Setting up your Schedule and Class Lists

One of the aspects of our system that teachers love the most is that it (from their perspective) automatically includes their schedule and student lists.  Not only does this make it easy to get started right away, but it also serves as a very useful tool in communicating the schedule to teachers at the beginning of the year or term.  However, one of the aspects of the system that teachers HATE the most is when their schedule is wrong, such as a missing student or a class that isn't properly mapped to their account!  Not only does it feel disempowering, it leads to "messy data" if, for example, attendance is taken for an incomplete list of students.

As much as we'd love to, JumpRope cannot help you design your schedule.  Scheduling is a complex, variable, and school-centric process that involves more variables than we can possibly manage.  We communicate this very clearly to users when they sign in for the first time: problems with the schedule in JumpRope need to be directed to school-based staff.  This isn't to be mean, but rather an optimization - if users ask us about their schedule, we'll simply need to direct it to you.  That all being said, we are available if you (as a programmer) need any assistance at all, and we will make your request a high priority.  In fact, we tag your account to receive immediate service in our support system!  That's how important getting accurate schedules into the system is to us, and to our users!

The Admin Console provides the tools necessary to create your schedule within JumpRope.  The specifics of this process will depend on your school, as we have everything from a ground-up schedule-building tool to customized imports designed to interact with external scheduling systems that your school may use.  Based on your school's setup (it will be evident when you click on the Schedule tab of the Admin Console), click on the link below to get more specific help:

1. My school enters the schedule manually
   
   
2. My school uses another student information system to manage the schedule (such as PowerSchool, Infinite Campus, SchoolForce, School Master, MMS, STARS, etc.)

In addition to providing import functionality from external scheduling systems JumpRope has all of the tools that you'll need to build your own school schedule.  Maintaining the schedule reliably within JumpRope is a very important part of the success of the system (hard to take attendance accurately if your student list is incorrect... and other related problems), so please read each step carefully and be sure to reach out if you need help.

Alright, let's begin!  The first thing to know is that JumpRope has five important pieces of a complete schedule.  Each is addressed in the Scheduling Wizard found in the Admin Console, so you may wish to hop right in and refer to this document as questions arise.  Still here?  The five components are as follows:

1. The "meta" schedule of Terms and Marking Periods.  Before getting into the details, the system needs to know whether your school operates on semesters, trimesters, quarters, or what have you.  You'll also need to define the dates of your terms, and add any underlying "marking periods."  This document may be helpful in helping you understand terms and marking periods in JumpRope.
2. The Course Catalog.  This step defines the "course types," or the catalog of available courses at your school.  This is similar to the bulletin at a college or university (PHL 101, 201, 202, etc.) in that it defines the subject area, number of credits, and etc.  You do NOT need to worry about making multiple copies for each teacher or section of students - you'll do that in the next step.  If you have no plans to use the Transcript System, you can safely leave the number of credits as 1 for every course. A step-by-step tutorial on adding courses to the catalog can be found here.
• To enter data in the Course Catalog, simply type the name of the course, assign a unique 3-4 letter course code (this step is important, as it will provide a short-code to identify the course), select the appropriate subject/department, and type in the number of credits it's worth.  Decimals are okay here.
• If applicable, you'll need to tell us how many total terms of a course you're planning to offer, and which term each course represents.  For example, if you operate on semesters and offer two semesters of US HISTORY, you would want to make a course called US HISTORY TERM 1 OF 2, perhaps with course code HUS1, and a course called US HISTORY TERM 2 OF 2, perhaps with course code HUS2.  Make sense?
3. Students.  This step allows you to add or import students into the system.  It may be easiest to use the Import from Excel feature, or you can simply begin typing in student names and unique IDs.  Please note that the ID column MUST be unique for each student within your school.  We strongly recommend using an ID provided by your state or district, as it will make managing any integrations with other systems much easier.  When a student is highlighted in the list at left, you can also add biographical information in the box at right.  This biographical information is available to all users at your school, and be collaboratively added later as well. A step-by-step tutorial can be found here.
4. Course Enrollments.  If you've used any of our other scheduling tools, you may recognize this one.  The list at left shows each course that has ever been created for your school, organized by year-term and teacher.  Expand to any course (marked with a white icon) to view and edit course details and student enrollments.  Click the Add Course button in the bottom left to create a new course - it will automatically show up in the list at left under the current year and term with teacher marked as NONE.  Highlight this course and begin adding students. Click here for a step-by-step tutorial on course details, and here for student enrollments.

• JumpRope's scheduling system is very flexible in that any given course/section can meet on any combination of days (days of the week, typically, but we refer to them as cycle days in case a school isn't on a five day rotation) and periods within a day - a course can even meet more than once per day to support block scheduling!  To tell us what periods and days the course meets on, simply begin by typing the period in the green box, and then tick off the check marks by each day of the week on which the course meets that period.  You can add up to five separate entries.  Of course, you can always come back and change this later.