Table of Contents
- How Has Technology Improved Schools?
- Efficiency 1: Board and Leadership Reports
- Efficiency 2: Dashboards for a View of Everything in One Place
- Efficiency 3: Paperless Applications and Forms
- Efficiency 4: Integrated Student Information System
Technology has a dominant presence in our lives and has integrated into every aspect of our daily routine. From smartphones to cars, technology is everywhere. Educational institutions are also part of this ongoing technological revolution.
Private schools have introduced new technologies to make learning easy and more fun for students, and these technologies have had an immense benefit. Students are more engaged in the classroom, and practical tools like learning games have made it easier for them to retain information.
Why should the administration stay behind? The school office processes a lot of data and handles many manual tasks every day, and technology like TADS can make it easier. It improves administrative processes and lessens the burdens on educators and office staff alike. TADS is a comprehensive private school technology provider that also streamlines many office processes, such as managing admission and collecting tuition. Let’s discuss how this technology is improving efficiency in the school office.
How Has Technology Improved Schools?
Outside of the school administration office, technology makes students and teachers more efficient. In addition to helping students with their assignments, technology also assists teachers in their daily tasks, such as lesson planning, grading, and parent/teacher communication.
A report published by Gallup in 2019 found that 81% of teachers see great value in digital learning tools, and 85% see its future potential. The internet helps them access content, resources and teaching materials. Educators also say that access to digital resources has aided their lesson plans and improves the quality of their teaching overall. Collaboration technology has helped teachers and educators better communicate with students, parents and fellow educators. It has also helped them leverage credibility with students.
Meanwhile, many schools now have websites that provide all the information a family needs in an easy-to-use manner. They offer easy access to calendars, progress reports, online forms and other resources. This allows school administrators to manage their budgets more efficiently by reducing paper costs and communicating more easily with students and families. A school website gives parents and students easy access to a faculty directory and helps private schools market themselves to families and donors. A website can also highlight the school with high-quality photos and build communities with social media integrations.
In general, schools and institutions that streamline operations with technology and use it in the classroom can better prepare their students and save time and resources.
Technology can also help management identify and remove inefficiencies in the school. Dedicated private school software, like TADS, brings these technological advancements to the school office and beyond. Many of our core capabilities help you save time and run a more efficient school office. Our suite of tools includes tuition aid data tracking, enrollment management, dashboards and reports. Designed to speed up manual processes and give you instant access to key information, TADS introduces critical efficiencies to your school office, including:
Efficiency 1: Board and Leadership Reports
TADS offers advanced reporting capabilities that make it easy for administrators to share crucial information with leadership and board members. This technology both increases the speed of communication and raises expectations for school board members. In the TADS dashboard, you can quickly gain insights into your school’s:
- Enrollment and applicant data.
- Fees and tuition payments.
- Fundraising goals, progress and donor information.
- Financial aid applications and statuses.
With these and other sophisticated reports, your board members can quickly visualize and understand information about your school’s financials, current students and applications. From there, they can direct your team with data-backed decision-making. They can offer insights to improve enrollment and market to prospective students and families or drive future fundraising efforts. At subsequent meetings, key performance indicators (KPIs), as highlighted in leadership reports, help everyone know if these decisions are working.
Board members can benefit from our robust reporting in several ways, such as:
Quickly Access Important Information
Traditional board meetings rely heavily on printed reports. With cloud-based school management software delivering leadership reports, every board member can access crucial documents and reporting and share files with everyone easily. The flexible reporting options in TADS let board leaders and administrators quickly generate, filter and send reports to colleagues. With the right information available to every member, board meetings become more efficient. Instead of raising questions, leaders can focus on solutions.
Within TADS, you can create users with different permissions and custom dashboard views. This ensures that every administrator and board member can view the information that’s relevant to them. It also keeps irrelevant or sensitive data away from users who do not need to access it.
Streamline Board Administration
Pulling valuable data from the cloud in just a few clicks saves school administrative assistants considerable manual labor. With automated reporting and easy report filtering and customization, board meeting preparation time is shortened. Administrative assistants can pull reports and email them out or schedule automated reports to be delivered to board members before the meeting. They no longer have to print out physical documents to distribute.
Improve Security and Control Access to Information
Keeping sensitive information — such as student data and the schools’ tuition and donation funds — confidential is critical. Using printed board reports or even online file sharing to look at this data opens your school to security issues. In TADS, you can control who accesses this data. Account administrators can add or remove members, and only approved users can access the information.
Within TADS, you can also set access levels for different users. Board members, school office staff and teachers can all access the reports they need, while documents with sensitive data remain hidden from users without permission.
Efficiency 2: Dashboards for a View of Everything in One Place
TADS offers an intuitive dashboard system that makes school management more efficient. The dashboard automatically collects and processes data from all the interconnected tools in the TADS software suite. The TADS Dashboard serves up relevant data to all your users, including faculty, administrators and leaders. You can customize dashboards to display the data that is most relevant to all your software’s users.
It offers useful benefits such as:
Better Decision Making
By visualizing data and tracking changes over time, the dashboard view helps administrators identify areas to focus on, develop solutions and track progress. The dashboard lets the board members analyze the school’s performance impartially and make better decisions. Because it offers up so many relevant data points, administrators can set goals and identify KPIs from within the dashboard to track progress against. As KPIs change over time, administrators can quickly assess if their actions contribute to their goals and course-correct as needed.
Accountability
Dashboards summarize data from across departments, making it easy for leaders to track and manage the school’s overall performance and efficiency. For example, from the dashboard, administrators can easily see recent fundraising progress. Then, they can follow up with the staff members responsible for running fundraisers as necessary. Similarly, they can quickly examine recent tuition payments and outstanding fees, helping them know whether to follow up with the billing department.
Because your school’s leadership can track information about all departments, they can hold everyone accountable for their unique responsibilities. Meanwhile, by quantifying key processes and outcomes, individual team members can analyze their own department’s efficiency, and track individual performance metrics as well.
Interactivity and Customizability
The TADS Dashboard provides real-time information to the board and faculty members. Users can interact with certain data points to gain more insights into the information most relevant to their jobs. The dashboard view is completely customizable to the individual user. For example, teachers primarily use the TADS student information system (SIS) for the gradebook and student communication features. Their dashboard may feature data about their students’ grades, current ungraded assignments or student progress over the semester.
Meanwhile, school administrators focus on different data entirely. They’re more concerned with tuition, enrollment and financial aid. Their dashboards display this information front and center.
All-in-One Solution
The value of the dashboard is that it aggregates data from across the TADS suite. With the real-time dashboard, you’ll gain a simple overview of your whole school system. The traditional methods of analyzing and reviewing data can be time-consuming for school management. With TADS, administrators can analyze reports to evaluate key outcomes and view real-time information with ease.
Mobile Device Accessibility
The TADS Dashboard works seamlessly on every device, so faculty and administrators can access the dashboard from anywhere at any time.
This allows them to keep an eye on key processes and stay connected with staff through a secure medium. Management can evaluate progress from anywhere and get the most accurate information in real time.
Efficiency 3: Paperless Applications and Forms
Paperless applications and forms can have numerous benefits other than saving trees. Integrating paperless technology plays a crucial role in increasing administrative efficiency in your school. When you work with TADS, we’ll evaluate your existing paper-based application processes and format them into streamlined online forms customized to your school’s profile and integrated with your website. TADS will also collect and digitize required forms such as medical records, so your office can store them all in one centralized system.
Managing your application process completely online and allowing families to submit forms for enrollment agreements, financial aid, field trips and any other form needs 100% digitally offer advantages including:
Reduced Paper Usage
The first benefit is an obvious one — digital forms reduce paper usage and costs. While this is a benefit to the trees and the environment, it also increases efficiency. You’ll spend less money on paper and ink and reduce staff time waiting for the printer. Since you don’t have to wait for applications and other forms that arrive in the mail, you will also save time processing applications overall.
Better Organization
When all forms are available and submitted online via your school website, you reduce the chance that forms will go missing in your office. You also reduce the chances for forms to go undelivered, either from an issue with the mail or a student forgetting to turn them in. When all forms get submitted online, your school, applicants and families receive immediate delivery notifications, allowing for better document tracking.
On your end, submitted forms are organized automatically within the TADS system, so you can easily find them when you need them. You can maintain all privacy needs for student records following state and federal regulations on our secure platform.
Automated Communications
Through TADS, families receive instant notifications when they submit applications and forms, making it easy to verify that you’ve received their information. School staff can also send admissions notices automatically via email or generate form letters to mail out the old-fashioned way. Notifications and confirmations are triggered automatically, improving efficiency in your school office by reducing your team’s need to reach out to families individually.
Efficiency 4: Integrated Student Information System
The Educate SIS (student information system) is a centralized hub for families, students and educators that integrates seamlessly with the TADS Admission and Enrollment system. It saves educators and administrators significant time by giving students and families real-time access to grades and other student data. Administrators can also use it to communicate with families, collect payments, manage donors and track attendance. It increases school office efficiency dramatically by combining key private K-12 software tools into one.
The SIS integration for TADS offers useful features such as:
Student Information Management
The educational institution has to manage tons of data for each student, from their attendance to their grades. Keeping track of this data can be overwhelming and gives rise to errors.
Now, you can organize data in a few clicks with the Educate SIS, integrated with TADS. With this integration, teachers have the flexibility to maintain their current grading, assignment tracking and attendance-taking practices easily tracking everything digitally. Additionally, staff can input, organize, analyze and even compare data between students. By being able to track all student information in one place, teachers are also able to be more responsive to any queries from parents and students.
Family and Student Portal
The student portal is another feature of the SIS that improves administrative efficiency. Through the student management system, all students and their parents have access to important and secure information via their portal. They can track their schedules, attendance, courses and even payments due using their portal. This saves your administration time since they do not have to send this information to students individually or field additional questions from students or parents about their classes, schedules and payments.
Parents and families will also have access to an easy-to-use portal where they can track their child’s academic progress. Parents can view alerts from teachers and check their financial status right from the portal. This saves administration time relaying communications between teachers and families. It also saves your billing and finance team from notifying parents individually about outstanding bills.
Better Efficiency
The SIS module expedites day-to-day functionality for staff and faculty. Besides integrating with TADS, it also integrates and syncs data with Ravenna, Google Classroom, aSc Timetables and USA Scheduler. This helps educators and office staff across campus get more out of their education software tools. With streamlined communication between faculty, parents and administration via the SIS module, your entire school office runs more efficiently.
Learn How to Run a School Office More Efficiently With TADS
Every sector uses technology to reach its full potential, and the education sector is no different. The latest technology available benefits students and teachers while boosting the school’s administrative efficiency. TADS reduces extra work and manual processes for administrators, so they can focus on the important task of running a school office.
Our flexible suite of tools for small-to-medium private schools offers solutions to streamline processes for every department. The Admission and Enrollment features help you track applicants and accepted students during your busy admissions cycle. Your financial aid department can reach award decisions faster and with the right information using our financial aid assessment solution. Meanwhile, automated billing and tuition management helps you collect tuition payments faster by communicating with families automatically, lessening your office staff’s billing and collections workload.
The best part is that our suite of tools is customizable to your school’s needs. You can select the features that will improve your school’s administrative efficiency without investing in tools that don’t work for your unique workflows. We know that every private school is different, and we can help you select the right modules for your main office staff. To find out how our tools can have a significant impact on your school office efficiency, reach out to the TADS team today.