah can help bridge that, that gap in communication and understanding between where students are across the day and boarding environments.
so hopefully this was useful for everyone and,if you'd like to get in touch with us and, set up a session to do a deeper dive, then we'd love to hear from you. You can email me at curr. Orah. com or simply respond to the follow up email that you get, post registering to this webinar.
Tiago Penteado: Yeah, awesome. I do have a question too, Kurt, from Art. so he mentioned that, the Blackbaud integration is missing the school level info or division info. So them as a K-12 school in the U. S., they use it for the upper school.And he said there's a grade filter in the integration of students, but school level field is blank at the moment.
then the question is, will school level field be enabled in the future for students and groups?
Kurt Meyer: So you want to be able to filter between upper and lower middle schools.
Tiago Penteado: Yeah. generally when it
Kurt Meyer: comes to integrations, if it's possible, then we're open to it. It does seem like Blackbaud and, some of these bigger SISs that school level would be available. We have done it for a different system in Australia, where we sync over the school level.we, and I'm pretty sure we do have a few for school level as well that we'vecreated.
Tiago Penteado: Yeah, what, this sounds a little bit to me, it could be a configuration issue as well. so what I'll do as well, I'll, follow up with you and your success manager after this as well, to see if we can get the result.
Kurt Meyer: Yeah, it could be. but we do have the concept of a school level.
And, yeah, with the different SIS, we've been able to sync that over. So if it is available within Blackbaud, it should be something that we can do as well. And, the way that would work is that you'd create this, you'd create a smart tag that looks for that school level and automatically tag students into those groups.
so yeah, that's how I think we could approach it from the top of my head. All right. Yeah, we'll be keen to work with you more on that.
Tiago Penteado: Yeah, perfect.I did have just a final question for you, Kurt. for everyone here, if they had to take away one thing from this webinar today, specifically for boarding school staff, what would you want them to take away?
Kurt Meyer: I'd say if you don't already have the integration set up with Blackbaud or Veracross, then that is a, I'd highly recommend doing that. just for those two things. Automatically excusing students from class. And then being able to visualize your attendance data on the dashboard and get those automatic alerts.
it's a very straightforward thing to do. Once you've enabled the integrations, then that can streamline a whole bunch of processes. yeah, that's what I'd say. Get the integration enabled and, have those parts in syncing and make use of the dashboard.
Tiago Penteado: Very cool.final call for questions if anyone's got any. Otherwise, yeah, I think that's all we've got.
Kurt Meyer: Yep, that's all from me. yeah, thanks so much everyone for joining in and, yeah, look forward to hearing from you soon. And yeah, thanks for, fielding the questions Tiago and can leave it there.
Tiago Penteado: Awesome. Thank you very much for joining everyone. All
Kurt Meyer: right. Thanks everyone.
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