Introduction

Welcome to the GradesFirst Advisor’s guide. The scope of this document is to provide you, the advisor, with a source of information that will help you understand and successfully setup and implement GradesFirst.  Since GradesFirst is a very flexible application, this document will instruct you on the basics of using the system.

Send Message

Sending an email or text message to your students couldn’t be easier with GradesFirst.  Simply check the box next to your student’s name and click Send Message.  This will bring up the Send a Message screen. 

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The students who you selected to receive the message will be listed at the top.  It is worth mentioning that each student will receive their own separate email, we do not “CC” student emails.  So in other words, when Bryan looks at this email, he will not be able to tell that David also received it.  This is especially important when advisors need to send out that sensitive group email but don’t want students to see who else received it.

Advisors can also attach a file with their email.  Simply click the Browse button, navigate to and select the file.  Lastly, you can also Send an Additional E-mail Notification To: anyone else.  Just type in their email and click Send Message.

If you want to send a Text Message instead of an email, click the Send Text tab, enter your message and click Send.  Your selected students will then receive a text message, from you, with your message.  Remember, it is a text message so you do have a 160 character limit.

Note:  When sending a text message, if one of your selected students does not have a cell phone number defined in GradesFirst, that student will receive your message in the form of an email.  So either way, your student will be messaged.

Schedule Appointment

Advisors have the ability to directly schedule appointments for their students by checking the box beside each of the students name and clicking the Schedule Appointment button.  When done, the screen below will appear.

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Scheduling an appointment can be a daunting process, at first, but with some practice advisors should get the hang of it rather quickly.  Below, we will cover each component of the scheduling process.

• Type is what determines whether the appointment you are creating is an Advising, Tutor, or General appointment.  While both Advisor and Tutor appointments are fairly self-explanatory, a General appointment may not be.  A General appointment can be considered an obligatory event for the student.  Events that can qualify are things like Football practice, Honors Society Dinner, things like this.  The reason adding these types of events to a student’s calendar is important is because those events will then show up as “Conflicts” when scheduling future appointments (more on “Conflicts” shortly).  It is usually a best practice to only worry about those General events when they occur during the regular school day, or office hours.

• Reasons is where you will select what the purpose of the appointment is.  For example, Career Counseling and Schedule Changes can be valid reasons for advising appointments.

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• Select a Date really means select a week in which you would like to schedule the appointment.  In the example above, I selected the 24^th and so as a result, the entire week of the 24^th appears in my scheduling grid.  This lets me see the entire week, and not just a single day, to determine which is the best day to schedule the appointment.

• Location is where you will meet your students.  Select the correct location from the drop down list. 

• Reminders are sent the day of the appointment.  The email reminder is sent the morning of the appointment and the text message reminder is set “x” number of minutes before the appointment.  “X” number of minutes is actually defined on the Admin tab by your GFA.  You can mouse over the “?” mark, besides the text reminder, to see what the current value of “X” is.

• Add an Attendee lets the advisor add extra students without having to exit the schedule appointment page.  In other words, it is a “Whoops, I forgot to select Andy for this appointment” kind of feature.  Simply type in the student’s name, select them and they will be added to the appointment.

• People Attending are the students who will be scheduled for this appointment.  Advisors are able to Remove a student or Add an Attendee prior to saving the appointment.

• Select an Advisor is the list of advisors who have availability at the selected Location.  If you are creating an appointment for yourself, simply check your name.  However, showing all advisors gives users the ability to create appointments for any advisor at that location (this option can be turned off to where advisors are only able to create appointments for themselves.  See your GFA for more information).

• Length refers to the length of the appointment.  While it will default to whatever the advisor had setup in the availability, it can be overridden here.

The Scheduling Grid is where you will actually select what time this appointment will take place.  Each grid field will either show a ‘blank’, a checkbox, or “Conflicts”.  A blank means the selected advisor does not have availability for that time on that day.  A checkbox means the advisor does have availability for that time on that day.  A Conflicts means that either the advisor, or one of the students, already has something schedule on that day.  You can click on the word Conflicts to see who has scheduling conflict.

• Availabilities is where you can override everything and schedule the appointment at any time at any day.  Select the option ‘Ignore Availabilities, unlock the calendar’ and you will see checkboxes appear in every field in the grid.  Selecting this option allows you to override any conflict or non-available day to schedule the appointment exactly where and when you want it. 

• Repeat This Appointment? Is where you can make this appointment recurring.  While there are many options to choose, the most common and easiest to use is ‘Weekly’.  Select Which Days, Every how many weeks and Repeat Until to make this appointment repeat.  For instance, I could check this appointment to meet on Friday, every other week, until May 31^st.

And finally, the last thing to do is click the Save Appointment button.  Doing this will do two things.  First it will send an Appointment notification email to each of the attendees with the details of the appointment.  Second it will update each attendee’s calendar.

Advising Report

This feature is to create an impromptu advising report for any of your assigned students.  This is excellent for those unscheduled student appointments.  Check the student you wish to file the report for and click the Advising Report button (see the below screenshot.)

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Every field on this form is optionally, so only fill out the fields that are relevant for you and your institution.

Charity (time)

This feature works hand in hand with study hall in that advisors are able to award, or take away, a student time that is counted for study hall.  For example, if Bryan Battle (student) told his advisor that he forgot to check into study hall, and thus he did not accumulate any credit for his visit, I could check the box by his name and click the Charity button.  This will open up the below popup window.

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I can select the Date, whether I want to increase (award) or decrease (take away) time, the number of minutes Bryan was in study hall and optionally a comment.  Clicking Save will award (or take away) time counted towards Bryan’s weekly study hall requirement.   If your institution does not use study hall, you can disregard this feature. 

Tag

This option is used to apply an extra layer of grouping to your students.  For example, if you are the advisor to all students with a Football Category, you may want to sometimes either view, report on, or message all of the Quarterbacks.  In order to do that, you would apply the “Quarterback” tag to those students.   So from your Home page, click the checkbox for each student you wish to apply the Quarterback tag to and click the Tag button.  In the Add Tags popup, enter “Quarterback” and click Save. 

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Now each of those selected students will carry the Quarterback tag with them.

Note

Notes are a great way to attach “Commentary” to your students.  They can also be used as kind of a task tracking utility as well.  Check the box next to a student’s name and click the Note button.

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