August 2009                                             CRS Advanced Technology IN THIS ISSUE FAYETTE COUNTY PUBLIC SCHOOLS SEAMLESSLY COMPENSATE SUBSTITUTES TEXTBOOK DEATHWATCH: AUGUST 2009 MEET A SUBFINDER EMPLOYEE   QUICK LINKS CRS WEBSITE NEWSLETTER ARCHIVE SUBFINDER MEET MAXX   Welcome to the August edition of InTouch Online! The year of 2009 is officially half over, and for many, the 2009 – 2010 school year has started, or is quickly approaching! Did you know? August is a rare month in the United States when there are no national holidays! However, one unofficial holiday we thought would be important to recognize is that August is National Back to School Month. Just because school is back in session doesn't mean that BBQs and some pool time is completely out of the picture. Enjoy, because before you know it, the nights will get cooler and the leaves will change. In the meantime, get out there and enjoy the last full month of SUMMER! In this edition of InTouch Online, our Customer Highlight has over 10 years of SubFinder experience to share with us; and we also have some interesting technology news regarding the traditional text-book. Now that text-books are starting to be available online (eBooks), how long will the traditional text-book last?   Customer Highlight: Fayette County Public Schools, Kentucky SubFinder Customer for over a Decade…and Counting   Interview by: Corinne Everett, Marketing Coordinator Interview with: Diana Kay Morris, SubFinder Specialist and Operator & Karissa Austin, Substitute Service Specialist and SubFinder Operator   Fayette County Public Schools is located in Lexington, which is the Bluegrass Region of Kentucky. Lexington was founded in 1775, and is also famously known as the Horse Capital of the World. Fayette County consists of 283 square miles of gently rolling plateau, and is composed of 55 schools, which serve more than 36,000 students from the Lexington metro area. This school district employs approximately 6,500 individuals, all of whom have one common goal in mind: providing world-class education to the children of Fayette County. Their efforts have proven to be successful, having earned state and national accolades in academic, athletic, and professional contests. “It’s About Kids” can be heard frequently by teachers, administrators, substitutes, parents, or any other individual associated with the public school system. Their website can explain it best: Kids are always our top priority. In every classroom across the school district, we strive to provide opportunities for students to grow and excel, and we constantly remind our students to reach for the stars!  Last month I was in Kentucky attending the Kentucky Association of School Administrators Conference (KASA), and was inspired by all of the districts in the state. Fayette County Public Schools is one of our oldest SubFinder customers. Consistently keeping up with ever-changing technology, I recently spoke with the SubFinder Operators from Fayette County, Diana Kay Morris and Karissa Austin, about how SubFinder has grown and assisted them for over a decade…and then some!   Corinne:            How many employees within the Fayette County Public Schools utilize SubFinder? Diana:               We currently have approximately 3,450 employees and 1,800 certified substitutes who utilize SubFinder. Corinne:            How long have you been working with SubFinder? What benefits do you feel SubFinder brings to Fayette County’s human resource and payroll office? Karissa:            I began working with SubFinder on Sept. 29, 2008. The ease in obtaining a substitute for an assignment is a major benefit. Our average fill-rate is 99%; I’ve been told that SubFinder is credited to this success rate. Diana:               Fayette County Public Schools has been using SubFinder since 1998. I, personally, have been working with SubFinder since 2000. Prior to that (1996), I was hired part-time to assist in manually placing substitutes by individual phone calls. This was done by myself and two other individuals; and we each worked from home. Some benefits of SubFinder that stick out in my mind are the ability to allow managers to track employee absences, the increase in employee and substitute accountability, and the ease of transferring human resource data electronically; all of which save time and money. Corinne:            How do your employees and substitutes feel about SubFinder? Do you feel substitutes are attracted to your district because of the convenience SubFinder provides in finding jobs? Diana:               The employees and substitutes are very happy with SubFinder. For our employees, it has simplified the absence reporting process by providing the option of calling in their absence via phone or the Internet. For our substitutes, they like the ability to access SubFinder 24 hours a day, and job shop. I feel substitutes are attracted to our district because SubFinder is so user friendly, and they have a better chance of choosing the positions they want to work in. Corinne:            Fayette County switched from SubFinder as a Box on Site solution to the ASP solution. Why did Fayette County decide to make this switch? What are the advantages of SubFinder as an ASP solution?    Diana:               We made the decision to switch from the SubFinder as a Box-on-Site solution to the ASP solution to alleviate having to come in after hours to reboot SubFinder because of electrical issues or hardware problems on our end; and to also alleviate the burden of having to call our Technology Department every time something went wrong.   Some of the advantages of SubFinder as an ASP solution are that it is housed at CRS, they maintain the hardware, virus software, install the updates, apply all patches to the system, and conduct general maintenance to keep it running smoothly. We were also able to disconnect 12 phone lines at our locations because CRS takes care of those, as well. Since switching to SubFinder as an ASP, we have not had any downtime. CRS takes care of everything! I would recommend it to everyone who currently utilizes the Box-on-Site solution.   Corinne:            Recently, Fayette County has been researching SubFinder’s substitute payroll software, SubPay. What features and functions within SubPay do you think will help Fayette County in the payroll process?   Karissa:            Here at Fayette County we give our certified substitutes a pay increase after they have substituted for 21 days. We have been researching SubPay because we feel that it would benefit this office by better tracking the days worked by our substitutes, and provide accurate reporting information.   Diana:               I think SubPay would help for purposes such as: tracking the long-term pay, unlimited pay tracks (for certified substitutes who have worked 20 days, then increase pay on day 21), create budget codes based on job position, site, etc. This would help a number of people in Fayette County, such as the bookkeepers at each site who have to manually enter the payroll information for their school. SubPay would help our budget office by ensuring that the schools are using the correct budget codes. SubPay would also eliminate the need for the SubFinder office to send weekly reports to payroll regarding who has started a long-term position, how much it should be, and informing payroll what certified substitute teachers have worked over 20 days to ensure that their pay has increased. Essentially, I believe it would help create a seamless environment between the SubFinder office and payroll.     We would like to thank Fayette County Public Schools for being such loyal customers for many years. Thank you to Diana and Karissa for providing us with information on how SubFinder has helped them for over a decade…and beyond!     Back to Top Seamlessly Compensate Substitutes SubPay Effortlessly Manages Payroll Using SubFinder Data   Is your human resource and payroll office frustrated with managing the substitute payroll process? Why continue this time consuming bi-weekly or monthly task when SubPay™ can automatically complete this process using existing SubFinder data. SubPay is the first and only application of its kind to automatically calculate substitute pay based on your organization’s defined pay rates and incentives, such as: escalating, retroactive, and long-term pay. In addition to calculating gross wages, SubPay supports accurate funding practices by creating and assigning budget codes to substitute time worked; this ensures expenses are being billed to the proper accounts.   Other benefits include: ·         Extensive reporting features ·         Saving many hours of labor each year that would typically be dedicated to manual data entry ·         Export of data calculated in SubPay to a variety of payroll applications ·         Increase substitute loyalty by providing competitive pay options and incentives   Read a Customer Case Study to learn more about SubFinder and SubPay. Make the new school year a seamless one by using SubFinder and SubPay to automatically place and accurately compensate your substitutes. For more information on SubFinder and SubPay, please contact us at 800.782.3463, or visit our website at www.crsadvancedtechnology.com.     Back to Top    Textbook Deathwatch: August 2009 Article From: Tech&Learning (http://www.techlearning.com); July 24, 2009     The question it seems, is no longer “if?” but “when?” Judy Salpeter, editor-at-large for Tech & Learning magazine and the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) dares to ask in this excerpt drawn from CoSN’s 2009 Compendium.   Is the print textbook—that old-fashioned, heavy, expensive staple of the 20th-century classroom—soon to be a thing of the past? While it’s hard to imagine the K-12 world, known for its resistance to change, throwing out math, language, and science textbooks in favor of digital content, our nation’s current fiscal crisis, combined with major shifts in the way we access and process information, is bringing the subject to the forefront.   In the K-12 world, where schools, rather than families, bear the brunt of textbook costs and budgets are strained to the limit, a number of districts and states are seriously questioning—some for the very first time— whether textbooks are the best use of instructional funds. The states of Indiana, Florida, Texas, and California [Editors Note: CA Lists State - Approved Digital Textbooks] have all made news in recent months with plans to allow districts the flexibility to spend funds previously earmarked for textbooks on digital content or other educational needs.   While some districts and states might be looking at flexibility as a way to free up funds for things that do not qualify as instructional materials, others are primarily arguing that it is possible to get high-quality content in a more engaging format for less money than schools have traditionally spent on textbooks.   Bailey Mitchell, chief technology, and information officer for the Forsyth County Schools in Georgia, explains, “We spend about $81 per student each year on textbooks but only $19 per student on all of the digital content we subscribe to—and that includes a broad collection of multimedia resources, databases, and interactive lessons.”   In addition to the physical costs, Mitchell talks about the hidden instructional costs associated with textbooks, including instructional time wasted by teachers issuing and collecting books, students going to lockers between classes to get their texts, students not doing work because they’ve forgotten their textbooks at home or at school, and so on. Mitchell also points to a scenario that could be seen as the ultimate waste of money: districts that are spending thousands of dollars on warehousing textbooks that are too old or too unpopular to be used.   Although digital versions of textbooks—or eBooks—have met with only limited success in the higher education world, some in K-12 believe that teacher receptivity to online texts will change with e-readers such as Amazon’s Kindle or Sony’s Reader Digital Book. Florida's Brevard County Schools is considering an eBook pilot. So are the Des Moines Public Schools in Iowa. Jo Ellen Latham, PK-12 literary specialist for the district, has been experimenting with Kindle for a possible high school pilot. “eBooks have the potential to fundamentally change the way we engage with text,” she says. “A project to support this would help us anticipate and be prepared for future needs.” While the focus of this pilot would be on literature study and independent reading, one can imagine the lessons learned being applied to e-textbooks. As Des Moines’ former chief technology officer, Greg Davis, puts it, “Textbook budgets often get cut first, so the texts we have are frequently old and obsolete. If there was a different solution that allowed us to get more current materials, that would be great.”   The Charles County Public Schools in Maryland has been working to design its own hybrid approach that combines offline print textbooks with digital supplements and teacher materials. According to district CIO, Bijaya Devkota, “Over the past five years we have worked with textbook publishers to obtain digital versions of their entire textbooks. We made it clear to them that we were going to continue buying the print textbooks for students; why would they want to provide us with the digital versions otherwise? But we needed the digital content to help our teachers map the textbook to the district curriculum.”   The district then hired teachers to work over the summer making links between state standards, specific textbook pages, various assessments, and multimedia content from Discovery Education streaming and other sources. “In this way we’ve created our own digital teacher’s editions of the textbooks,” Devkota explains. “In planning a lesson, a teacher can zoom right in on the standards being addressed that day, assign reading in the textbook, and help bring it alive with relevant voice, data, and animation. We’re moving the assessment process online. And with the lessons tied in to our Learning Management system, teachers can email relevant assignments to students at home.”   Many digital textbook approaches can be seen as evolutionary in their nature—representing a gradual transition from text-based to digital content. But there are some educators who would argue for a more dramatic change: doing away with textbooks entirely. Matt Federoff, director of technology for the Vail (Arizona) School District is one person who feels this way. “The textbook delivery model is out of gas,” he says. “No job in the world says read the chapter and answer the questions at the end of the book.” Furthermore, he adds, “I don’t want all of American history from one vendor, or even three vendors. Why should we take prepackaged bulky content and try to shoehorn it into what we need to teach?”   Federoff prefers what he calls “the iTunes model.” He explains that, just as iTunes allows users to buy individual songs rather than a whole album, “I don’t want to buy the textbook but I might want to buy a small piece of it. Good teachers stopped using the books years ago, although they still put stickies on their favorite pages from the 20 years of textbooks that were hanging around the school.”   “These sorts of changes are going to happen at the tidal wave level, not an incremental level,” concludes Bailey Mitchell. “Google, Amazon, and others are developing a ‘read-any-book-on-demand’ delivery system. Television is rapidly migrating to a ‘see-any-show-on-demand’ delivery system. You can special order a hamburger ‘your way’ at the drive-through or buy a new car on the Internet with just the options and colors that you want. Everything in our society is becoming more individualized, consumer orientated, and custom-tailored—except for public education. A prime example of the rigidity and inefficiency that reign in our public schools is found in our use of textbooks.   “Differentiation of instruction demands that we turn away from the static printed page and adopt a more hyperlinked, multimedia and interactive approach to the delivery of content.” The time to start, according to Mitchell and many of the other contributors to this article, is right now.   This excerpt is drawn from "The Future of Textbooks," one of six monographs that make up the 2009 CoSN Compendium. The CoSN Compendium is a collection of resources for members of the Consortium for School Networking, a national non-profit organization that promotes the use of information technologies in K-12 education to improve learning. Additional copies can be ordered online at www.cosn.org.   *Visit Tech & Learning Online: The Resource for Education Technology Leaders focusing on K-12 educators.   Back to Top   Meet a CRS Employee – Chris Trayer, Regional Account Executive     Please tell us your full name: Chris Trayer   How long have you been working for CRS: 7 ˝ glorious years   What is your favorite thing to do in the summer: I would say going to the beach with my family.   Have you taken any summer vacations: I have gone to Rehoboth Beach in Delaware, and will also be going to Disney World in August.   Describe yourself in three words: Polite, Witty, Unique   What do you consider your hobbies: I enjoy working out, eating, coaching soccer, and the best for last – watching Penn State Football!   If you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go: It has always been a dream of mine to go to Colorado Springs to train the Olympic Athletes.   What do you like best about your job:. I love to travel, meet people, and talk about SubFinder.   Little Known Fact About Me: Back in the day, I was a competitive bodybuilder.   Back to Top Would you like to receive SubFinder product information?   Complete the request form and a CRS Representative will be in contact with you soon! Welcome back to school! We hope you have a great beginning of the year, and will be back in touch next month!  Visit the CRS Advanced Technology website to learn more about SubFinder and other CRS products:  www.crsadvancedtechnology.com. Best regards,   The CRS Advanced Technology Team