Little SIS Premium was designed so that you can implement it at any point in the academic cycle. Little SIS Premium uses an intuitive interface to assist in creating linkages to current, teacher-created Classroom classes. It updates all your classes, not only new ones, as you add and remove students from your SIS.
We find that some schools or districts prefer to roll out Little SIS Premium as a pilot during the school year. This lessens the burden of change management by starting small and working their way up to full adoption for the following school year. This approach gives you and your team the rest of the school year to ensure that your SIS data is complete and in the optimal format to achieve the goals that you've set forth for Google Classroom at your district.
Below are the steps to follow to set up your first pilot job and link to current Classroom classes.
Before getting started setting up Little SIS Premium, it is a good idea to let your pilot teachers know what kind of changes they can expect to see in Classroom. Here are some of those changes:
- Creation of new class invitations in Classroom
- Updated rosters as students are added to or removed from classes
- Class update emails.This is optional - you can learn more about notification emails here.
- Archiving of older classes. This is optional. If you wish to archive old Classroom classes, you can learn more here.
Here's a sample email you could send teachers.
Little SIS Premium adoption contains the following steps:
- Create a Pilot Job
- Run Sync Analysis
- Link to Current Classes
- Commit Changes
- Review Process
Create a pilot job
We suggest creating a pilot job as the precursor to a larger rollout. Follow the steps in the Setting up a sync job step-by-step guide to creating your Pilot Job. The best practice is to create 1 job per school site or per pilot user group, using Inclusion and/or Exclusion Rules.
Run sync analysis
Once you've created your Pilot Job, you need to Run Sync Analysis on your job from the Scheduled Sync Jobs list to link to current Classroom classes.
Once you have run the Sync Analysis, you will move to the Sync Analysis Summary.
Link to current classes
To push student roster changes to existing Classroom classes, you must link the classes during the Sync Analysis process. Follow the steps on the Reviewing and Approving Class Links step-by-step guide to complete this process.
Commit changes
Now that you've established links to existing Classroom classes, you are ready to sync Little SIS Premium to Google Classroom. Return to the Summary page and click Commit Staged Actions Now.
Review process
Once you've run the initial sync to Classroom, it's a good time to reflect on the process. You need to determine the next steps for scaling up your implementation. We recommend continuing to create Manual or Staged Jobs until you are comfortable with the process, and your teachers are aware of the changes that are happening within Classroom.
Things to consider now are:
- Are you happy with the classes created by Little SIS Premium (i.e., the Class Name)?
If you are happy, great! The format of your enrollment file likely will not need to change. If you do not like the class names, you may need to include more fields in your enrollments file to build a Class Name during Job creation that meets your goals. - Who will manage Little SIS Premium when you initialize a large-scale roll-out?
It is important to consider who will be in charge of creating Little SIS Premium jobs and ensuring they are staged appropriately. This is important before a large-scale roll-out. Full automation eliminates the need for daily human oversight. But someone must ensure that updates to the software are implemented. If the updates impact jobs, those changes need to be made to the current Job List. You also want to ensure that teachers have a means of reporting any incidents related to Little SIS Premium and Classroom.