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Backpack 2008 Overview

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Backpack 2008 is revolutionizing the Student Information System market. Backpack 2008 provides a level of information transparency and accountability reporting that puts it in a class by itself. It provides a portal that engages parents and students like no other solution. Any yes, it addresses all of the functions that a district and school require of a student information system, such as:

Enrollment, Registration & Master Scheduling
Course/Class Management
Attendance & Seating Charts
Grade Book
Health Record Management
Discipline & Incident Reporting
Special Education
Teams / Clubs Tracking
Bus Route Management
Comprehensive School and State Reporting
Notification & Alert Subscriptions

Information Transparency

For a student information system information transparency means providing the school board members and district administrators with insight into the effectiveness of its curriculum and staff, providing school administrators with insight into how their school compares to other schools in the district and the state as a whole and how each teacher compares against the rest of the teachers in the school and district. For parents, information transparency means knowing more than just their children’s grades. It is having insight into individual assignments, attendance and tardiness and discipline incidents.

Accountability / Balanced Scorecard

Constituents have a right and need to know how the district, staff and students are performing. Backpack provides role based scorecards for each constituent; administrator, teacher, parent and student.

Administrators and department chairs will be interested in seeing the impact of their curriculum on assessment scores and understanding which lessons are effective and those that are not.
District and school administrators will be able to compare how schools within the district compare on assessments and like exams.
Principals and department chairs will be able to see how individual teachers perform as compared to district and school averages.
Parents will be able to see how their child is doing in each class and how that compares to the class average.

Backpack 2008 allows you to import standardized assessment test results directly into the system for further analysis and sharing with the appropriate staff. You can also define "local assessment" tests and perform the same types of analysis as on standardized tests.

Parent / Student Portal – Combining School with Social Networking

Engage the Students

No other school portal solution engages the student like Backpack 2008. Backpack’s social networking provides most of the same functionality that is available through applications like Facebook and MySpace, but unlike these social networks, access to Backpack’s portal is limited to students within the district / school. Parents and school administrators are secure in knowing that the system is free of access from outside predators.

The social network is the way to engage the student to utilize the school and class room functionality available via the portal. Individual class pages will display the student’s grades, upcoming class activities and assignments, allow fellow classmates to communicate and collaborate on assignments and allow the teacher to maintain and moderate a class blog.

Engage the Parents

It is understood that parental involvement has a direct and positive significant impact on a child’s performance. Backpack’s portal and alert functionality make it easy for parents / guardians to stay engaged and know what is going on at school. For example;

Grades – Access to the overall grade by subject as well as access to individual assignments
Assignments – Details on individual assignment description and due dates
Attendance – Detailed attendance by period, including tardies
Discipline incidents

Parents / guardians can also leverage the rich social networking capabilities of Backpack 2008. For example;

Dialogue with an instructor or set up a conference via the portal
Form a social network for parents with like interests, such as band parents or booster club members.
Contribute to the Idea Board

All users of Backpack 2008 can subscribe to alerts and notifications that can be displayed on a dashboard, delivered via e-mail or even as a message to a mobile device. Parents, for example, will now have instant access to updated information on missing assignments, grades or disciplinary incidents as soon as they are generated.

360º View

The problem with most student information systems is that they limit the user’s view of information across the organization. For example, upon receiving a phone call from a parent, a teacher wants to be able to quickly see everything about the student; what are his/her grades in progress for all classes, is the student missing any assignments, what is the student’s attendance record, has there been any disciplinary or health incidents, have other teachers recently spoken with the student or parents, and more. We know that a system needs to provide a staff member with this level of information at the click of a button, and Backpack 2008 does just that!

With Backpack 2008 there is no jumping between systems to get your job done. It provides everything a district needs in a single system. With its ease of use and multi-application abilities, it’s ideally suited to solve the problems educators and administrators face.

Master Scheduling

Backpack 2008 minimizes the time and effort required to develop your master schedule. The key behind our solution is that we capture and include all of the data elements that factor into a master schedule – and combine this with a state of the art scheduling engine.

After a master schedule run the user can view Backpack's Master Scheduling Board, where the master schedule is presented online in a spreadsheet format similar to the traditional “white boards” used today. While we mimic the white board that often wraps around your scheduling room, the similarity ends there. Backpack’s Master Scheduling board is "actionable". Your staff can interact with the scheduling board to resolve conflicts in real time by editing or adding course sections, moving students into or out of courses and sections, and moving teachers into or out of course sections.

State Reporting

Backpack’s patent pending state reporting module employs a unique approach to deal with the persistent changes in state reporting requirements. With Backpack changes to address state reporting requirements are made swiftly and without underlying data model changes.
Backpack also provides advanced support for creating and managing state reporting snapshots. Data snapshots are automatically created and, when required, data changes are easy and can be automatically synchronized, thus eliminating the need for subsequent double entry.

Built on State-Of-The-Art technology

Backpack 2008 is built upon the Microsoft Dynamics CRMTM platform, and leverages its built-in functionality to provide a rich user experience and deep integration with the Microsoft Office Suite. Backpack 2008 is tightly integrated with Microsoft Outlook - all calendar/activity information is automatically synchronized for you. Leveraging the power of Microsoft Dynamics™ CRM, users can choose to access Backpack 2008 through its own web interface or access the entire application from within Microsoft Outlook and utilize Outlook’s native user experience.

So why wouldn’t you choose Backpack 2008? It’s the ideal software system that lets your district run more smoothly, makes both teachers and parents happy, and gives you unparalleled communication and efficiency.