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Ronan Quirke: The great thing about working in education is, people are generally very punctual, and attending the webinars. So I can see lots of people jumping straight in on the hour. So welcome, everybody.
My name is Ronan. I'm going to be your host today. And, we are gonna be talking to, Sarah from Ridley College, about their journey reducing risk, with Orah. I guess the great thing about, Orah is that we, have customers right around the world.
although I have an Irish accent, I'm based, here in New Zealand at the capital city, Wellington. but we have customers, right across the globe. The globe really, which means that we get to hear about everybody's, I guess specific needs in terms of their location, legislation and things like that.
And their global needs as well, which kind of, you know, which is what we build upon. yeah, since we've been going since 2015, so just coming up on our 10 year anniversary this year. so I guess we've got lots of experience, but we're always learning like everybody else as well. And certainly things have changed over the last 10 years as well.
in education and how things are working as well. and yeah, just to recap. So the fundamental, is, student care for us, and attendance and communications are just part of that, overall student care ethos, but that's how we see these three different pillars, working together.
Any given school at one point in time, we're focusing on one over the other, or they have an overarching strategy that these fit into as well. And that's probably something we'll talk about, with, with Sarah as well, or, the supervised product, which is our attendance product.
Really, it's not so much about taking roles. It is about knowing where your students are in real time, because that's effectively, if you knew that, then you can, you will have taken the role. But more importantly, you'll know exactly where your students are, whether they are where they need to be, or whether they're somewhere else.
Are there somewhere else? And that's where they need to be. because they can't be in class as well. So yeah, just, bringing that into, the modern age is, a pretty key part of what we're trying to achieve. without further ado, I want to introduce, Sarah and we'll have a sort of a, just a conversation.
About, Ridley College's, journey, and what, they've been thinking about, what brought them to Orah and the sorts of challenges that they're trying to experience as well. so as we get this conversation going, hopefully it'll spark some questions, from the audience as well.
Please do feel free to, ask a question. I'll pepper them in as we go and just trying to make sure that it's a good conversation, as well. That's me talking for the last five minutes. Sarah, maybe you'd like to introduce yourself and just tell us a little bit about yourself and Ridley College.
Sarah Steele: Sure. So my name is Sarah Steele. I am one of the deans of student life here at Ridley College. I also help track attendance and monitor attendance here. In addition to that, I also am a head of house or one of our house parents here at the school. So holding two hats and really being able to see and, use or in both capacities, gives me a, unique, light into, into how it can be used.
Ridley College is a international boarding school. Of approximately 600 students, from, lower to middle to upper school, we, range from J K up to grade 12 with our boarding starting in grade five and six, and our boarding and day population is, maybe about 75, 25, somewhere around there.
So we do offer both boarding and day opportunities for our students. We are also a co ed school trying to. Just give you some context with regards to a size and scope of the student population that we are dealing with
this year. We've just recently over the past year started our journey with or attendance and are excited to share experiences.
Ronan Quirke: Yeah, thank you. And, it sounds like it's a kind of a typical day at the school. You're mentioning earlier there's a snowstorm coming. So you've got all that chaos to deal with as well.
Sarah Steele: Yes. Yes. Welcome to Canada where the weather is unpredictable and we have an incoming snowstorm as well as we're heading into a bit of a break here. So keeping track of students and students whereabouts is key at the moment for sure.
Ronan Quirke: Yeah, now I'm a little bit surprised because normally when I'm talking to a school and they've got a snowstorm coming in, normally people are running around looking panicked.
and, is that just because, Ridley College is well used to snowstorms or you feel like you've got your processes down a little bit in terms of handling that the early levers and things like that.
Sarah Steele: I would say that, I think that. We've got lots of helping hands on deck, with regards to individuals that are dealing with, different, at different stages with students leaving, or preparing the campus, or things like that, so things may look calm behind me right now, but rest assured those individuals are hard at work, making sure everyone is where they need to be and, really tracking all of that, has, yeah.
Ronan Quirke: Yeah, and I guess that's a good example of. The sorts of things that we, we're here to talk about today is that those situations where you really need to, understand where students are, circumstances change. so you mentioned you, you're on your journey with, or maybe you can tell us a little bit about what prompted you to start that journey?
what was the, trigger point in the school about what needed to change or where you felt there were gaps in your current systems?
Sarah Steele: I think for us, we were currently using two different platforms, one really for our day school population and taking attendance for classrooms there and the other one, more for our boarding, we had implemented or early on for boarding, but not necessarily our day population and, as we continue to examine that a little bit more, we saw, Gaps in communication, gaps in data collection, and, and so just using all these different platforms really saying, you know what, Orah can do all of these things.
Why are we not using Orah? for both, our day and our boarding component to organize school field trips and sports attendance and all these extra things. And so that's really what led us down that journey. And really, I think the. Attendance insights was key as well, giving us the data to be able to help our students proactively, prevent maybe future absences or have more restorative conversations with students around their attendance.
Ronan Quirke: Yeah. so it was, did you feel like the school had a sort of, had an absence or, engagement problem with attendance? Or was it more just the disparate systems and you felt like there were, you didn't know what you didn't know?
Sarah Steele: I would say that maybe there was, lack of communication between the two systems.
in addition to that, with regards to timeliness and accuracy, for example, Parents might call in to our attendance secretary or might send an email in, and that would just take a little bit of time for her to put it into the actual attendance platform, for teachers be able to see that a student was absent, excused.
Meanwhile, that teacher may have already taken attendance and a notification would have already gone home to parents saying that your child is absent and the parents going. But wait, I called or I emailed and, I thought I did the right thing. So just the accuracy and timeliness around that, as well as, with connecting it with our boarding, if a parent had excused a student, maybe early for a leave, like today, where they might be going home early because of the snowstorm, that would have been done through Or, on the boarding component, but that didn't get communicated to our day, day student in our day school.
So that was that area of communication.
Ronan Quirke: Yeah, got it. So you had little pockets of one part knew that, Johnny was going home early for the weekend, but the day school didn't know that. And then they're chasing each other, creates work for everybody. Never a good look as well when you, for the, families, if they feel like they, that one part of the school doesn't, isn't talking to you the as well, right?
Sarah Steele: Yeah.
Ronan Quirke: so was it, was it difficult to change your systems because. I guess that there's always a bit of inertia there. everybody's used to using a system. They might not love it, but, was it, or was everybody very open minded to just trying something new?
Sarah Steele: I'm going to say that you're probably going to always have some individuals who are a little bit hesitant to change, we are all maybe a little bit hesitant to change, but the, transition process I think has been fairly smooth, with regards to that, we were fortunate enough that we had been using it in our boarding, school, and so those individuals were pretty well versed in it.
the use of Orah, so moving it to our day population was a little bit easier there. We did start out small, with a, smaller kind of trial group, hand selected them so that there were, Individuals maybe in each department or division that could then act as leaders within their area to help teach others.
So really doing it through a peer mentoring type, approach, and I think the other generations Part that is really made this easy. And I think successful for us is, actually the support that Orah has provided. anytime I had a question or something like that, I always felt that there was someone that I could reach out to and say, this just isn't working right for us.
Or, how can we change this? And someone was Pretty quick to get back to me with, okay, we can turn on this feature. And I was like, wow, this is, that's perfect. That's exactly what we needed. And we're able to make those changes and adjustments on the fly. so the, level of support that, Orah provided has really helped make the transition smooth, for sure.
Ronan Quirke: yeah, I think that what you mentioned about the pilot, I think that's always a good way to get things going, because I guess, no matter how good the software is, and no matter how good the school is, you will be doing things a bit differently in the past, and maybe it might work for a new system. so even if everything goes really well, there's always going to be a few issues just trying to work out has what's the best way to.
To bring it in, in terms of the process and taking attendance, have you noticed anything different about how attendance is being recorded? It's being like faster, slower, same.
Sarah Steele: I would say that I think our attendance is more accurate now, because of the passes and the excuses are live, they're up to date, they're immediate, so our, I would say it's our timeliness that has really improved, as I had previously mentioned, as soon as a student was marked absent before.
A notification went home to parents immediately, which at times could be very, could cause panic within parents when in fact, maybe that student was just late for class, or, in some cases they were at another appointment or in a meeting with another teacher, but because we didn't have the method to communicate those things, they had been marked absent.
So in through the transition with Orah, it has allowed us better accuracy that way. And then also being able to use the attendance alerts, we've been able to delay the response and notifications to parents. You can do this kind of by the end of the day or after so many different offenses, but that has I think also helped relieve a little pressure for the students who also would be panicked that they might not be to class on time, but also to the parents so that we're not inaccurately Making them aware of something that.
That was maybe just a late or something like that.
Ronan Quirke: Yeah. Yes. Got it. So you've got the alerts configured to to not trigger instantly, but a little bit afterwards with gives a chance to if a pass wasn't applied, then you things can catch up because that's the danger in real time. Real time is fine.
If everything is perfectly accurate, 100 percent but yeah. Very rarely is a bunch of humans arriving to the same location, perfect situation. okay, so you've got those alerts set up in the morning. Do you also have alerts to go internal as well to notify staff of issues?
Sarah Steele: We do. So we have, we have alerts that will notificate, notify myself.
as one of the deans of students who will then help track attendance, to help identify different trends, which will then trigger me to have a conversation with those students and really find out maybe why we're trending in a specific direction. as well as notify some of our boarding staff that a student hasn't maybe arrived to class, as well as help them identify trends, which has allowed us really to help with, health and mental health and hygiene and all that.
if a student is maybe really struggling to get up for first period, what are their evening routines look like, how can we help the student, so that they can improve their attendance and just classroom presence. .
Ronan Quirke: Yeah. Do you, you finding the, punctuality, the late attendees, do you as a school feel that's like a precursor for problems ahead and trying to use that data a bit more?
Or how do you folks think about that?
Sarah Steele: Absolutely, so that's part of, part of my job is to really look at these attendance trends and identify why we're trending in that direction. In some cases, it has helped us identify, student well being concerns, sleep. sleep, hygiene and routines, and, really help set up, better routines for those individuals, whether it's evening routines, morning routines, sometimes we've also helped track trends, looking at grade levels, are there certain grade levels right now that seem to Missing specific classes.
Are there specific classes that students are missing? And then really asking yourselves, why is the attendance so poor in class A compared to class B? Or why are the, are the grade 12s trending in a lower direction right now? is it the time of year? Is there a certain assessment?
How is their well being? So it's allowed us to have those conversations around well being by using that data, that ORA provides.
Ronan Quirke: Key to talk about practically how does that work? so you've got the insights attendance insights dashboard. is there a group of you looking at that? Are you just jumping in and getting the good nuggets of information and then disseminating that? And what's working well?
Sarah Steele: Yeah. so prior to using Orah, we were using, another platform just to gather all of this information and data and, it was a platform that was fairly expensive and provided limited access and use. So there were maybe one or two people who could only access or use that, which would be myself and our attendance manager.
now through the use of Orah. We can have all of our boarding staff, all of our advisors be able to have access to this attendance information for their advisees or for the students within their, circle of care really, so that they can also see these trends. it is within my role here at the school to, to sit down and have conversations with those individuals who might be trending in a specific direction and really Look at that data and, look at, how we can help support these students, but just being able to allow other support members access to it has allowed them to also have conversations and support those students
Ronan Quirke: also.
Okay, great. So to share with all the relevant staff, but then. The specialists who are responsible for ensuring that then you're obviously taking extra care and attention and you're making sure that things are followed through. yeah, I think that's useful because I've from some of the schools I've spoken to.
Sometimes they're a little bit reluctant to share the insights with everybody. They're worried. It's going to generate a lot of questions and back and forth, but. Obviously you've taken a more open approach makes sense when you say but was there a little bit of a period of when people were confused why is it showing this or that or it was maybe that's just a thing in our heads and what didn't really happen.
Sarah Steele: I think given the way that our kind of our school is set up with regards to we have our house units and we have our advisory units and we all have students that are under our care and our circle of care that, being able to have access to that information, I don't think was overly surprising as we do take such care of those individuals within our school.
Our circle of care. So for our house parents or heads of house or advisors to be able to see that, I think just they were almost happy to be able to have that data because they felt that they could better support their students, in doing so we didn't give them access to all students, but only the students within their care.
Ronan Quirke: Got it. Yeah. Perfect. and I guess a lot of the time, the names don't really surprise you, I guess when you see them in the reports, but I guess it's just good to have everybody having that shared visibility of it. And I guess there's always a chance that there is somebody that you didn't expect to see on, a list as well.
And that's, the important.
Sarah Steele: Absolutely. And, when you see an individual on that list that you don't normally see, whether you're a house, a head of house or an advisor, That's that great opportunity to have that conversation and say, Hey, I noticed you've been missing a lot of class lately, do you want to sit down and talk about it?
And you might find out that there are social dynamics or family situations that are happening that are influencing that. And that's where we can start to provide those supports for that student.
Ronan Quirke: Yes. we, also chatted, came to talk about some of the areas. that you're finding useful as well.
We've chatted just before the webinar started about location tracking. can you maybe tell us a little bit about how you're using the location tracking in Orah?
Sarah Steele: Yeah. under the attendance feature, one of them is a location overview. And, In each of our buildings, we have a device where students can tap into to say that they're within that building and for other safety reasons in case of emergencies.
That's also extremely helpful. If there was a fire or a lockdown or something like that, but. One of the added bonuses that we found out about this that we weren't really anticipating was through the location overview, we were able to identify how many students were accessing a specific space at a certain time, and through that data, we were able to identify that we were staffing supervisors in a building that wasn't really being utilized very much by students at a specific time, and we weren't staffing another building as much as we could have been Where we saw, using the location overview, the number of students increasing the use of that space.
So we were able to reallocate our staff to, to buildings where students were using the space more frequently, which is ultimately providing better supervision in those spaces at that time.
Ronan Quirke: Yeah, perfect. and is that Is it mostly the boarding team that are looking at that for after school or is it during school hours as well?
Sarah Steele: most of that happens outside of academic hours during the academic hours. Those buildings are all staffed with faculty or staff. supervision wasn't a concern at that time. But once that staff goes home in the evening, then we bring in our evening staff and which is not as many as our, teaching staff.
so making sure that supervision was, properly, allocated, using those resources effectively and efficiently, really.
Ronan Quirke: do you feel like the, those checkpoints? Or a good balance between what school some schools would love is being able to have a GPS chip on every kid versus obviously probably students and all of the parents would obviously concerns about that.
But, would you as a school like to take it further? Do you feel like That's that's about where you like it in terms of more accurate tracking.
Sarah Steele: I think right now that's where our school and our student population is comfortable. We've had conversations with our student population saying, how would you feel if you know if we turn this on.
How would you feel if it was your choice, if you turned it on and you could turn it off? and I think right now they're quite comfortable just tapping into a building when they're there. They understand the safety measures around it, how it helps us in case of an emergency, to know who is in what building to ensure safety.
so that's where we're, where we feel comfortable at here.
Ronan Quirke: Yes. Yeah, I guess it passed that. I guess it's very much and what we find anyways, it's very much an individual choice of the school as to where they want to go with that. Because as we've had some schools who would love to have real time location tracking built into the app and others want assurances that it isn't there.
So I guess every school is trying to navigate what's appropriate. And then you've got the added complexities of device policies. Hi. What's appropriate there as well. So it's, I guess it's a murky area, but the checkpoints are, I think a reasonable compromise for now. yeah. What about, do you, get would parents like to know that kind of information as to, where the, where students are, particularly the boarders are, do you feel like they're happy to just know that they're checked in at night and they're, where they need to be at the key, times.
Sarah Steele: I believe we do have it turned on so our parents can see the passes that students are requesting, so that a parent could see, how many times their, child is asking you to go to the movies or off campus or situations like that. I think for some of our parents, they enjoy that feature.
And some of their parents, have trust within the school that, we understand where their child is and are ensuring that their safety. Is
Ronan Quirke: there anything that as a school you'd love to wave a magic wand at in terms of student safety and solve that problem, in terms of how everything's working right now?
Sarah Steele: I haven't given thought to that. I can't think of anything at this moment. You definitely put me in the hot seat.
Ronan Quirke: I did. Apologies. Yeah, I just thought of it as we're talking about it in terms of that. So, really, I guess where you're in at the moment is, this is. almost, yeah, pretty much halfway to the academic year, if not a little bit further, along this year is always all about, just continue to bed down what you've already got, would you looking forward to next year?
Are you going to be changing or rolling out anymore? Or what's your plans? Or do you just want to take a breather after you've achieved so much?
Sarah Steele: I think that we're continuing to always explore the new features that Orah has to offer. we've just, just recently started to explore some of the workflow features that are offered in Orah.
as well as the use of forms. so those are two new avenues that we're currently exploring. so hopefully, hoping just to expand that, into next year and really for me, and I think for the school, it's about really simplifying the process for both students. And for parents and for staff and faculty who are responsible for tracking and ensuring the safety of these students.
so just really looking at how we can do that through Orah. many of our forums have recently lived separate. And so students will often ask, where can I get this permission form or where can I get this permission form? So we've just started to move those onto Orah and just really saying everything you need is right here.
Ronan Quirke: Awesome. Yeah, so just continuing to roll that out and that random permission form that sits over there just bring that in and just keep working through that journey of bringing as much as possible in there. So you've got it all Tied together. I would just then thinking about, I think I keep getting distracted and just listening to you and actually really enjoying your story.
I think you're forgetting about my next question. And I think the audience is too, because I haven't seen any questions come in yet. Although I'm sure there is some. So please do pop a question in the chat. but maybe to prompt that, if you. Had some advice for other schools who are just, say they didn't even use or at all.
what would your advice be in terms of where they should start thinking about this or going about it?
Sarah Steele: I would say if they're currently not using Orah, definitely start exploring some of those videos that you guys have on your website that really highlight some of the key features that, that Orah offers and looking at how that might be of service to their particular school.
I think that's where I started my learning journey and I was able to say, Hey, look, we can do all of these things and That, we're having troubles with communication, timeliness, and we can do that in Orah. And so that's, I think, what really initiated, our journey. So starting with just that exploration on the website and through some of the, webinars that you offer.
And then second, I would say, start with a small pilot group, of individuals that, comfortable and maybe willing to take that risk in that plunge and, and, really working out how this is going to best suit your school. Don't try to do it all at once. easier way into it, maybe pick something, whether it's classroom attendance is maybe where you start and then you start to move into passes and, field trips and, locations and all of that.
but maybe start with one thing and then start to build off of that. And, other than that, I would say, just do it. I think I've, I felt really well supported in our journey, through it. With Orah and, and so for us taking that extra really plunge into the deep end of moving everything on to online through Orah has been a, actually fairly easy journey because of the support that we've received.
Ronan Quirke: Awesome. Yeah, that's great to hear. I think it's also great to hear, though, I think. You it sounds like there's a bit of a and quite an open mindset to to incrementally building the solution. I think sometimes schools feel like they need to have it already on day one. but it sounds You and I think, just to drill into this probably important is that it would have been a little bit messy when you were rolling it out initially, because you weren't doing everything right. So I think that's probably important to acknowledge is that it wouldn't have been perfect when you were doing that step by step.
Sarah Steele: Absolutely. And I think that's, We, really did. We started off small. We started just in our boarding environment, if I think back to when our journey first started. And there were a couple of troubleshooting things where we go, Oh, we used to do that this way. How can we now do this through Orah?
and getting that small subset of individuals on board through using it. And then even With regards to our classroom attendance, again, we started small, with a trial group of teachers who were trialing it and were able to identify, okay, this isn't necessarily maybe communicating to that or how is this record going to be kept for our ministry inspections that we have to be able to do and we're going to have an evaluation.
Where is this data being held so we can pull it when we need to pull it if we're being asked to? so just all those little learning, opportunities along the way. And again, starting small, with a small group and then slowly building on that.
Ronan Quirke: Okay, perfect. I have one question here. were parents consulted in the rollout?
Sarah Steele: so going back, each year, we send a notification to our parents, at the beginning of every school year, letting them know that we do use Orah, and the reasons why we use Orah for safety and accountability for our students. So in that sense, we, let our parents know that this is a part of how we help, ensure that the safety and accountability of their students and then, but with regards to asking for their approval to use it, I'm trying to think back of when we first started, using it.
I don't think we did because we're not necessarily tracking. We don't have any, GPS or anything like that turned on the student's phone. It really is, up to the student, by their choice to be, tapping into the different locations, to identify that.
Ronan Quirke: And it's really, you're not changing school policy.
You're just using a tool to better, align to school policy, and then the only real change from a, parent's perspective that is maybe the process to report absences would have changed.
Sarah Steele: yes. so that, that would have changed. and we're still in the process of educating our parents on how to do that.
Ronan Quirke: yes. As, a parent, I'm gonna hold my hand up and say, I don't always read. Everything in the school newsletter about how to follow those processes. so yes, I can, empathize that maybe parents aren't always amazing at following, instructions, but they get there in the end. And I guess, certainly from my perspective, I'm always going to choose the easiest option.
so I guess if we, if we, if we make sure that we're providing the easiest option, hopefully that will be good, if you can jump on, if kid is sick at 6am, and you can use the link to report the absence rather than waiting for the office to open at 8am when you've forgotten about calling, then that's probably, yeah, you might find that you get a lot more absence requests at weird times than you used to.
Sarah Steele: I think also it falls into habit, some of our parents who've been a part of our community for a longer period of time understand our older system of calling or emailing our attendant secretary. And so that's just habit built into them, where some of our newer parents are a little bit quicker to adapt to the new process, because this is just how it's been for them.
Ronan Quirke: Yes, I've just got another question in here, and it relates to. School information systems. Now, I believe it's blackboard that you use as your S. I. S. isn't it? Sarah? yeah. and we've got a question here about using or in tandem with other school operating systems, how do they work together?
In your case, schedule is all set in Blackboard, or at least that's where we get the school schedule from, and then we replicate that into Orah, so all the teachers classes are there and all the students are in there, and when attendance records are taken, then we're writing them back to Blackboard as well, so you're still treating Blackboard as your kind of, your And a set of attendance records.
And so that's where you'd be doing your, you mentioned the ministry inspection. So that's, where they would be getting the data from.
Sarah Steele: Yeah, absolutely. And I think the best way I've, tried to explain it to maybe some of our staff and faculty is that. I think of black bod as like our filing cabinet.
it's that kind of old clunky system where you're shuffling through papers and a million different links trying to find information where or is our daily platform that we're currently using. So currently. and then it does pull the information from BlackBaud where it's all uploaded and the back end in that old filing cabinet, and then puts it into Orah, which is this beautiful, nice platform to be able to use and navigate from, where our attendance, and our teachers are taking attendance and, identifying different pastoral notes and things like that, and then that attendance is then communicated back to BlackBaud, and I would say that, The communication between the two is almost instantaneous.
we really haven't had, there's not a delay that we've experienced with other programs in the past. it really does happen almost instantaneously. So you still have all those files and records. kept aside, but you've got Orah and it's, Platform and it's, Attendance Insights which offer beautiful graphs and charts and, things like that to help you understand that data a little bit better, where BlackBond just houses all of the information.
Ronan Quirke: and, shout out to Ben, who must have been joining us quite early in Australia where it's 7am. thank you, Ben. And you had a question, Ben, about TAS, which is an Australian School Information System. I'll just quickly explain a slight difference for TAS, Ben, is that we read the schedule and we read all the things that we talked about from TAS as well.
Test doesn't support us to writing back the attendance records though. So what we do in that case is actually a file export that you do. And so you would probably I think schools are normally doing that like once a term or a couple of times a term. But sit back in the filing cabinet, not in real time, you do, really, Sarah, but it's that's the solution for some other school information systems where we aren't able to send the attendance data back in real time by API, but.
If you're using Orah for all the alerts and dashboards and everything for what I think about is the day to day stuff, which I think is how you're using it at the moment anyway, that shouldn't be a be an issue so long as it does go back whenever you need to do reporting and whatever else that sort of.
Sarah Steele: Yeah, I can't really speak too much about tasks because I'm not familiar with that, but I can say even on a daily basis, I still really default to the Orah platform and the attendance insights to gather my data with regards to if a student is marked absent and, for a daily, even for a monthly call to be able to see.
how many times has a student been marked absent from a particular class within a month, or how many times have they been late to a particular class, or how many leaves have they taken from the school in a certain period of time, I still default to Orah to be able to do that, because our current platform, Blackbaud, without just going through individual, attendance dates, doesn't offer that, Kind of correlation of information.
Ronan Quirke: Yes. Was there because this comes up sometimes when schools are rolling these things that was there a little bit of period of time when you're trying to compare both and just to make sure everything was working out and then the generally what I see is schools do that for a few weeks and then they get confident that everything is working.
Okay. And then they say, okay, we trust that it's being recorded.
Sarah Steele: Yep, so that was part of our trial program, where we ran two different platforms, as I previously mentioned, we had a select group of, individuals, one in each division so that they can then be leaders within their division to teach others how to use the Orah platform, who were able to identify some of those, obstacles or areas where we weren't quite sure if it was communicating back properly, And, so we've done that and, I will say that particular part of the journey can be a little bit bumpy because you are running two platforms at the same time, but really understanding how each platform works and understanding that once you fully integrate into Orah, that maybe some of those obstacles that you're having won't exist anymore because you're all, everyone in the school is on one platform.
Ronan Quirke: Yes, perfect. got time for one more question and, Art has asked a question. Hey, Art. or is the time based system of Blackboard is class based attendance? Have you had any issues with classes and attendance? I guess really, All we can do is, mark the class attendance in BlackBot for you, so you're probably going to have just a richer set of data on the Orah site, because it covers everything.
Is that kind of your experience, Sarah?
Sarah Steele: that's actually a, it's a really great question, because it came up this week, and I would say that it has its pros and cons, where BlackBot is a class based system and Orah is a time based system. A good example of that would be, we have students who are leaving maybe halfway through a class.
for a game or a sporting event. So rather than marking them absent from the whole class, they're excused at a specific time. And you can see that there is an upcoming pass for that particular student at a certain time. So they should be checking in with class and then leaving at a specific time. So that's one of the great features of it being a time based system.
One of the areas where we have found that maybe it hasn't been as effective is when a student has checked into a certain spot before they were supposed to. So for an example, is a student was to check in at our health center for their third period class. Class based, in Blackboard, that'd be fine because it's class based, but because they were just coming off of a lunch or something, they checked in a little bit early, and so then they were automatically signed out from their second session.
second period class in, Blackbaud, being at the health center. So I would say it has its pros and cons and just, identifying what that was and us understanding that, oh, it's because I was able to go in and say, oh, they've just checked into the health center because you can see the times, within Orah, which is nice.
they checked in a little bit early. They were in class, they just, they checked in a little bit early. So that's why it says that they were in the health center. They weren't actually there the whole time. So having those timestamps has helped us overcome that.
Ronan Quirke: Yes, yeah, I think that's fair. I guess what we're trying to do is reflect the reality that people are messy, they don't turn up exactly when they're supposed to, and they don't all arrive at the exact same time, the same place.
But I think it's good that we try to be more accurate, but I think it does mean that we need to be a lot, continue to work on the more sophistication around how we handle those situations, because, yeah, if it's, 1 minute before, that doesn't necessarily mean that they weren't in that class or they, so that I think, yeah, we just need to figure out how we handle those kind of some more of that sort of messiness a little bit better.
But I think, yeah, as you said, it is. Thanks. It's more realistic, than having these kind of just these blocks and say, I guess somebody was there or not.
Sarah Steele: Yeah, and again, having that timestamp really helped us identify that they were in class. They just checked into this location at this particular time.
Ronan Quirke: Yes, and one thing which is going to be coming out very soon is we're going to be adding a lot more history details to all those things just so you can see what happened. this got updated and then it was updated again because this happened and that sort of history and audit trail on rolls and passes is something that I know a lot of schools have been asking for just to try and try to piece that together a little bit more as well.
Awesome. All right. Thank you. Those are some really good questions at the end. I appreciate we're at time and everybody has a, busy, school day to finish, probably, or to start depending on where you are in the world. so thank you. So I think, even Though you are in snowy, Canada, I think there's lots of things that everybody could take from, from your experience, no matter where you are in the world.
So I appreciate you, you sharing that, especially, since you've been struggling through the cold as well, you did amazingly. Thank you so much. if anybody does have any questions, please just, drop them, to us, And we can have the link will be on embedded in this video. so just feel free to ask questions and, for the or a team can, answer them.
And, we appreciate your time, Sarah.
Sarah Steele: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.
Ronan Quirke: Thanks.
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