Have you heard about Jackrabbit’s feature in the Staff Portal – Skill Tracking? If you haven’t, check out our blog here for directions on how to use it.

If you’re wondering how you can use this for your dance studio, keep reading.

This feature was built for you to keep up with your students even easier. By updating skills through the Staff Portal, parents can automatically see what skills their child has obtained and when. They can see when the student is even working on the skills. And best of all, there is an option for the staff to email the parents right in the Staff Portal to share that their child has done a great job in class today and finally mastered her split! Updates like these are very valuable to parents.

But past that, there are more benefits too. We’ve put this list together for you to see the other ways dance studios are using the skills feature to run their business.

1. Skill tracking – Some studios are using this for skill tracking, just like stated above. Amanda, owner of Celebrity Dance, explained that she has a curriculum for dance and acro classes at her studio. Some skill they track are not only the dance move itself, but the accuracy of that move. For example, a split is something that dancers work on for many years. Their skills are based on how close to the ground the dancer is from the floor. When they get to 6 inches from the ground, they’ll achieve a skill and they’ll work for the next skill – 4 inches, and so on. Keeping the skills in one place for her staff to update has helped keep her studio organized. When it’s time to determine classes for the following year, they have an easy way of seeing what level each child should be placed in. Parents will have a conversation starter with their kids when they get in the car after they’ve advanced a level.

2. Level tracking – Some studios do not have a full list of skills built out in their software. They use this feature for levels and update on a yearly basis. Olivia, Operations and Communications Manager at Gotta Dance, shares how they use Jackrabbit to update their dancers’ level on a yearly basis. When a student is excelling in a class, they may be moved up to the next level mid-year. Tracking this in Jackrabbit helps them know what students have moved up, how they are doing, and if they should be in the next level at the end of the year. Because dance skills are something that are always being improved upon, they use Jackrabbit to track the level of the student through the years.

3. You don’t have to move up just by grade level. By making some sort of skill or level tracking system for your studio in Jackrabbit, you can pick and choose which students go up to the next level each year. If you do automatically advance students into a class depending on their age, you can keep this record in your Jackrabbit database to show parents how many ‘levels’ they’ve gone up – even if they are just moving up one level each year.

4. Staff can email parents updates – Staff can email parents updates – On the skills page, there is an option for the staff to send an email. (There is a setting for each staff member in their portal settings to have this turned on or off.) Your staff can update parents right there on what happened during the class.

5. Share recommendations for parents through the Parent Portal so parents will know what class to register their child for. You can have each skill/level they obtain per year matched to a specific class for parents to know their child will advance to.

6. Share videos with students and parents – we’ve written a blog all about it for you here.

7. Goals – You can have goals like “Kindness Award” or “Leadership Award” that students are able to obtain. Or, a “Perfect Attendance” goal. You can add these to each class and staff can mark these ‘skills’ as completed and the parents will know that their student got a Leadership Award or has perfect attendance this year. This is a great way to use the skills in the Staff Portal to keep parents involved and students motivated.

What other ways are you using the Skills feature in the Staff Portal? We’d love to hear them!

<!–[if lte IE 8]>

<![endif]–> hbspt.cta.load(3803665, ’31bc32de-7d17-445c-b173-183f11352340′, {});