PRESS RELEASE: MUSAC signs New Era IT to service increased demand

MUSAC has signed New Era IT as an agent for the North Island region signalling the establishment of a strategic business partnership that will initially provide  consultation, hosting, training and support services across the MUSAC Classic product suite.

MUSAC managing director Dr Jeremy Dombroski says the New Era IT approach to service aligns strongly with the business values of MUSAC. “The principles behind the New Era IT school agreements provides schools with very good options for managing their ICT.” Dr Dombroski says.

New Era IT has been introduced as an agent in the North Island region so that MUSAC products and services can be provided to more schools. “We are looking forward to being able to give schools a real choice when it comes to selecting a school management system and extending our skills and expertise to set very high standards in the delivery of MUSAC modules to the schools we work with,” says New Era IT director, Ian Lindsay.

MUSAC is the most widely used brand of administrative software in New Zealand schools and provides an extensive suite of applications for the administration of all schools, including administration and management of assessment, curriculum, attendance, library resources, finances and assets.

The software has been developed in consultation with senior school managers and educators to deliver the flexibility required by schools to access the information they need.

MUSAC is owned by, and based within Massey University's College of Education.

PRESS RELEASE: MUSAC establishes stronger links to SPANZ

MUSAC is proud to announce a three year silver sponsorship of SPANZ the Secondary Principals' Association of New Zealand. "MUSAC software is the most widely used software package for school administration across New Zealand Secondary schools and it is great to be able to be able to reciprocate the support we've had from secondary schools through sponsorship of SPANZ”.

MUSAC managing director Dr Jeremy Dombroski says the MUSAC business has been through tremendous change over the past five years following the rapid growth of the business in the early years. "How we work with schools in 2010 contrasts immensely with how we worked with schools in 1990 and this will continue to evolve as technology and new partnerships provide opportunities. What hasn’t changed is the support we receive from secondary schools and our commitment to work with schools to make administration easy, so schools can focus on their core role of teaching and learning."

The first year of SPANZ sponsorship coincides with a landmark change in the way MUSAC provides services to schools.

MUSAC is the most widely used brand of administrative software in New Zealand schools and provides an extensive suite of applications for the administration of all schools, including administration and management of assessment, timetabling, curriculum, attendance, library resources, finances and assets.

The software has been developed in consultation with senior school managers and educators to deliver the flexibility required by schools to access the information they need.

MUSAC is owned by, and based within Massey University's College of Education.

Bunnythorpe School

Looking Good!

The answer is not with the Truant

The latest announcement from Ministry concerning the additional money to assist with managing and preventing truancy should be applauded. Yet one wonders if we actually have a strategy to deal with it, other than get a better measure. Sure, MUSAC and other Student Management System (SMS) providers, through txt message service providers can notify parents of kids not at school - but that is only useful if the parent is interested, or in the case of many teenagers, actually has a real ability to impact teenage behaviour. In fact, most SMS packages can give a school a multitude of reports about how good or bad their truancy problem is. Neat, we've measured it. And it's bad and we already knew that - albeit slightly worse than we thought. What tools do schools have to actually influence this behaviour and look to change it?

The conservative in me might suggest bring back the cane and give em' a good thrashing. And for some, I suspect that would actually work well.

However, I am aware of some psychological research (add a comment to this message and I'll try and dig it out) that looks back at issues like depression, drug use in kids and marriage breakdown. Researchers were looking for "cures" for depression, for example, by studying depressed people.

Similarly with looking at broken down relationships, where I'm sure a whole bunch of common factors were found with statistical significance, about bad marriages and therefore the inference was to have a good marriage, avoid these bad things. Such research found statistically important factors, but the inference the the opposite of these or avoiding these would lead to a good marriage was wrong. Same with kid drug use, same with depression.

At some point, researchers took a different approach - they studied happy people, kids that didn't use drugs and successful marriages. The results were somewhat different to the perceived opposite of the undesirable attributes society was seeking to avoid. i.e the opposite of depressed is "not depressed" rather than "happy". Socio-economic factors were not the leading cause of drug use in kids and communication was not the answer to successful marriages.

Back to truancy. MUSAC has coded, like all the other SMS vendors and as a requirement of special data sharing "approval" for SMS vendors, a whole bunch of statisical reports about truancy and attendance rates. None of it, I believe, actual helps a school determine what they need to do to get their kids more engaged in school so they are not truant. Helps them to measure truancy, but not tackle it.

Study the kids that turn up. That is the behaviour you want. That is the key. Encourage and strengthen that. What is it that gets a student engaged in what goes on in school?