Little SIS Premium Start-Of-School Best Practices

This article explores the essential tasks you must complete at the start of the school year to ensure a clean and organized classroom environment. Discover how Little SIS can assist you in accomplishing these tasks and setting the stage for a successful academic year ahead. Following the steps outlined in this guide, you can effectively use Little SIS/Little SIS Premium to streamline your classroom cleanup process and begin the new year with a fresh and inviting learning space.

This article picks up where the Little SIS end-of-year rollover best practices article leaves off. If you have not completed the end of the year tasks, do those before continuing with the steps below.

Note: If you missed it, be sure to watch the 2023 Labs Summer Fest Session 3: Little SIS webinar recording. The recording with time stamps and slide deck are a available in the Labs Club. If you have not yet joined Labs Club, see Joining the labs club.

In this article, you will learn how to:

• Communicate about archived classes when using Teacher Review
• Modify existing roster sync jobs
• Create new roster sync jobs
• Sync guardians

Teacher Review considerations

If using Teacher Review, be sure to communicate to the teachers that they need to first unarchive classes they want to use/link them for the new academic year or term. 

Modifying Existing Roster Sync Jobs

There are some steps to take with jobs before you push classes for the upcoming academic year. Performing these steps will save you the most time in cleanup later. 

Adjust the Alias

If your alias structure has stayed the same from last year, classes will not created for the upcoming year. Here you adjust your alias to be sure it is unique but different than last year.

1. Open Little SIS Premium.
2. Using the left navigation pane, go to Jobs, then Roster sync jobs.
3. In the list of jobs, locate the job edit.
4. Go to step 3, Data mappings.
5. Change the year for the class alias to the upcoming year. 
6. Click Save.

Now when you push your classes, they will all be new.

Manage Inclusion/Exclusion Rules

Verify that the rules are still appropriate and update as necessary.

1. Continue in the roster sync stepper to step 4, Manage inclusion/exclusion rules. 
2. In the Create or update classes in Google Classroom where any of the following are true section:
   • Click + Add Rule to add a new rule.
   • Click the trash icon to delete a rule.
3. In the Except where section:
   • Click + Add Rule to add a new rule.
   • Click the trash icon to delete a rule.
4. Click Preview Class Sync to check the rosters and class counts are correct.

Update Preferences

You can push classes without rosters. Whether you don't want the students to see the classes or the rosters are not finalized. To do this you'll clear both options at step 5, Update preferences in the Roster Sync jobs stepper.

1. Continue in the roster sync stepper to step 5, Update preferences. 
2. This step has 4 tabs, be sure Roster updates is selected.
3. Clear the checkboxes for Add any newly-SIS-enrolled students to classes and Remove non-SIS-enrolled students from classes.

The teacher can then accept and build out their class without any students. Later, when ready, return here and select both checkboxes on the Roster updates tab to allow students into the class.

Note: Students do not get an email when they are added to the class.

Decrease Automation Thresholds

For the beginning of the academic year or term, decrease the threshold for holding staged changes for manual approval. Choose a number that makes sense for your district or board; 25 or 50. Once the schedule changes settle, you can increase those numbers again.

1. Continue in the roster sync stepper to step 6, Automation. 
2. In the Hold staged changes for manual approval... section:
   • Decrease the value for When __ or more new classes will be created.
   • Decrease the value for When __ or more students will be added or removed from any single ACTIVE or PROVISIONED classes.
3. Be sure you have at least one email listed in the Send held job and sync notifications to field so that someone receives the job summary.
4. Click Save in the stepper.

You can also opt to run the roster sync job manually.

Create Sync Jobs

Creating a sync job is a multi-step process. During setup, you'll configure settings to sync your SIS classes to Google Classroom.

See Set up a sync job, step by step

Syncing Guardians

Using Little SIS for Classroom, you can synchronize guardian invitations from data in an SIS export. The guardian sync works differently than Class and Roster Sync jobs.

See Setup guardian sync

Document Version	Date	Description of Change
1.0	3/13/2024	Updated accessing LSISP link
1.1	6/19/2024	Removed extra space
1.2	7/30/2024	Reverify, added 2023 to webinar