We recommend that schools and districts pilot Little SIS Premium before a large-scale rollout. The summer months are a great time to work out the kinks that would arise during a pilot namely, cleanliness of data and change management. The advantages to rolling out Little SIS Premium during the summer are the creation of Classroom classes for all your teachers, and the lessened chance that teachers have already created classes that you will need to manually link to in the interface.
Getting started with a large scale roll out of Little Sis Premium
Review the Installation and Data Requirementssections in the Help Center to ensure your environment and your data are ready. After that, you'll want to create the Jobs that you will run throughout the school year.
Before setting up Jobs, we recommend bulk-archiving all of the previous year's classes. The reason for this is to ensure that both the teachers' and the students' view in Classroom only contains information relevant to the current school year. You can find out more about bulk archiving classes here.
Communicate to your teachers
We definitely recommend letting your teachers know about what kind of changes they can expect as you roll out Little SIS Premium. You can find further information about change management here.
Additionally, we have a teacher email template available here.
Setting up jobs for a full year deployment
It is a best practice that you set up your Jobs in a way that makes sense for your school or district. Smaller independent schools may find that jobs by grade level or term make the most sense. A small to medium-sized district might want to break up their Jobs per school site and term. A larger district might still find that site-level jobs are helpful. But may want to organize their Jobs into larger chunks, like Elementary, Middle, High to ease the setup process. But why wouldn't you want all your sites in one Job, you ask?
The more Jobs that you create, the more granular control you have over the contents of the individual Jobs. This includes class naming convention and automation settings. For example, you may want to include a class period number in your middle school and high school class names. But for Elementary school, you may only want to include the grade and the name of the teacher. Creating separate jobs for each will lets you account for the difference.
You can learn more about creating Jobs here.
Blocking teachers from knowing students enrolled in their classes
You can create classes without enrolling students. Teachers can still build out their course content in Classroom but they cannot see enrolled students. When you are ready to reveal students to the teachers, you can push that information out.
Within the Job settings, navigate to Update Preferences. The Roster Updates section opens first. Here you can deselect the Add and Remove checkboxes. This allows you to provision Classroom classes for your teachers without letting them or students know who is in which class. When you are ready to push the students out, go back into the job settings and reselect the Roster Updates.
