Back to School: 4 Ways Tech Teams Can Create an Effortless Return to the Classroom

The return of students, teachers, and staff to the classroom following summer break can be a chaotic time for everyone involved. Whether supporting hundreds of users or tens of thousands of users, IT administrators are constantly challenged with ensuring technology improves security, safety, and the educational experience without distracting staff and students.

When it comes to those first few weeks back in the classroom, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Summer is the perfect time to take proactive steps to update all-things-Lightspeed, allowing your end users to hit the ground running and you to focus on one of the many other challenges that crop up during those critical weeks in the fall.

Here are a few tips to ensure you are proactively setting up your Lightspeed Systems products to provide an effortless experience when students return.

1. Update to the Latest Versions: Lightspeed is constantly iterating to provide new features, functionality, and compatibility across operating systems and applications. This also includes ensuring you are protected in the ever-changing security landscape. By using the latest available Lightspeed Systems versions, you will receive the full benefits of our latest innovations while minimizing security and compatibility risks. Summer is the perfect time to deploy and test new versions so, when devices are back in their hands, students can focus on learning on Day 1.
2. Prepare Your Rostering and Syncing: Your roster is at the foundation of Lightspeed Systems’ products. Take this time to ensure your data is clean, accurate, and up to date to avoid downstream issues once it is imported. This is also the time to delete and archive old data so you can cleanly import next year’s roster. Review the 2024 Back to School -Success Checklist (you must login to the Lightspeed Customer Support Portal) or contact your Success Engineer or support to facilitate this preparation.
3. Train and Re-Train Your End Users: Like death and taxes, two things will be unavoidable in the fall: new end users will join your district and Lightspeed Systems’ products will have new and exciting functionality. So, whether you are introducing new users, or want to ensure existing users are proficient in all available features, leverage our education and training tools, including;
   • Live virtual training for Lightspeed Alert, Lightspeed Digital Insight, and Lightspeed Classroom Managment
   • Video Tutorials for Classroom Management available for educators on YouTube or the Lightspeed website
   • Lightspeed’s YouTube channel also houses additional ‘how-to’ videos, for example, this one on AccessScan for Teachers
4. Know Where to Go for Help: Lightspeed Systems has an experienced dedicated team on stand-by to support you. This comprehensive guide will help you check all the boxes across your licensed products, so you can optimize your environment. Bookmark this Back-to-School Resource Center created as a ‘hub’ of important information and resources.

Still have questions? We have upgraded our chat feature to leverage AI tapping into our extensive Knowledgebase and serving up conversational answers to your questions without having to scan through articles. Need to discuss something more complex? We have live agents ready to help you through our chat feature, or you can create a case in our Customer Portal and we will reach out to get your question or issue resolved ASAP.