Welcome to the New Year!!!
It is not too early to start thinking and planning for the 2016 National Migrant Education Conference.  If you don't know already, it is going to be in warm, sunny San Diago, Calafornia, April 24-27, 2016.  After what is probably going to be a long, cold winter, it will be a warm, welcome break

Over the last couple of years, a few of our states have expressed interest in pre-screening families for eligibility before actually filling out a COE.   For these states, pre-screening families seemed useful when they were completing paper COEs and they wanted to move that pre-screening process into MIS2000 to work hand in hand with their electronic COEs.  In honor of the first state who requested this functionality (KY), we refer to this pre-screening data as the BIP (Basic Interview Pattern for Determining Eligibility).  Basically, the BIP is a short set of questions that can be used to help determine if a family is eligible for the Migrant Education Program.  The set of questions in the BIP is completely customizable to fit your needs and depending on the implementation, we can even create and transfer BIP data into a new COE if it is determined that the family is likely eligible! 

States that host their own MIS2000 Web systems often have special rules about security. We've designed MIS2000 to be able to accommodate pretty much any security policies the states may need to support. One of the more stringent security standards is the FIPS 140-2 specification that's used by the federal government although states are increasingly beginning to require it as well under certain conditions. The state of South Dakota has recently begun to enforce this policy and I'm pleased to say we've successfully made modifications to MIS2000 to support it.

The MIS2000 web search page has a check box for "Active Only".

Like it or not, we must be prepared to handle students who have chosen to opt out of standardized testing. It's easy enough to simply not enter data for these students and that can work for a small student population. But if you have many students to deal with and you're collecting your assessment data manually, it can be difficult to know whether a student is missing assessment data because he opted out or it simply hasn't yet been added. This was the case in New York so we've added a new flag to their Assessments panel to indicate Opt-Out. Each individual test the student opted out of can still be added to the system because there are cases where students only opt out of a particular content area. When the Opt-Out flag is set, data requirements are relaxed for other fields like Score since there won't be any data for them. And finally, these assessment records are suppressed from being sent to MSIX since MSIX doesn't yet have a way to accommodate them.

One of the reasons that we started the MS/EdD blog was to be able to share information about enhancements and features of MIS2000 with our users which they might not otherwise know are available.    For this blog entry, I’d like to talk about COE Snapshots.   COE snapshots are a relatively new enhancement to MIS2000 which can be enabled for states using electronic COEs.   A COE snapshot is a snapshot of a COE, in the form of a pdf,  which is taken at the time that a COE becomes approved.   This snapshot is permanently stored with the COE and will always reflect the state of the COE at the time of approval, even if some of that data is altered at a future point time.  These snapshots can be displayed from within MIS2000 and can be printed or saved if desired. 

As states have begun to adopt more coordinated efforts to secure their online systems, we've added support in MIS2000 for every web user to periodically be shown a security agreement customized for each state. States can control how often users see the agreement and users are not allowed to go forward into any of the system functionality until they've agreed to it. So far only a couple of states have begun to use this part of the system, but I think it will become increasingly important in the future. Here's an example of what Arkansas' looks like:

Now that many states are allowing service providers to enter their services directly via the MIS2000 Web App, it's more important than ever for them to be able to have access to clear definitions for the kind of service in the drop down. Several MIS2000 states now have the ability to enter their own definition text to be shown in a flyover whenever a web user hovers the mouse over a particular service. Here's what it looks like:

Maine has been driving a lot of key development of the MIS2000 Web App for years now. Like many MIS2000 states, they've been keeping track of services through the web app, both by having MEP staff enter them and by having service providers enter them directly. We've made some pretty significant tweaks to their system recently that I'd like to describe a bit.

Jay and Jeff attended the ESCORT ID&R Forum in Louisville earlier this month and gave everyone the first peek at the new Tablet app we're developing for 2016. It's the beginning of a completely redesigned MIS2000 Desktop and Mobile experience, so new and beautiful that we've been thinking we may have to call it MIS3000.