New Look Coming for Teachers in Infinite Campus

Around January 18, 2021, Infinite Campus will be rolling out a new look to teacher portal pages—along with a couple of new features. This new look and set of features is a part of an overall Infinite Campus system upgrade so we wanted you to be aware as soon as we found out. I attended a preview webinar, captured some screen shots, and I would like to review these new screens now. 

First, when teachers login, you land on the Control Center landing page of the portal. Right now it is organized in what is called "Row-Based" organization as shown below for a middle school teacher and an elementary teacher:

Before Update Look Middle School / High School:

Before Update Look Elementary School:


After the update in January, the organization will switch to "Card-Based" organization where each period will be in it's own "Card" with it's own features, as seen below:

After Update (Middle School Example):

As you can see, each period has a card, and each card has the name and a default icon of a computer, as displayed on this Period 7 example here. Clicking on the cog-wheel in the corner of the card will give you the following screen where you can customize each card's look, including name, icon, and color:



You will notice that under each card there are two or three icons (Person, Paper, and Hand).

• Person icon—Take attendance for that class.
• Paper icon—Score an assignment right from that icon. 
• Hand icon—This new Questions feature that can be turned on or off for each class (1st through 6th period have it on, 7th and 8th have it off in this example). When this Questions feature is turned on for a class, students can ask a question of the teacher from their student portal, and you as a teacher can see that question and respond to it. In the example above, 5th period has the Hand icon with a red "1" on it. This indicates to the teacher that there is one unanswered question in that class. The teacher then can click on the hand, see the question, answer the question, and the student will be able to see the answer in a reply on their portal page. This is a nice feature that students can use to reach out to teachers with, especially during remote learning.

The teacher grade book has also had a couple of new features added to it as well. One is the ability to pre-schedule assignments by using an exact time of release for start and end date of an assignment. Another is the ability to include an assignment into grade calculation or not (especially good for field trip forms or textbook checkout that teachers like to keep track of in their grade books, but not necessarily give a grade for). Last, if you teach multiple sections of the same class and you give assignments that are either the same or similar for each class section, you can now copy the assignment to each class section that you want to copy it to, saving time in creating it for each class. This feature is shown below:



All in all, these new features are designed to make things just a bit easier for teachers and will hopefully bring some joy to the new year! A quick reference guide of these new changes and features is coming out on Friday, December 11, 2020, that will also include a video to demonstrate how to use and implement these new features. When that is released, I will send district wide email and include any links they provide to those resources as well.

As this calendar year comes to a close, I want to personally wish you and your families a very happy holiday season, and here's to better days ahead in 2021! See you next year!