The Prince Albert Catholic School Division board received an update Monday on the launch of the division’s new online portal, Edsby.
According to director of education Lorel Trumier, the Edsby portal has integrated with the data from their previous portal MySchoolSask.
“Edsby will be able to provide the opportunity for parents to look at the grade book, look at their parent and student portal information. So school newsletter, school messages — it is kind of like the Facebook of education,” Trumier explained to the board.
The Edsby is one platform for all users across the school division. It allows access to all students with Microsoft 365 Office apps and is available to all students for free download on devices while enrolled in the division. The board was initially briefed on the plan at their regular meeting in June.
Trumier explained to the board that after the integration they could begin to welcome students and parents into the portal.
“We can have the electronic handshake with students and parents where the students can log on and have the opportunity to see their portal and we will start engaging the parents on the ability to see the portal as well. So it’s a lot of work that’s occurring right now. It’s an exciting time for our school division,” she said.
The curriculum team at the administrative level, along with coordinators and school staff, are working on completing the transition.
“On our website we do have information and the login information for our parents. We are pretty excited by this and looking forward to having our families engage on this directly.” Trumier said.
The division is also transitioning to new library technology this school year. Their previous program L4U, was out of date. In March they transitioned to a new program called Insignia
Insignia was selected after a request for proposals (RFP) and multiple presentations were made to staff.
The software is fully integrated and will not require two platforms for library resources (L4U) and textbooks (TipWeb). Insignia allows all libraries in the system to catalogue and circulate items. The libraries will be able to keep track of all resources a student has on loan in one place. They have already done some in-service training.
“We will have to continue with some ongoing training. But you can literally search if you have more textbooks at one school if you are short a textbook at another school, or if there is something in our resource at St. John and St. Anne would like to use it, we can search. Our resources become more efficient and we can just send them,” Trumier said.
