Feature Story We would like to extend a thank you to all the participants, BIE Trainers and BIE Staff who attended the 2009-2010 NASIS Interchange held in Albuquerque, NM the last week of October. About 200 participants attended for each of the two-day sessions. The NASIS Interchange lets users gain insights into new and innovative ways to use NASIS and also provides a unique networking opportunity with colleagues, Campus Staff and BIE Staff for continued sharing of ideas and support throughout the year. These popular events provide continuing education to help users utilize more features and stay aware of the new changes that have been introduced to the NASIS application. Interchanges help users grow in their use of NASIS regardless of how long they have been a user. We made some changes to this year’s Interchange event that we hope was beneficial to all who attended. We shortened the lunch break and omitted the luncheon keynote speeches. This allowed us to add an extra hour of training sessions that our users could attend to give them additional learning opportunities. The training sessions were a mix of lecture sessions and hands-on sessions, where users could learn by working directly in the product with interactive communication. The open and hands-on support lab was available again this year for users to come in and receive one-on-one training, help implement what they had learned in their training sessions or work on other improvements they would like to put into action at their schools. It was nice to meet so many of the new users and see so many of the returning users take advantage of the resources in the support lab. Again, thank you to all who helped make this year’s Interchange a success and we hope to see all of you again at next year’s event.
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The NASIS program was recently updated from version 2010.1.0931 to 2010.1.0943. Many bug fixes and other changes are included in this update. For full details, release notes are available on the Customer Support Portal by going to Available Releases>Campus 2010.1 and then clicking on the release notes for patch bundles 2010.1.0935, 2010.1.0939 and 2010.1.0943. The Support Portal also now hosts release videos to help explain significant changes in patch bundles. Click on the links below to watch videos of the listed topics.
For a summary of the highlights, click here. |
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Ever wish you had time and resources to train your teachers all the cool stuff you learned about NASIS? Your wishes are coming true. There are many resources available that will help users get NASIS training. The more users are using NASIS, the more successful NASIS will be in your school. A great opportunity for teachers to take advantage of is the free Teacher Power videos produced by Infinite Campus. Teachers are often too busy to attend training. To accommodate a teacher’s busy schedule, the videos on the Customer Support Portal are short and self paced, which means they can start and stop them as their schedule dictates. The support portal also has videos for NASIS administrators, covering general product information and new releases. Click on the videos link under Campus Resources to see what is currently available. We want to emphasize that all of these videos are free! Infinite Campus also offers more in-depth training on all areas of NASIS.Infinite Campus University (ICU) is a way for users to take courses on line. It is a live training session over the internet with one of our certified Campus Trainers who know how to effectively teach adult learners. If users don’t find the course they want in the course offerings, they can click on the link to request a specific course. NASIS Newsletters are put together on a quarterly basis by your NASIS team at Infinite Campus. We try to keep a theme in each of the newsletters. The articles are short explanations on areas in NASIS that will help your school incorporate NASIS solutions. We have stored an archive of prior newsletters letters on the NASIS Project Portal This is a site that you will want to bookmark and visit periodically. We update this site on a regular basis with NASIS information that will be helpful to your schools.Bureau Certified Trainers (BCTs) are available to schools as well. BCTs are NASIS users that have been through rigorous training from Infinite Campus. They are fluent in many of the modules in NASIS. You can invite a BCT to come onsite to your school by contacting your Regional NASIS Education Specialist. Don Padilla (dpadilla@bia.edu ) works for schools in the West Region. The Navajo Region is managed by Susan McCabe (susan.mccabe@bie.edu ). In the East Region, schools will work with Kathy Renville (krenville@bia.edu ). The best way to reach these individuals is through their e-mail, as they do a lot of traveling. Please take advantage of all these opportunities. Training is an important way for schools to improve NASIS usage. The more users know how to use NASIS, the less time they spend on the system. Less time on the system leads to more time with the students. We look forward to working with your school as you advance your NASIS experience! |
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Recently schools have been submitting cases requesting the NASIS team combine, or in some cases delete, a duplicate person or two. The NASIS team has developed a more efficient way to handle these requests by running a SQL query to look for all duplicate people on your system. The results of the SQL query are then put in a spreadsheet and attached to the support ticket. Our goal is to be able to merge, combine or delete en masse rather than one or two at a time. Here is an example of what the spreadsheet might look like:
Remember to avoid creating duplicate students by performing an All People search on your local NASIS edition. If no student appears, find the student on the Bureau’s State Edition by using the Student Locator and choose/use that record. The Staff Locator should be utilized in the same manner. |
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ISEP Instructional and Residential Verification and Certification Reports ISEP Verification and Certification is the Education Line Office (ELO) process that verifies student eligibility. ISEP funding is distributed to schools and dormitories based on enrollment eligibility. For details on the eligibility process, please refer to the ISEP User Guide found on the NASIS Project Portal.The Verification reports are available in the NASIS District Edition and State Edition. The Certification report is available in the NASIS State Edition only. The ISEP Instructional Certification Report is used to certify instructional facilities separate from residential facilities. The report covers the entire academic school year. ISEP Certification is a two-step process involving verification and certification of student information. The ISEP Verification Report is generated and printed, then evaluated by the school and ELO. As errors in the data are found and corrected in the District Edition, the Verification Report is re-run and reviewed again. The process of running the Verification Report, evaluating the student information, and correcting errors is repeated until the data is considered accurate. Schools can also use the BIE Validation report to help audit ISEP data. When the school and ELO confirm that the data is accurate in the Verification Report, the Certification Report (a formal roster) is run and the data is printed and signed by the ELO, school principal and the school board chairperson. Certification is the official endorsement of the roster (student list). To ensure no changes are made to the data after certification, a digital copy is archived and a printed copy is signed by the ELO and school officials and submitted to the BIE. ISEP Residential Certification is based off of membership and attendance during a three-week period (count weeks). The count weeks default to the first Sunday in October, the week prior to and the week following. Schools are required to submit a waiver to request approval of alternative count weeks. ISEP Residential Certification is also a two-step process involving verification and certification of student information just as it is for Instructional certification.
BIE Validation Report This report can supplement your Verification report by validating data and presenting errors and warnings in a format easy to fix with links to the tabs where the data in question exists. You may run this report to display errors (red text), warnings (black text) or both. Errors indicate data that requires correction; warnings indicate data that merits review and possible correction. You may also choose to run this report for all categories of validations or sub-group such as behavior or Special Education. The following are examples of what are considered errors: - Consistency of the five SpEd fields on the BIE enrollment, including Exit information The following are examples of what are considered warnings: - Age checks for SpEd
The BIE 30 Days Residential Attendance report is used to monitor residential programs and is tied to funding based on the number of students in attendance. The report will identify students who met or failed to meet the residency requirements in a 30 day period. The report looks at the Attendance module and if there are unknown, unexcused or excused absence for the midnight bedcheck, then the student is considered not in residence and marked with an N. Exempt absences are considered in residence and are marked with an X. Students that are in residence for 10 days in a 30 day calendar period are considered eligible. Below is an example of the report in Student Summary Attendance mode:
Reminder: As with any new functionality introduced in NASIS, the appropriate Tool Rights must be assigned to the User Groups that need access to it. |
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NASIS Lifecycle This article helps answer the following questions: What is NASIS? Does NASIS ever change? If so, why and when? What is the update process? How can I find details on what changes will occur? The Native American Student Information System (NASIS) is a software application that is available to users over the internet. The servers that run the software are hosted in Albuquerque, NM. Each Bureau Funded School has their own District Edition, which consists of a Web site and a separate database to store their data. Data for students who transfer between BIE schools can be shared through the Records Transfer tool. Data used for BIE reporting is automatically shared with the Bureau via synchronization to the State Edition. Access to data on any site is controlled through tool rights, which can be assigned to user groups. Like other software applications, NASIS is regularly updated. Updates often include fixes to problems with the software or address security vulnerabilities. Sometimes these updates also include enhancements to existing functionality or new features. Infinite Campus is the software company that develops NASIS, and they release updates on a reoccurring 4 week cycle. Every time an update is released, Infinite Campus publishes a document (Release Notes). These documents provide details about changes that have been made in each update and are available for all users to review on the Support Portal. If the Bureau determines that a particular update contains important changes for NASIS users, they will begin their User Acceptance Testing (UAT) process. Significant changes to NASIS functionality require additional approval from the Change Control Board (CCB). The update is first applied to the Bureau’s separate testing environment (staging). Once the testing is complete and approval has been granted, the update is scheduled to be applied to each of the BIE school’s live NASIS environment (production), as well as their training environment (sandbox). Communications about production updates are sent to Bureau schools via the NASIS email list (ListServ). Any NASIS user can be a member of this ListServ to discuss the use of NASIS. Upon receiving notice of a scheduled update, administrators should prepare by reading release notes. This will help determine whether to conduct new training or assign new tool rights to user groups. |
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