Classes are over, students are home for the summer, and you are left to clean up and start preparing for the next school year. With a little Switched-On® preparation now, the fall term will begin smoothly for you and your students.

Follow these simple steps to get your preparation underway:

Switched-On Schoolhouse®

1. Back up your files.

This is a great time of year to be sure you have a permanent record for the 2009-10 school year. Hopefully you have utilized the backup feature of Switched-On Schoolhouse on a daily basis all year and have taken a copy of that backup to a safe place away from the actual school each week (in case anything happens to your building). Now, make a final backup and call it "2010 Final Backup." Store this backup on a CD, and keep it with your permanent records. If SOS ever requires a fresh installation, you can always restore this backup to your Switched-On system to recover any completed student work.

2. Upgrade to Switched-On Schoolhouse 2011.

Sometime mid-summer, your school will be receiving the 2011 version of SOS. You will need to upgrade by migrating your 2010 database into the 2011 SOS upgrade. You will also need to copy the new 2011 subject files onto your sever. If you have room to leave previous versions of the curriculum on your server, you may do this. If not, you should store these files on either an external hard drive or a flash drive. It is important to keep these as a part of permanent records and in case you need to view a student's work from past years.

You will receive thorough "How To" directions, but please call our tech support line should you require assistance. Our tech support team can even take control of your computer and complete the entire upgrade as you watch them click around on your screen.

3. Create a new term for 2010-2011.

Choose the type of your term wisely. Many schools utilize the Year Only term since it involves less administrative work between quarters. Please contact customer service if you would like more direction in choosing a term type. Make your new term the current term by clicking the appropriate button on the far right side of your Term Settings window.

4. Archive the 2009-2010 school year.

Utilize the Archive feature of the Admin login. This places all of the student's work that was completed in 2009-10 into an archived file that you can access via a username and password. One of the benefits of archiving is that future backup times will be shorter since only non-archived information is backed-up during this process. If you have been using SOS for many years and never archived, you may have noticed the time it takes to backup up the system has been getting longer every year. Archive all past year's work. The backup process will only backup the current school year, shortening the daily backup time.

Switched-On Online

1. Save a final grade report.

Under the Reports button of any teacher login, create a final grade report for all students. Utilize the pdf file format if you would like to print out this report for each student's permanent record file. Use the csv file format to nicely condense all of the students' grades into a single spreadsheet file for easy access in the future.

2. Set Courses to Inactive.

You will need to make all of the students' finished work inactive by going to the Assign Courses control of each student, scrolling down, and changing the status of each subject to Inactive. This will not delete any of their work. It will simply take it away from everyone's view. If you or a student ever needs to see grades or actual work, just change the status to Active.

Since all of your students' work is automatically saved on our end, there is nothing else for you to do with last year's work. All of your students' actual work will be accessible online for up to seven years. It's nice to know all of this vital information is stored right on the web for easy access for years to come.

Since this is summertime, if you read this entire article, you are definitely a dedicated user of Switched-On. We want to hear from you. Do you have any tips or tricks you would like to share with others? Please include them in the comments section at the bottom of this article so all our users can take advantage of better and unique ways to use Switched-On.