Up until this year Assessment Interpretation values sent to MSIX were treated in two different ways depending on whether they were state assessments or not. For non-state assessments, MSIX expected a value of either Passed or Failed, but you could pass any other value if you prefixed it with "Other". For state assessments, MSIX expected one of the values Advanced, Basic, Below Basic, Failed, Far Below Basic, Passed, or Proficient; there was no provision for sending values other than these. This required all states to provide mappings from the values they used within the state to these MSIX-approved values. This was often difficult or easy to forget, but if a mapping wasn't provided, there was simply no way to get MSIX to display the value that the state actually uses.

We just wanted to take a moment to give a warm welcome to Vermont as the latest state to join the MIS2000 system. We appreciate all of the states that make our work possible and it's always special to bring on a new one. Be sure to give them a shout if you run into them at the virtual water cooler! 

All MIS2000 web systems will automatically log out users after twenty minutes of inactivity. The time out is configurable for your state. In the final five minutes before being logged out, a countdown dialog will show that looks like this:

Most states have several different kinds of web users and they need to see different things. MIS2000 allows a great deal of control over what each individual user is allowed to see and do in the web app. It's common to set up restrictions concerning which COEs or which Students a user is allowed to interact with, based upon the LEA or Facility that a student is in. But sometimes it's necessary to allow one user to see things like a complete student record while disallowing others. MIS2000 supports this through its rich role-based permission system.

MIS2000 provides a variety of ways to get COEs into the system. There are pros and cons to all the variations but using a web browser is one of the simplest. The great advantage to entering COEs via a web browser is that the users don't need to have any software installed on their machines. As long as they can hit the internet they can enter COEs. This means they can use a desktop computer, a Windows tablet like a Microsoft Surface, an iPad, or even an Android tablet. The drawback to web COE is that the user must have access to the internet to get anything done. This is why a native tablet app is generally preferable and usually what we recommend.

I'm not sure how the new MSIX regs are going to play out in most states, but I think the timeliness requirements are going to present the greatest challenges. All MIS2000 systems are capable of collecting the full MSIX MDE list, and they'll all send the data to MSIX easily within the time requirements. But this still leaves the question of getting the data into MIS2000. I think in many states the data for Assessments and Course History may not have been entered into any system within the required time limits. This means that manually collecting the data and entering it into MIS2000 may often be the only solution.

Most states have their MIS2000 web system configured so that authorized users can search for COEs based upon their current status in the COE Review process. For example, Maine COE search looks like this:

I've recently made some changes to the way "My Students" works in the web app, so it seemed like a good time to explain this mysterious bit of functionality. The Search page in the web app can be restricted to show results for "All Students" or "My Students". It looks like this:

Several states have begun to add OSY Profiles to their MIS2000 systems but I think KY is the first to get it integrated into their web app. We like to remind everyone that there's never a charge to add new kinds of migrant data to your MIS2000 system. If it helps you serve the students or make you more productive, we'd like to know about it.

Lists are one of the newest features in the MIS2000 Web System and are still going through a lot of development. If you visit the Search page you'll see three tabs: "students", "coe", and "lists". Clicking on the lists tab will get you something like this: