Aeries Analytics, the new Testing and Assessment System from Eagle Software, is allowing districts to analyze data more easily than ever before. No longer do districts need to export student data and class lists to 3rd party assessment systems. Aeries Analytics is fully integrated with the Aeries SQL database and can analyze data ranging from test scores and attendance, to gradebook data and GPAs. Not only does the system provide powerful data analysis tools, it acts as an Early Warning System to help identify At-Risk Students at all grade levels. Student Watch Lists are integrated right into the new District Analysis Dashboard. To have your school or district added to our list of interested Aeries customers, please email sales@aeries.com

The 11/16/2012 release of Aeries.net contains a major new feature: a new Dashboard for the Student/Parent Portal.  This new dashboard gives parents and student quick access to important information like today's homework and events, current class grades and missing assignments, recent attendance, online educational resources and a listing of the student's most recent state test scores.  Also available is information about which other students the current account has access to and which other people have access to the current student.

This new dashboard layout should help get more information into the hands of students and parents by making this critical information more easily accessible than previously.  The idea behind this dashboard was to provide better information quickly so that parents and students do not have to go fishing for information.  This concept is also being extended to a new "Student Profile" screen in the works for parents, students, and school office staff in Aeries.net.  The "Student Profile" screen will combine important student demographic information with quick access to student test scores and program participations.  It will also make it easy to see which areas of the student contain information about the current student so that users can quickly see the big picture about the state of the current student.

More is also planned for the new Dashboard:

• Changing Account Types when a student or parent registers with the wrong account type
• Re-Registration Status for all linked students
• Online File Upload and Storage (Student Digital Backpack)

Also in recent updates to Aeries.net, the ability for parents and student to sign up for weekly progress report emails have been enabled.

Eagle Software is pleased to present the first in a series of videos with Sam Defeo. Sam is extraordinary at training Aeries and has had decades of experience in the training of Student Information System software.

This first video in the series is on Basic Query and touches on the begining navigation throught the Aeries Client query program. It can be found in the Support Video area.

A recent posting on the Aeries_talk group asked what Aeries reports people are creating for early intervention. You can run reports and queries, but there is a better way – Aeries Analytics.

Aeries Analytics has built-in configurable indicators and dashboards for any and all grade levels and allows you to create your own. You can get a list of students with two clicks and quickly enroll them in additional-instruction programs and create intervention records for them. For more information and a full demo, go to http://www.aeries.com/products/aeries-analytics.

Worried about matching changes for your pre-enrolled students? Aeries will do it for you!

Aeries has a new procedure in place to synchronize changes to student data throughout your district. Whenever data is changed for a student in your school, those changes are automatically pushed to the pre-enrolled copy of that student at another school! This includes fields in the Students (STU), Supplemental (SUP), and Secondary Student Data (SSD) tables, and each field can be selected to sync or not to sync (that is the question).

This procedure was developed so that the “Update Student Data” process is no longer needed! As long as all allowable tables are set to be ID-based, the essential fields are set to sync, and all matriculating students are pre-enrolled. The process also includes a method with which to lock fields in a pre-enrolled copy of a student. This will keep users at the pre-enrolled school from changing key information such as address or phone numbers. As with the sync process, these fields can be selected to be locked or not. The configuration is completely up to the district to decide. It is run from AdminCS and the form is called “Define Fields to Sync/Lock”. If you really want, you can even deselect ALL of the fields, and Aeries will let you do all the work just like the old times...

A new document has been posted on the website that details the Student Synchronization process in Aeries: Student_Sync.pdf. This document will provide information on Student Synchronization. Changes to Student data (STU), Supplemental (SUP) and Secondary Student Data (SSD) will be automatically synchronized between active records. There are various settings available through the Define Fields to Sync/Lock in AdminCS and LOC Rules set in the Schools form in the District database.

Understanding where a student stands academically can be a challenging question to answer.  With the addition of the Student Profile page in Aeries.net, we are equipping educators, parents, and students to get a high level view of a student’s progress.  Included in the Student Profile is the attendance summary, grade book summary including trend forecasting, the most recent state test scores, and summary information for student related areas.  These areas will show the most recently entered record and the count of records for each area including counselor visits, discipline incidents, interventions, and medical history.  Also included are all the programs a student is currently participating in.  Each area has links to the detailed content behind the summary information.  For high school students, their page will also include their credit history which shows their total credits earned grouped by subject area.

This page is the place where everyone involved in the student’s education can look to get the big picture for a student.    This allows for a quick way to see potential trouble areas as well as discovering areas of success and improvement.

We will continue to expand the content on this page as we receive feedback from our customers.

Future development includes:

• Adding a line graph to the grade book summary that shows the scores for each assignment
• GPA summary graph

A recent discussion about why an Aeries query was returning the wrong results highlighted a potential problem that even the most experienced Aeries query writers fall prey to: many Aeries tables have common field names. There are many occurrences of DT (Date), GR (Grade), TY (Type), TG (Status Tag), ED (usually enter date), U1, 2, 3, etc. and several other fields. The way to make sure that Aeries query picks the right field is use the table-dot-field format in your query statement, i.e., STU.GR, CON.CD, CRS.TG. This forces Aeries query to look at the specified field. The key is remembering that your query may look at a field you are not even aware of if you are not specific.

If you write MS Access queries or SQL queries, this becomes less of a problem because Access and SQL Management Studio will force you to pick a table before the query runs, but you need to make sure you choose the right table.

When searching for students, there are a few tricks that you can use to look for students.

1. Entering a Number (like 1234567890)…
     a. …will return students with matching Student Number (STU.SN), Permanent ID (STU.ID), or SSID (STU.CID).
     b. If only 1 student matches the number enterred, that student will automatically be selected and the current student will be displayed.
2. Entering just "_" (an underscore)…
     a. Will look for incomplete student adds. Sometimes a student add is started and the user closes the window or encounters a problem and the incomplete record is added to the Aeries database with underscores in the first and last name fields. You can search for these students by entering an underscore.
3. Wildcards – use the following wildcard characters to search for specific patterns in student names
     a. % - is for any set of characters. Example: "an%l" will return: Angelica, Angel, Angela, and Anel.
4. LastName, FirstName
     a. Use a comma in between two text searches and the system will look for students the last names of the 1st value and first names of the 2nd value.

We are pleased to release the Course Request module for the new Aeries.NET Parent and Student portal.  This great new feature allows for students (and/or optionally parents) to submit course requests online through an all newly redesigned and streamlined interface from this feature in ABI.  When a student loads the "Course Request Entry" screen, the school's subject area requirements are shown on the left, allowing the student to quickly see the areas they need to add requests for.  The courses available to the users are limited to the set of courses pre-selected by site administrators.  Students can filter and search this list by the course's primary subject area and by title.  Students can then click on an information button next to each course that shows additional subject areas, UC/CSU subject areas, and the long course description if available.  Site administrators can designate the dates that requests can be submitted via the portal as well as whether or not users can submit alternate course requests.  Additionally, any course requests entered by site personnel can be designated as "locked" which will prevent a parent or student user from modifying that request.

We here at Eagle Software are proud to announce that we are offering a tutorial video series on the new Course Request module presented by our own programmer, Nick DeVore. The series can be seen by clicking - VIEW ALL >>

Major changes were released for the Assertive Discipline form.  Previously, each Assertive Discipline record could only store 3 different Disposition codes and there was only one set of related disposition fields for all 3 dispositions.  

The major enhancement will now allow multiple disposition records to be stored.  This allows the LEA to report to the State the final disciplinary action taken, as the action may progress for the student (i.e. suspension leading to expulsion).  This will also allow for the disciplinary action duration to be kept per disposition, enabling the LEA to keep track of the days of suspension as well as the days of expulsion under the same discipline record.

The Assertive Discipline form has undergone many enhancements, including making the form larger. The new Disposition (DSP) table will now be used to store multiple Disposition records.  The number of Dispositions that can be added to an Assertive Discipline record are unlimited in the DSP table however the form can only display up to 10 dispositions for a single ADS record.  The order in which the fields display on the Assertive Discipline form has also changed.  The new DSP disposition fields will display at the bottom of the form to allow new records to be added and displayed.  An option has been added that will allow you to view the old ADS disposition fields.  All old ADS disposition fields will be displayed with parenthesis around the field names.

The districts network administrator must verify that any user who can view or update Assertive Discipline (ADS) has matching permissions to the new DSP table.   Also, the Victims (VIC) and Witnesses (WIT) tables should have an additional level of security due to the confidential nature of the data.

All Disposition codes that are set up in the COD table for ADS.DS will be automatically converted over to the DSP.DS field in the COD table.  This will also include the ADS.RST, ADS.RL, ADS.AA, ADS.RS and ADS.ST codes.

Records with Disposition codes in the ADS table should be converted over to the DSP table using the Copy Dispositions From ADS to DSP macro.  Not all Disposition records can be converted using this macro. Any ADS record that has more than one disposition and information added to the disposition fields, such as Disposition Start Date (ADS.DD) cannot be converted.  We cannot determine which Disposition code goes with the entered data. 

After running the Copy Dispositions From ADS to DSP macro, run the Print ADS to DSP Conversion Audit Report to generate a report of the records that could not be converted.

All Disposition fields from the ADS table that have been setup on the Define Required Fields form that have Required Fields and Limited Dropdown settings for the Disposition and related data fields will be automatically copied so that they work appropriately with the DSP fields. The original settings for the ADS fields in the Define Required Fields form will be del-tagged.

These changes are to help Districts submit Discipline data cleanly to CALPADS.  Previously, some districts were creating multiple ADS records for the same student for the same incident with different Dispositions to track the student’s progression.  This affected their districts CALPADS reporting.  The changes made to ADS with the addition of the DSP table enable you to track all that information on a single discipline record and not have to use a work-around that caused issues with CALPADS reporting.

If the ADS records have the Days and Start and End Date fields associated with the most severe disposition, those records will be extracted correctly in the CALPADS EOY extract and do not need to be converted.

Please remember that it is VITAL that all Access Users are running on the latest Access Service Pack.  This is critical, especially for older versions of Access (Access XP/2003) that could potentially crash if they don’t have the latest service pack installed.  Please refer to our Compatibility document for specific details at the following link: http://www.aeries.com/Downloads/Public/Aeries_System_Compatibility_Chart.pdf 

Please note that your saved disposition Query statements will no longer be valid!  They will need to be rewritten to include both ADS and DSP disposition codes.  Examples are now available out on the web site at the following link:  http://www.aeries.com/training-support/queries

We understand that these changes are extensive, but were necessary to allow Aeries to more closely match the data reporting requirements of the State.

After months of development, Service Learning Tracking is now available in Aeries.net.  This new feature extends existing concepts of placing more responsibility for data entry tasks into the hands of parents and students and leaves the review and evaluation of that information to school staff.  In this revolutionary new feature, STUDENTS, not school office staff, enter information about the organizations they are volunteering for and enter the service log records all online.  Students can even upload documents, images, and video of their service as proof.  School staff simply review the information submitted by students and mark it as "Approved" or "Denied."  The system, exclusively available in Aeries.net and the Aeries.net Student/Parent Portal, uses integrated emailing to inform students and parents when Organization and/or Log records are approved or denied.

For the requirements, the school defines how many hours each year a student is expected to complete for graduation.  Hours are pro-rated for students entering school mid-year or for students with a gap in enrollment.  Hours can not be banked, but can be made up for deficiencies in prior years.

Full documentation is available after logging in to the website on the Downloadable Documents page in the "Aeries.net Admin" section.

The 3/22/2013 Aeries.Net release included an Import From AIR form which gives users with appropriate permissions the ability to import student registrations from AIR into Aeries.Net. The functionality of .Net matches CS in that users can filter the list of available students by their import status.

AIR settings must be set up through School options prior to accessing the new Import From AIR form. Once these settings have been populated, to import from AIR via Aeries.Net, a user with appropriate permissions can navigate to the Student Demographics form and click on the "Import from AIR" button. This button will take the user to the Student Details form that lists the students’ pending import.  From there, users can match the new student registration to an existing student in your district (who is currently inactive) or simply import the student registration as a brand new student.

In conjunction with the new Import From AIR form in Aeries.Net, the existing AIR Import form in Aeries CS has been modified for terminology consistency. The caption on Load Which Status was changed from "Completed" to "Pending Import."  The Aeries CS form also added a Delete button to the main form so registrations can be deleted without going into the Details form. Logic was added to the Details and Summary buttons to verify that students have not been imported or deleted since the form was opened to avoid double-entry. The error messages have been enhanced to be more specific regarding this type of event. Additionally, when importing a student for next year, the student will be auto-tagged as pre-enrolled ("*") instead of asking for a status tag.

AIR will continue to progress into a more robust enrollment tool. The next big feature to come in AIR will be the internationalization of the prompt text presented to the parents.  This will allow for the parents to select from a list of languages to have the AIR site presented in.  This will not translate the local district defined text.  Fields like AUT (Authorizations) and any SUP (Supplemental) fields the district requires the parents to answer will all have to be translated by the district.  Any customizable text in AIR will also need to be translated by the district.  This feature is slated to be completed by early 2014.

The abilities of Aeries Analytics to act as an Early Warning System just got better.  The system already did an excellent job identifying students with multiple At-Risk Indicators for not graduating.  Discipline and numeric field values like GPAs and EL Years in Program have recently been added, greatly enhancing the system's ability to identify critical student subgroups in need of intervention.

With Discipline, analysis can be done on Frequency of Violations, Frequency of Dispositions, and Total Days of Dispositions (i.e. Days of Suspension).  By using the Aeries Analytics Dashboard, this discipline information can be cross-referenced for any other Analysis Indicator to determine correlations in data, including identifying potential causes for low test scores and grades in some students.  Students falling into certain Discipline Performance Bands can be subgrouped and analyzed individually.

With numeric field value analysis on fields like EL Years in Program, districts can quickly identify and create subgroups for Long-Term English Learners in order to target specific interventions and intensive instruction, maximizing local district resources.  GPA analysis is also very effective in looking for students, where, although they are not failing, they remain on the cusp; and in combination with other risk factors, may be at a higher risk of falling back and not graduating.

The Aeries Analytics Data Analysis Tools continue to grow.  Planned future enhancements include being able to cross-analyze all performance bands for any two indicators (great for multi-year test score and data correlation analysis) and complex multi-year cohort analysis.

Since 1995, the Aeries system has adapted to the ever-changing California K-12 education landscape.  With Common Core coming quickly to California schools, Aeries is ready.

Aeries has long had the ability for California CST Standards to be included in the master table of standards.  Eagle Software has partnered with industry leader, Academic Benchmarks, to bring Common Core Standards to Aeries.  With these standards in Aeries, districts are ready to begin aligning and linking curriculum, assignments, and Standards Based Grade Reporting.  “Common Core begins in the classroom, extends back to students and parents, and finally ends up in the office or at the district with large-scale reporting” states Camden Iliff, Director of Programming at Eagle Software.

The major focus moving forward for Eagle Software, is not just on the data management needs of the office staff but also making certain that classrooms can run more smoothly.  This is why the Aeries Gradebook was recently re-written to focus on K12 Standards-Based Grade Reporting and will be rolling out true Rubric Grading in the next few months.  The idea is to provide perpetual feedback to teachers, students, parents, and administrators so that all stakeholders in a child’s education know how well a student is performing in the required areas.

A critical aspect to having a well maintained gradebook is having strong formative assessments integrated into the curriculum.  Aeries Analytics provides an excellent way to assess students on the fly in the classroom and help teachers adjust their instruction and curriculum.  Aeries Analytics also allows for broader interim and summative assessments to be administered and analyzed across teachers, grades, and schools.  With a unified solution, it is easier for busy administrators and teachers to have a broad analysis of a student's status using Aeries Analytics Dashboards.  With this information, the At-Risk Student Identification Algorithm in Aeries Analytics helps districts target students at most need of intervention and help target limited school resources.

“We want to be effective in helping our customers prepare for this new endeavor in education.  Over the past few years, Eagle Software has developed end-to-end feature sets that provide classroom management tools, a rubric-based gradebook, an aligned grade reporting system, along with assessment building, management, and analysis tools.  Combining these means with our built-in K-12 Common Core standards, our full cycle of products serve to better benefit our end-users.”

                Barry Lloyd, President, Eagle Software

Aeries continues to provide schools with a scalable, flexible product.  Visit our demo link to see how our product has evolved to support the needs of today’s educators: http://demo.aeries.net.

Major enhancements have been made to the Medical forms, including the addition of medication tracking. The Medical Log has been renamed to the Daily Medical Log. The form has two new tabs: Daily Medication Log and Student Medications.

The Daily Medical Log stores daily visits made to the office by students with a medical condition. This includes the student name, medical condition, start and end time, start and end date, as well as any comments.

The Daily Medication Log displays the medication log for the day with recurring or as needed student medication information. Medication Name, Dose #, Time Due, as well as Dose Amount and Measurement details are recorded. The Click to Log feature gives the ability to log given doses of medications by clicking the mouse in the Time Given column. Medications that have a specific time due will also show the teacher, room number and class that the student is in at that time.

 The Student Medications tab contains a list of student medications and allows the ability to add a new medication for a student. A report of the Student Medications information can be printed and has the options to include dose history and display current medications only.

We recently announced our partnership to create a seamless integration between Aeries and the Educator's Assessment Data Management System (EADMS).  There are now two choices for a testing and assessment system that will tie directly into the Aeries® Student Information System: Aeries Analytics and EADMS.

There are numerous reasons that schools and districts have purchased and utilized Aeries Analytics over the past year since its release. Two of these are its cost-effectiveness and its integrated approach to eliminate time-consuming duplicate data-entry.  While we have many goals for our integration efforts with EADMS, the first goal will be creating a single-sign-on approach that is seamless between the two systems.  Additional integrations will involve moving test results and student data effortlessly between the systems.  EADMS is a robust and well-developed product that has several more years of development behind it than Aeries Analytics, especially in the areas of test scanning, scoring, and analysis.

Whichever solution you choose, Eagle Software will continue to offer a quality product. Many users may find that Aeries Analytics is the right solution for their needs.  However, if you desire a fully-featured solution, we encourage you to take a look at EADMS (www.eadms.com).  One important thing to keep in mind is that you can puchase the Aeries Analytics Dashboard and Early Warning System for only $0.50 per student on its own.  If you’d like to know more about EADMS, their team will be presenting a session at our Users' Conferences in October and March, or you contact the Eagle Sales team at sales@aeries.com or (888) 487-7555.

Whether you are paying for just the Analysis Dashboards or our Test Scanning & Scoring feature as well, we stand by our product and will ensure it is a worthy product for our customers!

Recently, a team of Eagle Software Programmers and Support Staff contracted with experts from Microsoft to push Aeries.net to its limits.  The goal was to identify bottlenecks in the system, to fix them, and in the process, improve overall system performance.  Eagle Software has gone through this process with Microsoft three times before, producing great successes in making the Aeries.net system run faster and more efficiently.  This time around was no different.

What Microsoft brought to the table were top experts in the fields of SQL database design and performance and ASP.NET programming and deployment.  Additionally, an experienced Load Test Consultant took care of making sure the load tests performed on the system, equivalent to the hardware a 50,000+ student district would have, were accurately representing real-world system usage.

The results: by the end of the week-long engagement, Aeries.net was able to push through two-thirds more concurrent users and requests per second on the same hardware than at the beginning of the week.  More importantly, even at the higher user load, critical pages were loading 75% faster than at the beginning of the week!

“It couldn’t have been more of a success,” stated Eagle Software Director of Programming, Camden Iliff.  “The SQL performance improvement was even greater than the web servers.  SQL Processor usage dropped by 50% even with a two-thirds increase in user load.”

How we did it: the combined Eagle Software and Microsoft Expert team simulated user load using Microsoft’s Visual Studio Ultimate Test System.  Aeries.net was installed across 6 virtualized web servers with 8 processing cores each.  Test runs lasted between 30 to 45 minutes and the team monitored the web and SQL servers the entire time.  After each run, advanced SQL analysis reports were run against the transactions to determine which set of SQL queries were running the slowest, being called the most, and taking up the most processing time.  Additional web server analysis was done to identify application subroutines where the system was spending the most time.  Then the programming team went to work optimizing the identified bottlenecks.  After some lightning sessions of programming, a new build of Aeries.net was deployed to the web servers and the process was repeated.  All in all, sixteen rounds of testing were completed over five long days at Microsoft’s Dallas Campus.

“Bringing in Platform Experts from Microsoft and dedicating our own critical resources represents a major investment for Eagle Software,” states Eagle Software President, Barry Lloyd.  “But that investment directly impacts our customers by making the user experience better and by optimizing existing school district hardware.  Performance and Scalability Testing of Aeries.net is critical to making school investments last into the future, especially in times of tight budgets.”

STAR 2013 Test Results can now be loaded into Aeries with the new STAR Quick-Turnaround Reporting (QTR) layout!

Student test resultsfor theCaliforniaStandardsTests(CSTs) andCaliforniaModified Assessment (CMA)areavailablefor the Quick-turnaround Reporting (QTR) for the2013Standardized TestingandReporting (STAR).  STAR QTRfilescontainscale-scoreandperformance-level resultsforindividualCSTandCMA multiple- choice testsonly.

The Aeries STAR Test Results form now allows loading results for CST and CMA from the STAR QTR test file.  The STAR QTR files can be loaded in the school or district database for Client Server or Access users.  Once loaded, the results are available immediately for use in scheduling students for the next school year.

NOTE:  It isimportant torememberthat thesearepreliminaryresultsonly;theresultsmaychange in thereportsthatareshipped todistricts.

When the complete STAR files are received, we will update the form accordingly.  Then when the complete file is loaded, the results will be matched to the existing CST and CMA Test records by the Student Perm ID number and the Testing Admin date.  The existing records will be delete tagged and the complete STAR records will load with the additional data.  Documentation is available.

LOAD_STAR_QTR_File.pdf

Training is scheduled on a first come first served basis, so please plan accordingly. The busiest time of the year for Eagle Software trainers will be between July 29 and August 30. If you require training within those weeks, please choose a date as soon as you can and contact Training@aeries.comto schedule. Please give complete information on what you wish to have, and thorough information on how to contact you. Please understand that we may not be able to accommodate last-minute requests or changes as other training sessions may already be scheduled at that time. For a description of Aeries courses and the District staff who should participate in the training please see the Aeries Trainingdocument on our website.

You may also check our website at Aeries Regional Workshopsfor a calendar of scheduled workshops and registration information. Our regional workshops are offered on a variety of topics. The first of next year’s workshops will be held in December. The schedule will be posted in October. Workshops are presented using a lecture format with a single computer and projection unit. Please note there is limited space available. 

Available in the Beta Release 2 of the Parent/Student Mobile Portal:

It’s always exciting here when we get the “green light” to begin development on a new product. Diving headfirst into something completely new… and this time, it’s mobile.

Innovation within the mobile world has continued to be extremely fast-paced, with each new device coming out made to be smarter and more powerful than the last. After following the industry closely for some time, we have decided that now is the perfect time to begin creating a fully optimized Aeries.Net for mobile. We’re not talking about making apps though; instead, we will be taking full advantage of your devices modern browser to build a complete mobile app experience within it. So, what does this mean? No downloads required. What does it look like? Well, see for yourself:

When you reach the standard parent/student login page on your mobile device, you will be greeted with a “Mobile Portal Beta” link below the familiar LOGIN button. Clicking the link will instantly redirect you to the mobile portal, where you can test-drive all of the latest features:

To give you the best experience, we’ve created a two-way street between the full site and the mobile portal. This allows you to seamlessly jump back and forth between the two at any time, while remaining logged in and remembering all of your preferences.

Timesaver: quick access when you need it.

On a final note, we just want to mention a cool new feature that acts as a quick access menu for popular tasks: Timesaver. At the moment, it provides instant access to your Gradebook, Attendance, Change Student, Full Site, School Info/events, and a Teacher Directory. 

So, head on over to your current Aeries school account and try the new mobile parent/student portal today!

Click here to test-drive the Mobile Portal from your phone.

Click here to watch our new Aeries.Net Mobile Parent/Student Portal promo video.

Click here for a list of currently supported mobile operarting systems and browsers.