Education and education technology services provider Pearson, US, has announced the release of version 7.3 of Chancery SMS, its student information management tool. The latest release is stated to include various features, including a new Academic Planner tool to help counselors track students’ progress toward graduation. Chancery SMS is claimed to provide student information management for some of the largest school districts in the US.
It has been observed that while the American School Counselor Association (www.schoolcounselor.org) recommends a student to school counselor ratio of 250-to-1, today schools have a national average of 467 students assigned to each counselor. Given all of the possible curricular paths student can take, ensuring they are always making progress toward graduation can become a challenging task, it is noted. With Academic Planner, Chancery SMS is expected to significantly reduce the manual effort required to monitor each student’s status toward meeting graduation requirements.
Academic Planner tracks the courses each student has completed and automatically determines which graduation requirement area each completed course satisfies. Priorities and rules within the Academic Planner are managed by each district, ensuring that complexities such as the number of times a course credit can be awarded are considered. Students can be put on different graduation tracks at any point, and the system will automatically reassign course credits based on the defined rules for that track.
Other new features and enhancements offered in Chancery SMS 7.3 include an enhanced student search results grid that provides users with immediate access to select records, regardless of district size or search complexity. The New Counselor Base Role and Home Page seek to help users define specific counselor roles. Counselors have their own home page, as well as a way to quickly access students specifically assigned to them. Also, users can save a dynamic search list, which is useful for frequently run searches. Chancery SMS is also projected to include full access to the most recent documentation directly from the Chancery SMS interface. Full-text search, extensive hyperlinking, and personal bookmarks are claimed to make it fast and easy for users to find the information they are seeking.
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