Claris FileMaker is additional staff. I, I see Claris FileMaker as a staff member.
When I started here, we had just started the one-to-one laptop program. I noticed we were spending a ton of time on
paper stuff, and, and doing stuff by hand--especially the mailings--and I thought there had to be a better way.
We bought FileMaker. From there, we just started by moving just our computer inventory in there.
And then, next step was to move all of our students in there. And the next step was to have
the assignment where the student belongs to the computer.
We wanted one platform, we wanted t--the Apple platform, and we also wanted a leased program,
so that students would lease the laptop for four years and then leave with it.
From there, we really started, uh, connecting it with all our other systems, and eventually we ended up
bringing payments into our FileMaker. We ended up bringing in addresses, and um, all the information from our SIS
to scheduling. At that point, FileMaker was our one-stop shop from the laptop program, um, and then our next step
after that was, you know, what else could we use FileMaker for? And that's when we expanded it to anything technology-related.
We, we knew that COVID was out there, but we didn't know to what extent it would affect us.
When it first happened in the spring, I thought it would be about a week and we'd be fine.
When it dawned on me and the rest of us that it would be longer than a week,
there was a real scramble to, to create school again.
We had to flip a switch and it was, uh, remote learning.
For the past nine months, I guess it's been, it's been a bit of a whirlwind. Um, in the, in the spring,
when everything kind of happened, we were more of just kind of the "check-in, take care," but this year,
starting school, we started fully remote for about nine days I think it was, and then we went into this hybrid platform.
And it's definitely been challenging.
I don't know that we could have ever expected that we would increase by 1,800 devices in a three-month
period of time, deploy, and, and have them up and running and ready to go as quickly as we were able.
As well as support, because it's not just the student devices. Each one of our teachers has a laptop,
and some of them have a laptop and an iPad.
In the past, with the old system, it was very archaic and everything was by paper. Now, with the Claris FileMaker,
what makes it so amazing is the fact that you can just get all your information right there.
Anytime you evaluate new software, that's always the question number one is, does this integrate with our SIS,
does this integrate with our gradebook, our LMS, uh, you know, our active directory and our email. But, luckily for us, because
we're using Claris FileMaker, that's not really our top question because we can build the integration ourself relatively easy.
So, we have been using Connect to bridge that gap and allow us to integrate with Apple School Manager and
the other software packages that we, uh, currently don't have an integration for.
It's great to see the people that you've worked with all this time, you know, come together with
amazing ideas and amazing solutions to some challenges we never thought we would be facing.