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: Okay, so we can get started. for those of you who don't know me, my name is Kurt. I'm one of the co founders of Orah and I look after the product team. And, We'll go around and do some introductions,we've got Ronan here as well, and I'll let Ronan, intro himself.
Ronan Quirke: Yeah. Hey, everybody, a frequent flyer, at these webinars, Ronan here.
I look after, I'm in the product team as well,basically, whatever Kurt doesn't look after, I look after in the product space, particularly around, integrations and the kind of the core, admin systems and processes, as well as our communications product. very much.
Kurt Meyer: Awesome. And a special, person on the call today, Matthew Varley, our new CEO.
So I want to give him a chance to introduce himself as well for those of you who haven't connected with him yet.
Matt Varley: Yeah. Thanks Kurt. And hi everyone. it's absolutely fantastic. And thanks for joining the call today. Super excited to meet you all throughout the webinar today. I joined last month, as the Orah CEO alongside Paul and Kurt.
the co founders of Orah and just super excited about where we're heading as an organization to increase the duty of care at schools. I thought we'd jump into A small kind of couple of slides, but we'd walk through a bit of the Orah backstory, just for those who are unfamiliar, with Orah.
I know we've got plenty of customers on the call today. and then just refresh about where we're positioned and where we're heading, from a vision standpoint. So Orah was founded in 2015. So we're coming up to the, 10 year anniversary of Orah and has over 300 Of the world's top schools across 20 countries using, the ORA platform to meet and exceed their duty of care, with many of those schools on this slide, joining us here today.
In terms of duty of care,what it means to us at ORA here is really ensuring that students are accounted for both physically and mentally. We aim to help schools create that secure and supportive environment through the technology platform that we provide to schools to increase that visibility and allow you to action the things that are the most important at your school.
And how we do that across the three pillars at Orah is really answering three really critical questions. The first one being, where are my students? So their physical location when it comes down to attendance. How are they? So the wellbeing of the students on your campus. And then that third question of how do we engage with them, through the communication platform.
Yeah, the combination of these three pillars is what we believe makes Orah, different and provides value to the schools that currently work with us. And we're super excited about coming together today to look at what's happened. Over the last 12 months, with the product and at Orah, and then having a bit of a look into the future as well with what's coming over the next 12 months.
So with that, I'll say thank you. I look forward to me meeting everyone in a more one to one environment over the next couple of months, and I'll pass back to Kurt. Thanks, Kurt.
Kurt Meyer: Awesome. Thanks so much, Matt.so yeah, today we're going to do a, a recap of some of the key. Releases that we've been working on this year across the three products, but, more so on the attendance side.
and as Matt said, we would also do a, preview as to what we'll be working on next year. came to do some demos of what's new as well. And what's coming down the line.we've also got a couple of spot prizes. So any, anyone who puts in a question will be,on the table to get a spot prize.
Ronan will be the judge in terms of who has the best question.
Ronan Quirke: Yep, I'm going to be keeping an eye on the questions. So yes, I don't, and hey, it could be the best question that you have. Don't feel under pressure to make it the best question possible. Just anything that's on your mind. Also,don't let Matt off too lightly, we know it's his first webinar, but if you've got a question for our new CEO, go ahead and feel free.
He can jump on and answer a question as well. so yeah, by all means, this is, our last webinar, of 2024. So we want to make it a, an enjoyable one. And the, what keeps us on our toes is you asking us some good questions. So yeah, shoot away.
Kurt Meyer: We've got the first question in already. Does Ronan take bribes for best question?
Ronan Quirke: I am partial to, Irish whiskey, but that's probably a little bit tricky to transport,via webinars, but, we could, we can figure something out, Jenny.
Kurt Meyer: Awesome. Awesome. All right. So let's get to it.wrap up of 2024.starting with Kinnik, over to you, Rennan.
Ronan Quirke: Yeah, if you're like me, early 2024 seems so five minutes ago and also five years ago. so it's hard to really To believe that this, was released, earlier than, quite early on in 2024.
It feels like it's been out for quite a while now, our Connect Communications product. so we were working on that sort of in late 2023, but it was in early 2024 that we released all the good stuff, around being able to directly, send messages to students. And creating groups as well, which was a big thing that we were being asked for as well.
so we, we've have now quite a few schools using this. we've been still getting some good feedback and we know there's more to be done in this space. But, particularly for schools who wanted to bring their communications. I guess inside, the, into the school kind of data realm and to rather than WhatsApp groups or messenger groups and things like that, then I think this has been really well received.
do appreciate your feedback on it. We know we've got more to do. there's never, Because it involves people and communications involves people that there's always more to do. There's only so much we could do in terms of making those communications perfect. But, yeah, I think there's definitely more we're getting in terms of requests around this.
But, it's been great to see what you're already doing and using with that. And we'd actually, if you do have some feedback on this, of course, you can get in touch. But we'd love to know also what's been working well, because sometimes we only hear,what you'd like us to do next, but, this time of year as well to motivate the development teams, it'd be great to hear if there's any success stories or anything that you're particularly finding good in terms of, the communications product.
And the, I guess the other aspect of this is the safety net that we were going back to what we talked about at the start around duty of care is the oversight capabilities that we wanted to build it from the start, which is in there as well, which is why. We wanted to develop this communications platform within Orah.
Yes, there's lots of, other tools, as I mentioned, that probably are better apps that you can use, but they don't give the school the ability to have a sense of what's going on, to be able to drill in and just make sure that everything is, that we have the appropriate level of, Oversight in terms of what communications are happening with your school, who's communicating how, and if you needed to go back and find out what was said, then that's available to you as well, which is really why we wanted to jump into this space.
It's around, how this communications kind Come into that whole duty of care piece. So again, I guess in this one, it's, as I said, it's a safety net. Hopefully you don't need to use it very often. but, we're quite glad that we were able to do this. in tandem with,building out the whole communications part, because, it's, the oversight piece,is something that was, is really quite fundamental to how we were thinking about communications.
And hopefully that's working for you. And again, love to know how this is, how weaving into,how you're managing things and how you're delivering that duty of care to your students. Is there more we could be doing? maybe, I can't promise it's going to be on the roadmap, but I don't know, maybe, As you come to the end of the school year, with the Southern Hemisphere, which is quite soon, or you're only halfway through almost in, in, U.
S. and the U. K., maybe thinking about how those communications fall into looking at back at the overall school year. if, If you're super keen on a wrapped version of the communications, maybe we can figure out a way to do that in the future as well. But yeah, we'd love to know what more we could be doing in terms of this reporting piece for communications as well.
Kurt Meyer: Awesome. And another key update that we did, This year for our nurture product is more advanced behavioral notes, as well as a browser extension. And the idea was that, we just wanted an easy way for faculty or members of staff to quickly capture behavioral or wellness information about a student.
And off the back of that, they can also have communications with other staff members. So you could save a note and tag in someone else. saying, FYI, this happened or, discussing next actions and things like that. So it really, creates a way to better collaborate with other staff members.
with regards to what's happening with students around behavior.and off the back of that, we also released our AI powered behavioral summaries. through, through capturing this information, these behavioral notes, you can automatically generate a written summary of all of the content within those notes.
And you can give the, the summary sort of a direction. So you can input a prompt to say, what you want the summary to be about, and then we'll, go through all of the records within that timeframe and generate the summary. You can tweak it and edit it. it will have references to all the, records that were used, and you can save that as a PDF and, or share via email, with other staff members.
it's just a really great way to,if you're jumping into a meeting with a student, or a parent, or,for any reason, you just need a quick digest and download about what's happening with the student. this is a great tool to do that instead of, what we heard previously. Schools were, going through the inbox and trying to build up a picture of what was happening, with a particular student.
Which could take hours, just going through past emails and things like that to, get a sense of What's been happening. Whereas this can happen immediately and you can spend most of your time just thinking about, How you're going to approach the conversation versus bringing together the information
so those there are a couple of key updates on the behavior side for a nurture product Now moving into our attendance and location product, we released a location overview dashboard, which gives a real time overview of where students are, right now. so that's organized into your different passes, so you can see which students are, excused or absent based on your passes, which students are on, events, and which students are checked into different locations and events.
whether on campus or off campus. So the locations can be updated based on passes as well. So if a student is staying home because they're sick or something like then the location would be home, or if students are checked into different buildings across campus. then you'd see them, checked into that building, on the map view.
and the next step for this, which we will be working on next year as well, is being able to check students into specific classrooms. Based on class attendance.so there won't be, there'll be a initial first time set up just to make sure the locations,have the right geo coordinates and things like that, but once that's set up, then as teachers are taking attendance for their various classes, then you'll see their, the student locations being updated in real time.
and that goes back to.that key question around,understanding where students are and class attendance is a massive, indicator, to understand if a student's at school, in class, missed a class or things like that. So really, Integrating locations and attendance, we think is a, it's a big opportunity that we've been working towards.
the other key area that we've been working on is the, our intended insights and alerts. and actually want to do a bit of a demo just to go through what we currently have and speak to some new additions that we've released.yeah, over the last week or so. so just jumping into my demo account.
So I'll start off with the main attendance dashboard.
so one of the key updates is that this dashboard is now, specific to the user that is viewing it. So you'll notice that it says all my students. So depending on the students that you assign to, faculty member or a staff member. they will only see those assigned students on this dashboard.students can be assigned by, their classes or by year labels or customizable tags, but, basically you'll only be able to see the data that is most relevant to you, when looking at this.
So a teacher could just be looking at only their classes. Or, a Dean could be looking at, a year level or a school level. so it just makes it much more relevant to whoever's looking at the dashboard.the other thing that we've introduced is this role completion rate.so this shows you that the percentage of.
role checks that were completed versus those that were not completed. and it gives you a good sense of, how well teachers are taking attendance. and also we'll show you on the right here, which teachers, haven't been taking attendance and a little bit of detail for which classes that the attendance was not taken for.
So it helps build the culture around taking attendance and gives, the administrators a way to, follow up on, on those frequent flyers who might not be taking attendance. And there's also automated reminders so that,teachers will be nudged automatically to take attendance, whether it's a specific five minutes into the lesson or after the lesson, that's customizable.
we've also included attendance days, and this is one of the areas that we're going to be building off as well, which I'll talk to later on, but um,it's, Instead of just class attendance, we'll also be providing insights and, capturing records around the students overall presence on a daily basis.
so whether or not they were at school for a particular day. so that's another layer of attendance that we're going to be building off.yeah, the other thing that we've recently added is the ability to Customize these dashboards. So if you create a new view, you're able to decide which widgets that you want to include or hide.
And so that just means that the dashboard can be a lot more targeted and relevant to whatever it is that you want to include. You want to capture on that view, you can save the timeframe and the filtered students as well within that view. So it just makes it a lot easier to, bring up the information that, that you most care about.
the next update that we just released, which I'm quite excited about is Insights, attendance insights for a individual student.so you can go to a student's profile now and you'll be able to see an attendance insights page for that student. And this will give you a breakdown of all of their attendance records and, some key metrics.
Like the attendance rate, the tardiness rate, excused absence rate, unexcused absence rate, within that time frame. and we'll also give you a breakdown of those metrics. On a per class level as well.so that just gives you a really quick overview of, where a student stands in terms of, attendance and versus,trying to piece it together before.
So now you can just, Zoom in on one individual student.
And going back to our Attendance Insights page, I wanted to talk also to some updates that we've made around Attendance Alerts. So under our Alert Settings, you can set up a new alert. Alerts can be sent to members of staff, contacts of students, or students themselves. And you can customize the wording for each alert, and you can apply additional filters onto these audiences as well.
So for staff members, for example, it could just be the course staff.it could be assigned staff, so staff members who are actually assigned to the student. Course staff means, say if a student was absent for maths, then the maths teacher would be the one that gets the alert. also by user role based on the user roles that you've set up.
So there's a lot of customization in terms of who gets these alerts. And you can also, set up the criteria to trigger their alert. it could be for any student or it could be for, a particular tag, which could be year levels or. Um,just any kind of customizable group, or you've also got your SIS groups here as well.
But if we said any student, you can choose the attendance categories. It would say absent unexcused, tardy unexcused, for any course or the same course. Let's say any course, three times in total or in a row, say in total within let's say one month. And so that's the criteria. You put in your messaging for each of those recipients.
And then you can also schedule when you want this alert to be sent. By default, it's immediately, which means as soon as that criteria has been met, the alerts will go out, but you can also schedule it as well. And often schools. Want a little bit of a buffer before the alerts are sent. they have time to make any corrections if there's any records that weren't up to date at the time the alert is sent out.
particularly for parent alerts, they might not want to alert a parent until,halfway through the day or towards the end of the day, where they know that they've had time to reconcile any, gaps in the records before alerting parents. So scheduling the alerts has been a key update that we've released as well.
and you can also see all of your alert history. So everything that's been generated and sent out is easily searchable. you can see what, which criteria triggered the alert, which specific records met that criteria, who was notified. Andyeah, you've got a complete history of those alerts as well.
So that, that's a quickfire overview of some of the improvements that we've been doing, for the insights and alerts. that's what you can see, but we've also been making a lot of changes, to the backend to make it more accurate and reliable. faster to reload. So we've been constantly refining it this year.
Ronan Quirke: Yes. Yeah. Including, increasing the frequency that, that we sync from, the, the, school information system, if you are still sourcing that. And there's a couple of questions I might just answer now. There's a few other questions that have been raised a while ago, but I was waiting for us to get through to the relevant topics before we.
Got into them, but, we do have a question about our attendance rates only pull from the school MIS, or it doesn't currently sync with our MIS for attendance, but we have roles set up for our boarders directly on Orah, but the insights are all showing zero percent. We'll just probably explain, there's, for the, attendance insights dashboard, Kurt,There's two ways that you can get that in there.
The first way is that if you're direct, if you're still taking attendance in your school information system like Blackboard or Veracross or Synergetic, we can connect to that and populate our attendance insights dashboard with that. And then the second way, though, Curtis, is that you're taking class attendance, within Orah itself, and that will populate that.
Try to create the, the attendance insights as well. but I guess there's maybe a little bit of, misunderstanding between class attendance and they, the older type of roles that, that schools could be taking at the moment. So to, to use attendance insights, You do need to be taking class attendance in Orah, so that will require an integration,if only to get the schedule in there, so either we're connecting into your MIS and you can, we can get the attendance data and bring that in directly, or we've connected to your MIS and we're getting your schedule in and you're taking your class attendance within Orah itself, those are the two ways that you can actually get the attendance insights working.
If we're not integrated, if you're not already integrated, it might be worthwhile just connecting with us just to find out whether or not we support your MIS for that. Yes. yeah.
Kurt Meyer: Yep. Yep. That, that, I don't think I have much to add to that. I'd say, yeah, that, that pretty much covers it. It's.it's up to you in terms of whether it's Orah based or based on your MIS for that, dashboard, but for our boarding customers, there is a difference between class attendance or academic attendance versus the,the boarding school type of attendance, which is more not based on a schedule or like an academic timetable.
It's just based on,checkpoints throughout the day.
Ronan Quirke: Here's another easy one. I'll let you answer this one, Kurt. Do you have a date as to when the features will be available to use? In terms of what we've just shown.
Kurt Meyer: Yep. These are all live, ready to go. What I've shown so far. So this is on our live account.
Ronan Quirke: Yes. So if you can't see these things in your account, then it's likely that we might not have enabled that product for your account, or perhaps as the other person asked, perhaps we don't have the integration set up so that you can actually use these. they're definitely available to use. It's just a question of are they on your account.
And is the integration set up for your account as well. So those are the two things to check if you're keen to use those features.
Perfect. Thanks, Kurt.
Kurt Meyer: Awesome. Yeah, thanks for that. Please keep putting through your questions. so aside from Attendance Insights, we also made some big improvements to, the accuracy of our attendance records. and we think this is something that no other company that works with attendance has been able to do to the same level.
But, we've updated our, how our business rules for how attendance is recorded. And so this is just a diagram of, a bunch of different scenarios. And in each of these scenarios, should a student be excused? Or unexcused. And what it comes down to is, if there's an excuse that overlaps with a class, then the student should be excused.
and we had to go through a bunch of different scenarios to just make sure that, that logic made sense in all those scenarios. And there were some edge cases, but we covered those as well. So we think we've got A pretty robust system now where, you can, students will be excused from classes as you would expect them to be based on the, the absences or excuses that you create.
one of the key, so that's on the back end, but one of the key, features that you would notice is that we introduced the concept of an actual start and end time. Um,within a POS.
Oh sorry, it's when I bring up this POS here. We can see the actual start time, actual end time, as well as the scheduled start time and the scheduled end time. And the actual start and end time, these are, fields which are captured automatically, but they can also be edited. and it's the actual start and end time that would excuse a student, from a class.
which means if there are any changes, So if a student, was actually present instead of absent, then you could update the actual start and end times to reflect that, and then that excuse will be removed from the student's attendance record.so the way that we'd set it up is that as long as the actual start and end time, matches reality, then the attendance records would be updated automatically to reflect that.
You
so that, that was a key update that we've made on the back end to make sure that our attendance records are as accurate as possible.
Ronan Quirke: Yeah, I think your kind of phrase reality, I think is a big thing there. What we've been trying to do is try to square the fact that, Life, especially school life, is very messy, and we know that, and we understand that things don't happen in beautifully sequenced, sequenced timings, everything, and it's not as well organized and as rigid as, a lot of software products are in terms of having quite simplistic approaches to these things.
What we've been trying to do, and a big shout out to Elsa on our team as well, who's been doing a huge amount of deep diving into thinking through all these different scenarios to try and be as flexible as possible to handle these things, because we know that You, in your school, you need to just roll with it and people are going to turn up late and they'll have, be out on one, on a medical pass.
And then all of a sudden they'll turn up, but then they'll have to leave again. All these different things happen in reality. And rather than having, a product that doesn't, that just can't handle that. We're trying to simplify the complexity for you, and handle all these different cases, which I think is, yeah, is what, when you talked about, Kurt, in terms of what we're trying to do differently here is to not be, to give you a simple solution that doesn't reflect reality.
give you a complicated solution or an advanced solution but make it simple for you in the end in terms of how it actually shows up. So hopefully we're doing that and we're still trying to make sure that we handle all these different scenarios and we know we're getting still some good feedback in terms of more thinking to do but yeah.
Kurt Meyer: Yeah, absolutely. the scenario that comes to mind, and there's plenty of different ones, but, I think one of the classic ones is a parent forgets to put in their excuse and the student doesn't show up. And everyone's marking them as absent throughout the day, but maybe the parent gets a reminder or they remember towards the end of the day or even after, after the school day ends.
and then that excuse is re inputted into the system. You want that to override all of the past records and the system, will allow that and you're able to edit those time frames as well.so those real life. cases, we think, this approach helps us handle in a much better way.
Veracross Inspection.
Ronan Quirke: You want to
Kurt Meyer: talk to that, Raymond?
Ronan Quirke: Yes, that's something that we did have a,already syncing the kind of the core student data. When I say core student data, students and contacts and houses or dorms were already coming across. But this year, we advanced that quite a bit and also able to automatically sync your staff list.
So you can Bring in that list of staff and then, create their profiles and add them to your, Orah account, in a much more streamlined way, basically just importing that and keeping that staff list in sync, as well as being able to write attendance back to Veracruz, which is the big thing that we achieved this year.
and,yeah. Still, we're still adding more things based on some of the requests that we've had since we've gone live, like being able to cater to athletics and group events as well, in terms of how they work in Veracruz. Yeah, we now have quite a number of schools using that. There's probably a couple of schools still using the old integration we need to get moved across.
No good reason to be using the old one now that everything is in here in the new one. But yeah, a big shout out to, I won't list every school, but there's been a lot of schools that helped us pilot this integration because as hard as we work to make sure that it's perfect before we go live, none of our test environments or our friends at Veracross can provide us with a perfect school data set.
So working with some schools closely to make sure that we get everything right in terms of replicating the schedule and sending attendance data back. There's been a lot of work that's gone into that, as well as using Veracross to populate the Attendance Insights dashboard as well.we do have one question from Jenny who's been, who was asked quite a while ago, but I just wanted to get to this slide before I answered your question, Jenny.
So thanks for your patience. you were asking about this medical link with Magnus and Veracross. So it doesn't link through Veracross, but we do have a Magnus integration. So you can, connect to that separately and show kind of details like allergies and that kind of stuff within the student profile view in, in Orah.
Kurt Meyer: Awesome. So that's a high level summary of what we have been working on this year. It really doesn't, it doesn't nearly cover everything. there's a lot of finer details and a lot of,more nuanced settings and feature requests that we have been working on, but broad strokes, those are some of the key updates.
I also want to talk Towards what's in the works in the, the short term and
Ronan Quirke: give you, yes. Sorry, sorry to ruin your flow there, Kurt, but I was just going to, I thought maybe I'll just answer a couple more questions that have been around for a little while. yeah. And that we might even be able to segue that into what's in the works as well.
so Andrew asked, can we tag students from end of shift? Into nurture. So I'm thinking then, so you'll be tagging in terms of creating some sort of, pastoral, note in the end of shift.
Kurt Meyer: Yeah. So end of shift reports, we've, having, we've added the ability to attach pastoral notes to a duty report. So,I think that's what you're talking about Andrew.
So that is available and we've also added the. you feature for receiving a daily digest, to your email inbox for any updates that have happened. throughout the day, including what's been included in those duty reports. so instead of having to go to the activity feed and trolling through the duty reports, that could just be emailed to you as well.
Ronan Quirke: Thanks, Greg. and Shanna had a question as well. Hey, Shanna.is there a way for teachers to take an emergency role, like during a lockdown, for example, that they may have students in their room who are not their students? She looked at runoff roles, but wasn't sure if that was the best way.
Kurt Meyer: Yes, so we have a dedicated, module just for emergency roles and notifications.
that is in a, it depends on which pricing package you're in, but that's in the upper right. Pricing level of supervised, but it's a real time emergency role where teachers can be collaborating with each other in real time to account for students. and it would send out alerts based on different templates that you have different.
emergency scenarios to,teachers, parents, students, both when the roll begins and when it ends, and there's some more emergency specific functionality in there as well. So we have a whole module for that and. Yeah, we'll be happy to, talk that through with you more, Shannon.
Ronan Quirke: Perfect. Thanks, Kurt. That was some really good questions already today. Obviously the spot prize motivator, is working wonders here. So I appreciate that. So yeah, don't, it's still a few minutes left. So feel free to jump in and ask another question. And even if we don't get time to answer it live, then we can always answer it afterwards.
but yeah, so back to you, Kurt, in terms of what's in the works. Awesome.
Kurt Meyer: so I'm going to start off with daily attendance, daily attendance is quite a key, a key update that we've been working on, which is the ability to, track a student's overall present presence on a day to day basis.
Sorry, I just need to find my design for that. Oh yeah, here we go. so starting off with this, the settings just to give everyone sort of a sense of how we think about daily. How we're thinking about approaching daily attendance. within your attendance settings, there will be a way to assign daily attendance policies.
which is a way to calculate daily attendance based on class attendance. These policies can be assigned on a per year level, or it can just be a blanket policy that applies to all students. but the policies will look at the class records throughout the day and then determine what daily attendance status a student should have.
so in this example, if a student is present for their first class of the day, then they're marked as present. If they're late for their first class or absent for their first class classes, but then they attended later classes throughout the day, then they'll be late for the day.if they're excused, absent for all classes throughout the day, then they'll be excused, absent for the day.
And if they're unexcused absent for the day, they'll be um,if they're unexcused, absent all classes or have a combination of unexcused and unexcused absence, then there'll be unexcused absence. And so the Daily Attendance Record, as I mentioned before, just gives a, an overview of who was at school on a day to day basis, as well as what their, if they're at school late, which can be, You know, something that's important to, to understand, versus arriving to, the behavior behind arriving to school late and arriving to a class late is quite different.
And the way that you approach it is different. So having that distinction, is helpful. So that's setting up the,the policies for daily attendance. the way that you'll be able to see the, this data within the attendance insights would be similar to what you can see with class attendance at the moment, but you'd be able to toggle between the two modes.
on these key metrics. Here you'll be able to switch between day or daily or class attendance, metrics or attendance rate, and for each student you'll be able to see their class attendance records versus the daily attendance records. And in this table here you'd see the breakdown between class and daily attendance.
Daily attendance is going to be a core record that we'll be using for other things like triggering attendance alerts based on daily attendance. As well as having an actual, table and database of daily attendance, which would be a way to better, identify anomalies throughout the day. So just looking at the day more holistically and being able to pick out, which students have had, a gap in their, And that might be something to investigate further.
so that's a core update that we'll be working on. we've already started on it, but we'll be working on it through into the new year.the other thing that ispartially live, it's live, but we aren't, we still need to do some, updates on the mobile apps. Thanks. But it's the ability to create multiple active passes.
so you'll notice this student here, she has two passes. whereas the current behavior in our system is that students can only have one active pass at a time. and what this caters for is situations where a student might be, say, In the medical center, but then they might also have another pass for the day or say, late arrival or an early excuse and before those two passes would be overriding each other.
Whereas now you can have both without one ending the other. And so it just caters for more. scenarios where,you want to be able to excuse students for different reasons, but not have that completely override each other. And there's a few settings behind it, so you can decide which passes should have this ability.
by default, it's, disabled, but you can go within the pass settings to turn those on for the passes that you want to be able to, not end if a new parcel location has been added to that student. So that's quite a key update.
Ronan Quirke: Yeah, my kind of go to example, Kurt, is always you're on an exam pass for a week, but you're out sick today.
So you don't want to then cancel the week long exam pass and that not to be so that's a kind of a classic example, but they're just two things to just to zone in and you already mentioned, but, this is Off by default. and we would probably recommend you talking to us about your like how you want to set things up for you go through and set up multiple passes right now, isn't that sort of for the next month or two as we roll this out and add it into the mobile apps and things.
Kurt Meyer: Absolutely.so I know we're getting close on time, so I'm just going to go through these ones. these top two and then I'll, let Ronan cover the last two. so taking attendance for events, this is something that's been in the works for a while but, Orah has an ad And events module where you can organize, school events that students or parents can opt into.
but currently there's no way to take attendance for those events. but what we want to be able to do is, display those events on the schedule view so that a teacher, can mark attendance similar to how they mark class attendance. So they'll be able to open up the event. See the event details, and simply mark students as present or not present.
And so think field trips, think, activities that might be happening on campus. This is just a way for you to account for students, in those situations.
And the next one, bridging the gap between behavior and attendance. So that's like a general theme that we've been thinking about. going back to our core pillars of duty of care. understanding how the student is and, how that relates to attendance is usually,part of the same picture.
So if the student's showing a particular attendance pattern, they could be having wellness or behavior issues. or you, there could be students that you are already aware that has a wellness or behavior issue that you just want to monitor on the attendance front. So those two things come hand in hand and we're trying to bridge the gap, around that better.
So one of the, one of the things that we've been exploring, and this is still a concept and. it may not look like this in the end, but we've just been thinking about this idea of how can we,show more correlation with attendance and behavior and wellness to get that more, holistic view of what's happening with the student and to give schools a better way to engage with students.
Students, where, you know, they can see a pattern starting and they, they're able to address that.so we're thinking, on the dashboard or some sort of student focused view, being able to have a mix of both, attendance, Behavioral and wellness information, so that, looking at it, you can get more of a holistic view of what's going on with the student and trying to show that in some sort of correlated way where you can see that, attendance rates dropping and, but also, student mood shakes are less.
hitting into the lower areas as well. so that's just an overall theme that we're thinking about and would love to work with more schools on how, how would, how can we best create tools to support schools to engage with students that are showing these behavioral attendance issues and try to better bridge that gap.
So that, that's a theme that I'm excited to work on, next year. And yeah, over to you, Ronan,
Ronan Quirke: for these last two. Yes, yeah, as you said, conscious of time, so I won't get into, too much detail on this, but,as we've been, increasing the number of, end users, like parents that are reporting, absences in advance For daily attendance and class attendance, we've been getting some feedback around, so we do already support single sign on.
That's good for student accounts and staff accounts, things like that, and some parent accounts, we've also been looking at ways, can we actually Automatically, log in from, say, your parent portal or something like that straight into the Absence Reporter, little app that we have, rather than doing the sort of one time password flow, which, a number of you are using as well.
So anything that can just make it just that little bit easier and more seamless between, your portals and things like that and into the, or Absence Requester. And as well in terms of just integration enhancements, I mentioned that we're currently working on a new integration, which is for Australian schools, Synergetic, we're quite well in advance and we're piloting,with that number of schools right now at the moment, as well as we know that there's a few kind of fine tunings that we need to do for some of our existing integrations.
A key one, I think, across all of our integrations and making sure that we're we're only showing everything that's on the student schedule and not extra classes that you don't need to take attendance for. For example, we've had some feedback about how we can fine tune what shows in Orah in terms of the Orah schedule.
Versus the, the MIS or SIS schedule and things like that as well. So we've got quite a lot, of just sort of small improvements that we're looking to make across the existing integrations as well as, yeah, new, we're looking at some new ones as well for 2025 as well.
Kurt Meyer: Amazing. So that brings us to the end of our presentation. Are there any other questions that haven't been answered yet, Ronan?
Ronan Quirke: Yes, just, there is one from Shikala. I'm curious to know if there's a way to set up events by specific categories, like arts, sports, and pull a report of which activities get the most attendance.
okay, so I'm assuming then we'd be setting up events in Orah, and then having events categories, which I don't think we You have event categories at the moment.
Kurt Meyer: no, we have, so you could set up the event passes torepresent a category. So you might have a music category or an athletic category or something like that.
And those are passes. And, within our custom, dashboards, which we didn't cover on this call, but you'd be able to create a custom dashboard for, Yeah, showing the number of events split up into different pass types over a time frame.so that's definitely possible, but, you might need to reach out to us, to help you get that set up because there's a little bit of configuration for that.
Ronan Quirke: Yep. And I think there is also an interesting little challenge there about how would we show event attendance on our insights dashboard as well. So that's actually a really good question. So thank you for that. that's a little bit of a challenge we'll need to take on board as well.
Awesome.
Kurt Meyer: And any, Oh, sorry, go.
Ronan Quirke: Just one, one last one. We have time for any plans to expand the events module to allow the uploading of files. When running an event ship, they need to provide a risk, okay, so this is like the risk assessment documents and things like that you want to do for enrolling in an event.
Yeah,
Kurt Meyer: I think we can do that. It's definitely possible. Thanks for putting it on our radar. We can do it for passes, so it's something we've done before. We just need to add that same functionality to events.
Ronan Quirke: Awesome. Thank you, everybody, for all your questions. Some really good ones. I will consult with Matt and Kurt and Tiago and see who we think the best questions were. And they're all great questions, so we've got a tough task ahead of us, but thank you for that.
Kurt Meyer: Yeah. Any comments or Last words from you, Matt.
Matt Varley: Yeah, just super exciting. Thanks for taking us through and for everyone on the webinar through a lot of stuff done in 2024. And I think as you can see from both Kurt and Ronan, there's much customer feedback and these questions fuel the way that we're going to develop our product. Heading into the future as well.
So don't be shy even after this webinar. If you've got those questions, if you've got things that you'd love to see happen in the platform, we'd love to hear from you. I know Kurt and Ronan would love that as well because we're ultimately here to build a platform that sort of meets your needs to be able to run your school and your day a lot easier than what it is now.
So please keep them coming and thanks for taking the time out to spend with us.
Kurt Meyer: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Matt. And, the final, task for today is to name the two spot prize winners. Ronan, have you? Got any winners in mind?
Oh, you're on mute.
Ronan Quirke: Don't keep us in suspense. Yeah, and that's the two winners. No, joking. I, I think, I think just because it's provoked us to, to, have a think more Shikala's question about, events, attendance and reporting. and, it's hard to go past, Shannon's question as well, because that's a really good one in terms of emergency roles and a reminder, I think, for ourselves that we know features are in the product.
Maybe they're not easily noticed, or you may not have that in your account. And so those things are easily missed as well. So that's probably a reminder for us too. Make sure that when we talk about these things, that maybe we need to make sure that may not be in your account. And so you may not know about it.
So we'll need to work on that too. So thank you for both of those questions. They're great questions.
Kurt Meyer: Amazing. thank you so much. We'll reach out to you to, give you your prizes, but thank you so much, everyone for joining in. Really appreciate, your feedback. And, for those of you who weren't able to make it, you'll get a recording of this.
Webinar as well in your inbox. All right, I think we'll leave it there. Thanks, guys. Thanks, everyone. Bye bye.
