Jackrabbit’s development team is hard at work on some great things that are scheduled for release during 2015! We have a couple of areas in particular that will be of keen interest to you. One area of Jackrabbit that is gaining a couple of great new instructor/staff features is the Time Clock. Essentially, the Time Clock will be a mobile-friendly portal for staff to log into and handle some of their class management duties. Another enhancement expands the tools available for you to communicate with your families.

Basically, this is what you’ll see:

• An easy way for instructors to take roll and update skills on their mobile device
• The ability to limit instructors from ever seeing any parent info or other important info inside your database
• Mass texting ability to parents and students

Note the details and the benefits to you:

Mobile-Friendly Roll Taking and Group Skills Tracking: Through the new staff portal, instructors will be able to log in quickly and easily and take roll and track skills for groups. Everything works easily through mobile devices and will help to streamline activities that often tie staff to their computers for record keeping.

There are a couple of real game-changers about this:

• An unlimited number of instructors can log in at the same time with no impact to your concurrent users.
• Those who log in to the staff portal will not be able to see anything else in Jackrabbit – such as complete class lists or family contact info.

Mass Texting Features: This will expand the ways that you can communicate with your families, offering an alternative to email that may be preferred by some of your parents – especially for critical information such as closings or class cancellations.

This feature will add a small per text cost – but only when messages are actually sent. There will be no charges added to your Jackrabbit invoice for months where no texts are sent.

This is just a preview. There is much more to come (and we will share it at the East User Conference in February)! For now, consider how you will put these new capabilities to work for your staff and look forward to added value they will bring to your office.