You can always check the Orah changelog for a live feed of all the updates that the Orah team are releasing, including the ones mentioned in this webinar.
Note: This transcript is automatically generated and has been reviewed, but it may contain errors.
Grant Dyer: [00:00:00] Everyone, welcome, sorry for our late start. Thank you so much for joining us today. My name is Grant Dyer, I'm the Head of Customer Success here at Orah. I'm joined by two of our Customer Success Managers, Emily and Alexis, who you all know, and Zohab, who leads our onboarding team.
We are honestly so excited about this one. It's been a huge summer at Orah for our product and engineering teams, and everything you're about to see today comes straight out of your feedback in the community portal. If you've ever clicked Help and Learn in the Orah sidebar and submitted a suggestion, this is where that went. The feedback loop is what made today's webinar possible, so please keep it coming. The more feedback you give us in that portal, the more likely we'll be able to develop awesome new things. We've got a huge group of schools with us today, which is fantastic, so thank you for carving out time in what we know is an incredibly busy stretch of the year. That means a lot to us.
If you're watching the recording later, I hope this is as beneficial as it is in person. You can always reach out to us afterward for any questions.
A couple of housekeeping notes before we get going. We're using Zoom's built-in Q&A for this session, so drop your questions in there as they come up, and we'll get to as many as we can. We'll save Q&A for the end of the webinar. Alexis, Z, and I will be keeping an eye on the chat throughout. If we don't get to your question live, reach out to us directly or email support@orah.com.
One more plug while I'm here: use Fin, our AI chatbot, whenever you need a quick answer. Our support team is monitoring it very closely, and right now Fin is resolving over 80% of inquiries on its own. The more people use it, the smarter it gets. We monitor every time it doesn't work out for you and make changes, so it's genuinely worth making it your first stop, especially during this busy time of year as hundreds of schools go live with us.
[00:02:00] All right, can't wait to kick this off. Emily, take it away.
Emily DeRoche: Hi everyone. So great to be leading the session today. We have a lot of updates. I know you've been watching the changelog and seeing them come in as they're published, and we're going to go through a lot of them today, so bear with me as we make our way through. Some we'll really dive into and get into the nitty-gritty; others will be more of a surface-level mention, a "hey, just in case you didn't see this in the changelog, it's really important that you know about it" type of update.
I'm going to share my screen as we go through these updates. My hope is that we'll also have a slide deck to keep us situated. We're not Zoom experts over here, so we're really trying to make sure you're able to see all the screens, so bear with us for a second as we get that sorted.
[00:03:00] I'll go ahead and share my screen, and then, Z, if you can try to share the slide deck at the same time... it looks like I'll have to share first. Unless you're able to also make me a host.
Zohaib Siddiqui: Hold on.
Grant Dyer: As you all know, we use Google Meet, so Zoom is a foreign concept to us.
Emily DeRoche: If only. If only we could make this work through... You can probably do it from the panelist view. Okay, let's see if I can now share as well. Okay, perfect, I can. Awesome. Let's share my entire screen here, and hopefully you're able to see both at once.
[00:04:00] And so I can be reminded of where I'm going next, give me a second here. All right, so, all the things. Like I said, we're covering a number of different updates today. We're grouping them into six different categories: attendance updates, in terms of functional updates for attendance managers, but also some updates under the hood, so to speak, in the background, that will lead to better visibility and more accurate counts between Orah and your SIS. Some updates to passes. Updates for parents and contact management.
Zohaib Siddiqui: Emily, sorry, I think we can't see both screens. It will only show one.
Emily DeRoche: We can only show one? Okay, well, that's fine. I'll use the slide deck just to situate myself, and we'll go through the updates visually.
[00:05:00] All right, some updates to events. These are long-awaited updates to event management. We'll also touch on some other highly requested updates, and then share a bit about what's coming next.
So, in terms of updates for attendance, a big one, really big one here, is the Reconciliation View. This is a new screen for the attendance management function. It's one that can be hidden from other staff if you choose. There's a setting in your user settings, the attendance management view, and anyone you want to have access to the Daily Reconciliation View, the group records, and the student records needs to have that enabled.
What this Daily Reconciliation view does is surface all of the information you need to know or might need to act on as the day progresses. [00:06:00] As you're starting your day, you'll see an "Absent for the Day" bucket. Any student who's been marked absent in the morning shows up in this bucket, since there's been no opportunity beyond that first class to have them marked present yet. As the day progresses, a student might be marked present in their next class, which moves them into the "Late for the Day" bucket.
These two buckets follow your daily attendance policies. Quick plug: we're introducing new updates for daily attendance policies soon, so keep an eye out for those. What this screen becomes is the working list. As students are marked absent, the attendance manager can look through this list, review the student's schedule, and see where the student was marked absent. If they have any known passes, [00:07:00] we can edit them from here.
Let's say a pass was input and it actually ends just before the first class of the day starts. What you can do is edit that pass right from here. Or you could input a pass. Let's say we've talked with a parent and we know that John's absence is known for the day. I can add an absence right from here — let's say this is an absent-excused pass, with a start time of 8 AM and an end time of, say, tomorrow at noon.
[00:08:00] So we go ahead and input that pass. And what that does is input the pass — we can see it right on the student's schedule, and we can see it has appropriately updated the student's records for the day. What was absent-unexcused has now fallen into absent-excused. I can still see John in my "excused, absent for the day" bucket and review how that pass impacted the attendance that was taken.
We can also view contact details here, if you're the type of attendance manager responsible for calling parents or getting in touch with them. You'd have their details right here. [00:09:00] There are also regular filter options, and a toggle to view all the contacts associated with the students we're reconciling attendance for.
The other thing you'll find on this Daily Reconciliation View is a count of all overdue rolls. Any teachers who haven't taken attendance show up in this list, along with their associated rolls that haven't been taken. It used to be the case that we had automated reminders for teachers, or manual one-off reminders where you'd go through the list clicking every teacher who hadn't taken attendance, sending them an alert for each course. [00:10:00] The option we have now is "select all staff and email," which sends each staff member an individual email listing the courses they haven't taken attendance for — compiling that information into one view for those teachers.
The last tab on this Reconciliation View is a list of all absences for the day — all the absences we expect to start today that are still in a scheduled state. This is a good place to look as you're nearing the early dismissal period, where you could see a list of all scheduled early dismissal passes. Here you'd also see a list of all students an individual user has access to and their associated passes, including any passes that have already ended for the day, with the same filters available.
[00:11:00] So this page is really meant to be the one-stop shop for attendance managers. As it's been released, we've already started internal conversations about small tweaks that might be made, so we're keen to hear from you as you get up and running with this new view.
Next, I wanted to touch on how some of this information has also been brought over to the student profile. If we go to any student profile, we'll see the student's schedule view directly on the profile, along with a new tab for Attendance Concerns. As a reminder, if there's a view you find yourself always coming to on the student profile, best practice is to [00:12:00] set it as the default tab — whether that's the new schedule view, or the Records page, which was common before. Depending on your workflow, you can choose which is best for you.
Moving on to some other attendance updates: alerts. A few updates here really pack a punch. One is the ability to have a smaller delay window after criteria is met — it used to be set in hours, and we now have minutes as an option, in 15-minute intervals, so you can choose 15, 30, 45 minutes, and so on before an alert is sent.
Another update: the ability to send at a scheduled time. That already existed, but there are some add-ons. [00:13:00] Let's say you want to send an alert at 10 AM — now you have the choice of whether to send a notification the following day, or not notify at all, if the criteria is met after that alert time has passed.
A good example of when to use this: notifying parents when a student has been deemed absent for the day — not yet marked present — sent at 10 AM to their contacts. If a student is marked absent after 10 AM, say because a teacher delayed taking attendance, [00:14:00] it used to be the case that these time-based alerts would send the next day at that same time. Sometimes there's a use case for that, but not always — we don't want a parent receiving an alert tomorrow for an absence that happened today, when the point of the notification was to help reconcile that attendance in the moment. So now you can choose not to notify recipients, and instead just open an attendance concern.
For staff, a big update I'm really excited about is the ability to send a summarized email instead of individual emails. A good use case: say you have an athletics director who needs to know, at the end of each day, which students met certain criteria that would prevent them from participating in a game or practice. [00:15:00] Instead of setting this up per student, you'd set your criteria for a tag or group — say, student athletes — and at a certain time of day, maybe 2:30 or 3 PM, you'd send one summarized email listing all students who met that criteria to that staff member or group.
Moving on from alerts, and this next one's a big one: attendance policies and dual codes. This update leads to a much more accurate representation of a student's class-by-class attendance. [00:16:00] If you don't make any changes here, the system will work as it always has, but there are some interesting options you can enable.
This update lets you determine how much overlap a pass needs to have with a class for it to be marked absent, tardy, or not considered at all. Sometimes a pass has just one minute of overlap, and you may not want that to impact the class at all. Or a pass overlaps by 15 minutes, which used to automatically count as an absence for that class — and that might not be the most accurate representation. So now, grade by grade, you can decide what counts as an "absent threshold." [00:17:00] If a pass overlaps by 50% of the class or more, that's automatically deemed an absent code. If it's less than 50%, the first ten or fifteen minutes of the class might instead be a tardy code.
You can also decide whether to set a "late" status. If you set one, and the pass ends X minutes before the class starts but before the absence threshold is met, it registers as late for that student. If the pass ends, say, two minutes after class starts, the teacher proceeds as normal and can simply mark the student present or tardy. [00:18:00] So the late threshold decides whether the pass shows up on the class attendance at all, while the absent threshold determines that if the pass overlaps by a set amount — percent or minutes, say 30 minutes or more — it registers as an absence even if it was originally set up as a late code.
Here's an example, since this concept can take a moment to click. Say a student has a late-to-school pass; their parent input it, and they're arriving at 10 AM, which for you is ten minutes into second period. The default reason code for that pass is tardy-excused. [00:19:00] They've missed the whole first class and ten minutes of the second class. With this set up, the system will recognize the student missed the entire first class, and instead of tardy-excused, it will use an absent code for that first class — we'll cover how to set those up next — while the second class, which falls within the late threshold and hasn't reached the absent threshold, registers as tardy-excused.
Further down this screen, there's a simulation so you can visually see, based on the options you set, how attendance would be accounted for if the pass overlaps the start, middle, or [00:20:00] end of a class. I'd recommend playing around with this as you figure out the right thresholds for your school.
If we go to Reasons, we'll see how that secondary code is determined. Here's an absent-excused code, and for each column there's a Late SIS Reason and an Absent SIS Reason. Every pass has a default code, or you might manually choose a different reason, and this becomes the secondary logic. [00:21:00] So for absent-excused, the Late SIS reason might actually be tardy-excused, while the Absent SIS reason stays absent-excused.
So here, if the pass overlaps by the tardy amount — less than 30 minutes in our example — it gives the tardy code. If a student is absent for the first ten minutes and the default code is absent-excused, it switches to tardy-excused for that pass, and that's what registers in Orah and what gets sent to your SIS. [00:22:00] But if the absence threshold is met, the code reverts to the original default, absent-excused. So one pass spanning a class and a half, or a class plus ten additional minutes of another class, could send two different codes to your SIS.
I suspect some questions have come in on this — don't worry, we'll get to those at the end of the session.
As for what's next for attendance: we should have new Daily Attendance Policies released next week, which will create a daily attendance record for each student, each day, capturing things like arrival or departure time, or early departure and return time, depending on the pass type used. [00:23:00] Those daily attendance policies will feed into the Daily Reconciliation View.
We're also introducing Overlapping Pass Validation. As an attendance manager inputting a pass, you sometimes don't know if a student already has another pass in the system that might interact with it. Going forward, if another pass exists for that student in that time period, the system will surface that for you so you can make an informed decision on next steps, rather than discovering it after the fact.
Next, some updates to passes. [00:24:00] When adding a new pass type, it used to be "start from scratch" or "start from a template." We've rethought the existing templates and rebuilt them around the most common practices we've seen across schools. Each pass type now has a slightly different setup screen, with tips you can turn on or off, guiding you through setup in a logical way. You can always see a summary on the right of what the pass will look like in practice, [00:25:00] and you still have the flexibility to adjust the details — like who can input it — as you define the specifics for your school beyond those common defaults.
The other update for passes is the ability to edit the pass type after it's been submitted. Say a request comes in from a parent — a "parent-excused absence," for example — and after reviewing it, I realize I wish the parent had chosen a different pass type instead. [00:26:00] What I can do is change the pass type and select a new one, confirm the change, and — instead of asking the parent to resubmit and re-enter all that information — I can simply change the pass type, fill in any additional context if the fields differ, and approve it. That removes the back-and-forth.
[00:27:00] The other update here addresses something we see cause a lot of issues, and it's hard to spot. When a pass is created, it's created based on the settings current at that time. If it's sitting in a scheduled state, it holds onto those settings. Say a pass type automatically activates, and you decide to change it to require manual activation — any passes created after that change get the new setting, but passes already sitting in a scheduled state keep the old setting of automatically activating. A pass holds onto the settings it had [00:28:00] when it was created.
So when you change a setting like that and save it, the system will now tell you there are a number of existing passes in the system still holding the earlier setting, surfacing that for you at the point of change. Beyond that, it'll also surface this when you look at an individual pass — if it's an existing scheduled pass where settings have since changed, opening that pass type will tell you it was created under old settings and let you see the details. [00:29:00] This is one way we think you'll be able to troubleshoot when things aren't working as expected — a lot of the pass-related issues we look into from our end come down to settings having changed. This gives you visibility into that.
Next, attendance in the parent app. This is an option you can turn on or leave disabled — it's disabled by default. To give parents access to attendance data in the parent app, you'd go to your contact database [00:30:00] and edit permissions to allow parents to view attendance in the app. You can do this across your whole system — select all, rather than one by one. This is another parent update: bulk actions within the contact database. Select all, then edit permission to allow viewing in the app.
So what does that look like for parents? Grant, can you confirm you can see the screen okay?
Grant Dyer: Yep, looks good — I can see from "Hi, Kim" down to Schedule. [00:31:00]
Emily DeRoche: Perfect. So from within the parent app, it becomes a full-circle experience for parents. They get an alert, which shows up here, and if they click the notification, they can see the alert and related records. For this attendance alert, I can see that my child Alex was marked absent, unexcused, at their 11:00 Latin class this morning. I can view attendance and see Alex's attendance for the year, or for today — did Alex miss any other classes? I can see Alex has a daily attendance rate of zero and hasn't attended any classes today. [00:32:00] I can see the schedule and notice that attendance wasn't taken in one class, but was taken in another.
And right from here, I can also add a pass. So the full-circle piece is that a parent can receive that alert and submit a pass from the same view — say, "Alex is actually sick at home today" — and put in that absence for Alex. Let's actually test this out together. We see the request coming in from Alex — let's go ahead and approve it. [00:33:00]
It might take a minute to update. I'm curious to see exactly what that looks like. So it really is a full picture for parents to access that information and submit a pass right from there.
The way parents would check this day-to-day, without an alert, is by going to Family, selecting the student — let's say Alex — [00:34:00] and then View Attendance. It can take a few minutes to update, but we'd go to Attendance and see those attendance records.
A few more parent updates. I already mentioned the contact database bulk actions, but I'll go back to show the filtering options — the ability to say "only show me students without connected contacts." This is an option I foresee schools using, especially at the start of the year as they get parents to connect their accounts. [00:35:00] Filtering to students without connected contacts narrows the list, and you can select all and resend invitations, without sending that reminder to students who already have connected contacts. There's typically a default parent who's connected, and maybe a second one who isn't yet — so you could send the reminder only to contacts for students who don't yet have a connected contact.
A couple other filter options here too: filtering by a specific tag, or by relationship type, [00:36:00] just to make for a cleaner view. For example, if other relationship types are coming into the system that you don't necessarily want having an account, you could filter to just "parent" so you're only seeing parents in the list before sending invitations.
The other thing coming very soon is shared email login, and this one's really important — it's been requested time and again, especially by schools with a lot of staff who are also parents. Right now, they need two separate logins. Soon, they'll be able to log into both accounts with one email address. [00:37:00] From a web browser, they'd click their name in the top right to switch accounts; on an app, they'd simply sign in with the same school email address to both the parent app and the staff app.
If you already have staff parents in the system, which I know many of you do, you'll simply re-invite them using their staff email address, and any connected accounts under a personal email address can be deleted or kept in place — totally up to you. [00:38:00] It would just mean that staff member has two separate accounts they can sign into, both associated with their children and their name.
Okay, moving on — I know we don't have a ton of time, but I think we have just enough. Next is events. I know this has been anxiously awaited, and people are really excited about these updates, as am I. If you go to the Activities view, or even into settings, you'd think not much has changed — a lot of it looks similar to how it always has. Where you'll see the updates is really in the rollout of the event itself [00:39:00] — on the event day, leading up to it, and how you see that event in the system.
If I go to the schedule view, I can see there's an event in progress. All events show up on the schedule, and from this view we can see the students currently registered, and that there's a waitlist, including who's on it, with a timestamp of when they were added — prioritized by that timestamp. We can see and edit all the event details here — the submission close time, the event end time. This event has already started, and we can take roll checks right here from the event.
Let's say the event is starting and a student, Scott, never showed up. [00:40:00] I can delete that student from the event, and it automatically fills their spot with whoever is next on the waitlist.
Similarly, as students indicate through their app that they're no longer interested, they can drop off the event, and students get filled in from the waitlist. When a student moves up from the waitlist to the event, they're notified. So as you approach the event and students drop off, or you remove them from the staff view, waitlisted students are automatically pulled onto the event. And if there's still room on an event and another student shows up with no one on the waitlist, [00:41:00] I can add that student directly to the event from right here.
For roll checks, at any point during an event you can click the new Roll Check button and take a roll check for the students in that event. You can always see past roll checks in the Past Roll Check section. [00:42:00] So if you wanted a roll check when meeting for the bus, another at lunchtime, and another before getting on the bus to leave, you could have an individual roll check for each of those moments. There's also a complete change log — any changes to event details, any students added, removed, or moved from the waitlist, all captured with a timestamp in the change log. You'll also notice a download function to export all responses and student fields to a spreadsheet.
One more thing I noticed today that I didn't get a chance to fully look into — [00:43:00] I saw it in QA testing, so I imagine it's coming soon: the ability to upload information to events themselves, rather than creating them internally. Keep an eye out for that.
Okay, a few other quick favorites before we get to Q&A. First, the impersonation view — we're now able to impersonate users. If you have an admin account, you can go to the Staff Database and view the site as any other active staff member would, by clicking the three dots next to their name and selecting Impersonate. That opens the view exactly as they see it.
Next, on any of the attendance views — let's go to Insights, for instance — [00:44:00] wherever you see a date picker, you can now favorite date ranges. Say you're always entering August 24th through December 25th because that's your first term — instead of typing that in repeatedly, you can save it as a custom date range. You can create custom ranges for a number of periods — the full year, a term, and so on — [00:45:00] and wherever a date picker appears in the system, those same saved ranges are available. These are unique to your account, so what you save might differ from what another user saves.
And the last one I wanted to show you, though I realize my phone has died: checkpoints. Our checkpoints now support QR codes and barcodes. The old checkpoint required you to [00:46:00] scan in or type a student's name, maybe with a PIN. Now you can enable not just QR — which came out a couple months ago — but also barcode scanning. When a student scans their QR code or barcode on their student ID, it registers that student, and depending on your kiosk setup, lets them activate a pass or check into a location. We're really excited to see how schools use this.
Grant, before we wrap up for questions, I don't know if you want to speak to a couple of updates coming soon that we're excited about — dismissals, and visitors in emergency rolls. Anything you want to add on those two? [00:47:00]
Grant Dyer: Sorry, I was muted. On dismissals — it's been a very successful launch. We have a couple dozen schools actively engaged in dismissals, and it's going really well. We're at a point now where we're pretty much booked up with dismissals until October. So if you're interested in after-school or end-of-day dismissals, reach out to Emily, Alexis, or me — we can give you a demo and walk you through how it all works. We're just so busy with it right now that we wouldn't be able to launch dismissals for a new school until early October. There's also a dismissals item on Featurebase. Emily, do I have a minute to share my screen? [00:48:00]
Emily DeRoche: Yeah, of course, I'm done sharing.
Grant Dyer: Excellent. I'll show you a couple of things that are useful, in line with what I mentioned at the start of the session. Like I said, most of the feedback behind everything you saw today came through Featurebase, the community portal we use for feedback. I want to quickly show you how to use it. There are a few ways: you can click the Orah bubble here, where you can ask a question, talk to Fin, our support AI bot, talk to support, or suggest a feature. Or, in the bottom right, there's a small question-mark icon — [00:49:00] click that and hit Submit Feedback, choose a category, say Day School, and that's it. Type in what you need, add attachments if you like, and that's how easy it is to submit feedback. Everything we covered today came out of your feedback.
Dana, I think I saw you here — Dana's the one who actually requested parent attendance in the app, and it's really cool to see it live. Thank you, Dana, for the suggestion and for working with us to build it — that all lived in the portal.
Another way in is the Orah Community Hub, where you can see all existing feature requests and browse the changelog, where we share all our updates. [00:50:00] One thing I'm really proud of is that we're now not just posting releases we've shipped, but also giving you a preview of what's coming up. For example: shared email login, allowing staff and parents to share an email, coming soon. This has been a tricky thing when a teacher is also a parent — I saw two requests about it in our support queue just today. Soon you'll be able to log in and choose whether you want the parent portal or the staff view.
There's a lot going on. Like I said, the product and engineering teams have been listening and developing all summer, building things like impersonation, so as an admin you can log in as another staff member just to see what they're seeing — useful if someone on your team says "well, I don't see that." All of those updates live here.
[00:51:00] One more thing: we host a lot of webinars, and they're all recorded, including this one, so you can always come back and find them. All our upcoming webinars are listed at orah.com/events, where you can register, and all the past ones are there too. We love having school leaders, admins, and staff join us — for example, this one was hosted about a month ago with Julie Katz from Donna Klein and Nicole from University School of Nashville. If you're interested in joining a future webinar, we'd love to hear from you. When we host webinars with schools, we want honest conversations, not perfection — what was it like introducing class attendance, what did you learn, what was difficult, what was easy, how did Orah help, what could we do better? [00:52:00] Those are the kinds of topics we love covering. If you've had an interesting experience and want to share it, please let us know.
I also want to mention our Success Library — our help center with all our guides and best practices. You can get there at success.orah.com, or by clicking the logo to open the help center directly. Last thing: the video library. I'll send a link after this webinar — Zohab, can you drop it in the chat?
Zohaib Siddiqui: Already done.
Grant Dyer: Already done, excellent. We have about fifty how-to videos the team created over the summer to help with your back-to-school setup. [00:53:00] Those videos are included in our Success Library, and also come up any time you ask Fin, our AI bot, a product question — if there's a relevant video, Fin will provide it, alongside anything from the help center library.
Like I said at the start, we heavily rely on Fin — this is a very busy time of year, with hundreds of schools coming back all at once, and Alexis and Emily cover most of North America. It's a lot, but we've pushed out a huge amount of resources for you, and you can always keep talking to your CSMs — they're there for you. But as a quick reminder for support, that's success.orah.com. [00:54:00] Fin answers over 80% of inquiries successfully. For the other 20%, we have a support team dedicated to watching for chats that didn't go well, and we proactively follow up and fix it. So the more you use Fin, the better it gets for you and the whole community.
One more site: orah.com/training. Since everyone's heading back to school at the same time, we've set up daily webinars on different topics — you've probably seen the emails and pop-ups, sorry if we've been overdoing it. At the bottom of that page you'll also find Open Office Hours — Zohab runs multiple sessions a week, no registration needed, just subscribe to the calendar and drop in. [00:55:00] If you ever have questions and your CSM is busy, that's your fastest way to get support, along with support@orah.com.
Does anyone else on the panel have anything to add?
Nope. Well, thank you all so much — we loved having you today. We can't wait to see what this school year brings. Let us know if you have any questions, and we'll send the recording out to anyone on your team who missed it. Thank you very much, bye everyone.
Emily DeRoche: Thanks, everyone. [00:56:00–01:00:00] (recording ends)
