As described in the two previous sections, MarkBook will accept the following fields for each student who is "electronically imported" into a new class:

Last Name
First Name
Home Form (aka Tutorial Group, Home Class, Home Room, etc.) for any one term, block, or semester
Student Number
Date of Birth (various formats - see the chart below)
Gender - M or F, Male or Female, any words beginning with M or F
Special Program Placement such as Enhanced, ESL, SLD, etc.
A Home Telephone Number
A Parent Work Telephone Number
A Student Email Address
A Parent Email Address
Miscellaneous
A Special Use number for potential ID control by your administration software

Hopefully, your educational system can build a comma-delimited or tab-delimited ascii text file that incorporates as many of these fields as possible. Any field where a "stray" comma could appear should be sandwiched in quotation marks. The Miscellaneous field is the most likely candidate but commas may appear in other fields in your school system. They may appear in student names like 'John Knight, Jr.'! Or, someone may have erroneously entered an Email address with a comma instead of a period such as aol,com. Consequently, we recommend encasing all fields in quotes. A Tab character may be used instead of commas as the field separator.

We recommend that the file be designed/tailored for the needs of your system. That is, any additional student information that is regarded as important to MarkBook users should be exported from the system's mainframe into MarkBook's Miscellaneous field. For instance, the Miscellaneous field could contain some or all of the following information about each student:

Special academic placement e.g. Enhanced, Gifted, ESL, SLD, etc. instead of using the Program field
Medical Alerts
Significant Medical History
Custody and Access Alerts
Home Address
Ethnicity
Lunch support or other aid
Additional Telephone Numbers
Additional Email addresses
Any other item(s) that your system wishes to communicate to teachers.

The following comma-delimited export file has been set up for a system with three trimesters per year at the senior level. There is a red header and one example student who has been timetabled into three Home Forms: HF1, HF2, and HF3. John Bull doesn't have a special Program placement and therefore his 5th field has no data (two adjacent quotes). All selected courses (seven characters each e.g. ART9A0A) are run together in one field. They can be separated by spaces as in this example. As indicated above, quotes around the fields prevent MarkBook from interpreting a stray comma as a field separator.

Last,First,Number,Gender,Program,HF1,HF2,HF3,DOB,Tel1,Tel2,SEmail,PEmail,Courses,Misc
"Bull","John","35601","M","","9B","9H","9P","19860326","(715)555-1234","(715)552-1919", "bullj@dingdong.edu.k12.ca","bullsr@awol.com","ART9A0A MAT9A0B SCI9B0C MUS9A0B PHB9A0D GER9A0B", "Gifted in Math. Allergic to bananas, bee stings. Insulin-dependent diabetic. Deaf in left ear. Father has sole custody."

Each teacher has two potential means of picking out selected students as per the previous Manual sections 4-4 and 4-5:

by Home Form (ignore the ones that don't apply) or
by Course Code

This same file-generating routine could be used in the same school system for junior classes where there are no trimesters. In this case, the file would likely show the same Home Form in all three Home Form fields.

IMPORT FILE SPECIFICATIONS

The following table has the specification limits for each field in an import file. More fields may be added such as the HF3 in the above example. Fields may be deleted if there is no data available. The fields may appear in any order in the file as long as all records are the same. We strongly recommend that all fields be sandwiched in quotes as per the example above and that there be a header row as the first record.

Field Name	Length	Examples
Surname	30 characters	Bull
Given Name or Forename	30 characters	John
Gender	15 characters	M or any word beginning with the letter M,   OR F or any word beginning with the letter F
Student Number or Unique Pupil Number	20 characters	12345, 123-456-789
Date of Birth or DOB	10 characters in any of the formats to the right with or without '/' characters. Text formats such as JUN are not permitted.	1. YearMMDD (20040629 or 040629) 2. MMDDYear (06292004 or 062904) 3. DDMMYear (29062004 or 290604) 4. Year/MM/DD (2004/06/29 or 04/6/29 or 04*6*29 and so on) 5. MM/DD/Year (06/29/04 or 6/29/04) 6. DD/MM/Year (29/06/04 or 29/6/04)
Home Form Term 1 or Home Room	15 characters	9D, RM211, SNC1DO-A
Home Form Term 2 or HF2	15 characters	as above
Program	20 characters	ESL, Enhanced, Special Ed
Phone 1	30 characters	555-1212, (999) 555-1212
Phone 2	30 characters	as above
Student Email Address	no limit	skipper@awol.com, John Bull <skipper@awol.com>
Parent Email Address	no limit	dad@parent.com, Mr H Bull <dad@parent.com>
Miscellaneous	no limit	Health Card #: 123-9885-41, allergic to nuts, carries an Epipen, Custody with mother only.
Special Use	no limit (cannot be seen or edited by the teacher)	45698532
Courses or 'Import If'	no limit	SNC1DO-A ART1AI-02 ENG1A106

TIMETABLE / SCHEDULE / LOCKER IMPORT FILES

MarkBook will import Timetables/Schedules as well as locker information. See section 4-2 for details on these functions. Once imported, timetable information will also flow to your handheld PDA (Palm or Pocket PC). The following image is a Notepad view of an import record that has timetable (period, course, room, teacher name), current grades and attendance in each course, and contact telephone numbers for one student. This particular file, called LCKMGR_SCHD.TXT, is available from the SAS system. Although this record is difficult to read in its current Notepad format, once imported, it will display in an easy-to-read format inside MarkBook and LockerManager. Once a class is built, MarkBook will read a whole-school file like this to import the information for just those students in the current class. The student number (first field) is the key field for this filtered import.

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SPECIFIC DOWNLOADS
Click to section 4-7 to see links to various "Student Information Management Systems". Follow a specific link to view and print a description of running a "MarkBook Export" from the specified student information management system.

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Manual: Go to section 4-7 to see how to obtain specific SIS downloads which you will use to set up your MarkBook classes electronically.
OR
Manual: Go to section 4-8 to see how to update your classes electronically.

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