ADAM

Records and Points Administration

ADAM offers a reasonably sophisticated means to deal with the disciplinary and award records that is compatible with many schools’ requirements. The following sections will explain the different features of the system.

Events vs Points

Broadly, there are two different kinds of records that can be stored by ADAM. These are broken down into an “event” and a “point”. Distinguishing between the two is best started with some examples:

Events:

Points:

The key distinguishing elements are:

Managing Records and Points Category Groups

Three default groups are provided: “Good”, “Neutral” and “Bad”. These groups are used only to sort the Records and Points categories and have no other meaning. Some combined primary and secondary schools choose to have groups such as “Junior Primary”, “Senior Primary” and “High School” to help separate out the categories. This also allows different consequences (see later!) for demerits in the prep school vs in the high school.

On the Administration tab, look for the Pastoral Administration heading and click on the option to Edit the Records and Points Category Groups.

On this screen, you can edit existing groups, add new ones and change the order of the groups.

Managing Records and Points Categories

This is certainly where most of the work is done when setting up Records and Points for your school.

From the Administration tab, look under the Pastoral Administration heading and click on the Edit the Records and Points categories option.

Adding a new Records and Points Category

The screen, shown above, has a number of options, explained below:

Click the button at the bottom to save the new Records and Points category.

Adding and Editing Records and Points

There are several ways to add records and points to a student’s profile.

From the Pupils tab, under the Records and Points Admin heading, click on the option Add records or points. Type in the student’s name and click on the Next button.

Choose the category that you wish to record against and, once more, click on the Next button.

You can now record the information necessary. Be sure to include a note explaining the reason for the record. Your name is automatically recorded against this entry. When you click on the Record Records and Points button, you will see the new record appear in the table below.

If you have permission, or if you added a record to a pupil, you will see an option to “edit” or “delete” the record in the Actions column.

Displaying a Pupil’s Records and Points

From a pupil’s profile, you can click on the Records and Points option and you will see a tabbed summary page of the different categories. Click on each category to see that pupil’s records.

Records and Points Consequences

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Records and Points Alerts

Using Records and Points Alerts, ADAM is able to send emails to staff on a regular basis to alert them to records and points that have been added to a pupil’s profile. Alerts are sent at a regular time interval each day to staff members. The exact staff members that are alerted can be configured per alert.

Timing of the Alerts

To configure the time at which ADAM sends Records and Points alerts, navigate to Administration → Site Administration → Edit Site Settings. On the Site Settings page navigate to the Cron Settings tab and scroll down to the Alerts section. Within that is a time selector for  Records and Points alerts times.

Click to select a time to send the alert. It is possible to send alerts multiple times each day. Alerts will only be sent for items that were added since the last time the assessments were run.

Creating Alerts

To create a new alert, navigate to Administration → Pastoral Administration → Manage Records and Points Alerts. You will be shown a list of existing alerts, if there are any on your server.

Any existing alerts can be edited or disabled from this screen by clicking on the edit or disable links to the right of each entry.

To add a new alert, click on Click here to add a new alert at the top of the page. The following screen is shown:

The Records and Points reason is the specific category that should generate an alert. If you wanted to be notified when a demerit was awarded to a pupil, you would select “Demerit” from this list.

The Starting Threshold and Ending Threshold are the totals that a pupil must reach before the alert is triggered. If you want to alert a teacher to every incident, set your Starting Threshold to 1 and your Ending Threshold to the highest value possible (ADAM only lists numbers to 1000 - if you think pupils might get more than that, please contact the developers). If you only want staff members to be notified on the 5th occurrence, then choose “5” for both your Starting and Ending Thresholds.

If you want to be alerted to every 5th occurrence, you will have to add in additional alerts for the 10th, 15th and 20th occurrences - and more if you think a pupil will reach those levels.

The starting and ending thresholds are counted according to the Alert period. You can choose to count from the current reporting period (“Period”), the current year, month, week or a pupil’s entire career at your school (“Total”).

The last two options determine who ADAM will send the alerts to.

Choosing a staff member in the Email Staff block will cause that staff member to always be emailed. In the case of a detention, for example, this might be the head of discipline.

The second option, Email teachers of these subjects, will alert any staff member that teaches the offending pupil for one of the selected subjects. While this may include academic staff, the list of teachers would also be those of subjects like “Registration Class” or boarder house parents. In these cases, you would select “Registration Class” or “Boarding House” and the teacher who has that pupil in his or her class would be notified of the pupil’s alert.

Click on Save Changes to save the alert.