The demands of rostering and syncing classes can be overwhelming. To help you stay organized, we’ve put together a to-do list for Little SIS Premium so that you can get ready for the return of your students, whether it’s a school year or a new semester.
Provided you completed the end-of-year steps, including pausing sync jobs, pausing the guardian sync, and pausing the SIS export, you are ready to start your back to school tasks. This Help Center article can help you if you still need to perform the end-of-year rollover tasks. Depending on your setup and the number of changes you need to make, this process should take approximately an hour.
Note: The tasks you need to complete are the same whether you are using Little SIS Premium. How you accomplish the tasks differs depending on which you are using. It comes down to where you click and slight naming conventions between the versions.
Reconfigure the SIS Export
Ahead of the start of the school year, and typically after your SIS has rolled over to the new academic year, the first step to get Little SIS Sync/Little SIS Premium up and running is to ensure you are pulling the correct data from your SIS.
Check the academic year is correct
If your SIS queries require an academic year input, check the export setup to ensure that the correct year is selected before launching Little SIS Premium for the new year. Some SIS exports will only pull the current academic year after the rollover in which case you are all set.
For the guardian export, it may not be necessary to change the academic year input. It is worth checking that both that and any other filters on the query are up to date before the new school year.
If you are having trouble with your SIS exports, contact your database administrator, SIS provider/host, or regional service center.
Reconfigure Sync jobs
Once your SIS exports are running to the Little SIS Sync server/Little SIS Premium for the new school year, the next step is to ensure that your sync jobs are ready for the new school year.
To reconfigure a sync job, you’ll open it in edit mode and verify each step in the stepper. Because sync jobs are unique, they cannot be bulk updated.
Check the source data file structure
If the structure of your file has changed the file will appear in red at the Source data & mappings/Source data in the stepper. When this happens, you need to reattach the file and create new field mappings.
Check the class alias
The most important thing to check in each sync job is your Class Alias because it provides a unique tag for each Google Classroom that is part of the job. If there is any reference to the previous school year in the alias, edit the expression to change it.
Check field mappings
If there are any other changes, such as a change to the class name, edit the expression for that field mapping to make changes.
Check Job scope & rules/Manage inclusion/exclusion rules
Are you planning to sync a broader or narrower range of classes for the upcoming year than you had previously? If so, make sure to check the Job Scope and Rules. For instance, if the sync job includes specific schools, you may want to include more schools or exclude more schools. Edit, add, or delete inclusion or exclusion rules where necessary.
Create classes without adding students
There are times when classes need to be synced without adding students. Maybe student enrollments are not set yet and you do not want to let teachers and/or students know about class allocations. Or maybe class schedules are released very close to the start of school and teachers need earlier access to start building out content before that release.
To create classes without students, open a sync job in edit mode and go to the Update preferences step in the stepper. On the Roster Updates tab be sure to deselect both checkboxes.
When you are ready to add students later, simply recheck the Add any newly-SIS-enrolled students to classes checkbox on the Update preferences – Roster Updates tab.
For more information, see this Help Center article:
Little SIS Premium: Set up a sync job, step by step
Bulk archive classes
Before you get up and running for the new school year, there are a few clean-up tasks. The first of these is to bulk archive classes used in previous years.
For more information, see this Help Center article:
Little SIS for Classroom (web): Archive or delete individual or bulk classes
Bulk delete provisioned and declined classes
Classes not used last year are prime for deletion so that teachers and administrators have a clear list of classes. These include classes in a Provisioned or Declined state. Provisioned classes show up for teachers at the start of the school year in addition to new classes you create. Declined classes show up for administrators in Little SIS for Classroom (web).
For more information, see this Help Center article:
Little SIS for Classroom (web): Archive or delete individual or bulk classes
Resume sync jobs
The next step is to get the new data into Google Classroom for the start of the school year. If you do want to have a review with our team, we recommend stopping ahead of this step to ensure your setup is good to go before pushing data to Classroom.
As with the first data run when you started using Little SIS Premium, we always recommend running the first sync of the year manually to ensure your classes look as expected. This means leaving the automation setting set to manual and triggering the sync analysis from the job list page. When reviewing the results, ensure the class name, roster size, and distribution of classes per teacher are as expected before approving and running the sync.
For more information, see this Help Center article:
Little SIS Premium: Review, approve and stage, and commit class changes
Resume guardian sync
If you have previously used Guardian sync, we recommend that you review your Scope and Rules, at the least, for any old rules that may need to be adjusted. If your SIS export has resumed, then you can begin running Guardian sync on an automated schedule after school starts. We generally do not recommend starting earlier, as there will not be many active classes for the parents to receive updates until after the start of the year.
To automate guardian sync, open the job in edit mode and go to the Automations step in the stepper.
For more information, see this Help Center article:
Little SIS Premium: Set up guardian sync
Haven’t yet made the switch to Little SIS Premium? If you are interested in this cloud-based tool, learn more on our Little SIS Premium webpage. If you are ready to get started with Little SIS Premium, speak with our team of experts.
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Lorrie McConnell
Technical Writer -
About the Author:
Lorrie was born and raised near Pittsburgh, PA. She is a proud graduate of Slippery Rock and Chatham Universities. She holds degrees in Business and Professional Writing. In her role as Technical Writer, Lorrie adds clarity to all things Amplified IT. She continually looks for better ways to explain the ‘how’ and ‘why’ for our products and services. Being a Pittsburgh native, Lorrie loves all things black and gold. When she does get downtime, she enjoys family, baking, walking, and archery. A fun fact: Lorrie participated in the largest wedding cookie table which earned a Guinness World Record with 88,425 cookies!
