Synergy News You Can Use

The MDE/MCCC site will open in April. Follow these steps to get ahead of the game!

1. Log onto the MDE/MCCC site. Roll your calendar forward from 2017-2018 school year.
2. Edit your calendar with the proper dates, Instructional Days and Days in Session
3. Double check the Term Codes (Start/End Dates, Instructional Days and Days in Session)
4. Make note of your Academic Id and your Calendar(s) Numbers so they can be attached to your schools within Synergy.
5. If you do not have an account to work in MCCC, ask your District’s IoWA person who can pre-authorize you and then you can log on and request access.  MDE staff will either reject or approve your request (probably within a few days).
6. You can upload your course and staff files for each school for grades Early Education – 12.
7. When school year ends and the student courses have been transferred to student course history you can then run the student extract and then put 2018-2019 behind you.

Within Synergy you must do the following:

1. Update your Academic Id and Calendar Number for each school on the State Requirements view / MCCC tab. Remember to populate the Period Default Minutes on this tab as well.
2. Make sure that your course and sections are coded properly for your K-8 grades that cover the following subject areas (Math, Language Arts, Science, Social Studies, Art, Music, PhyEd/Health and World Languages). Grades 9-12 should have almost 100 percent of their courses coded.
3. Secondary sites should have a bell schedule with valid times attached to the school calendar.
4. Sections must have an instructional method and section record type for each record you want to report. We recommend that for your elementary sites that you populate the Instructional Minutes Override field for each section you report in the elementary. The amount you put here is the total average amount of minutes that this course will meet over the entire term of the section. Example if you are teaching this course and you average 60 minutes per day for 170 days of instruction then the amount you enter into this field is 10200 (60x170). (If you do this now before you roll your elementary schedule into the 2019-2020 school year, you will only need to fix those sections that are new or have a term code change).

Our hope is that everyone will tackle this reporting requirement early and not wait until the last week of the deadline or in some cases the last two days or last two hours.