August 2025

The beginning of school can be a crazy time but HelpDesk is here to help make it easier. With the start of school quickly approaching, FastDirect wants to make sure your school is ready. In addition to completing the Summer Transition steps, there are several other items to be addressed. To stay on top of the many features and settings that need to be reviewed for the start of school, we have created a checklist for administrators and teachers. Click the links below:

Administrator’s System Configuration Guide (summer transition con’t)

Teacher checklist!

These checklists could be your new best friends! They won’t bring you a fancy coffee drink in the morning but they will make using FastDirect a little easier. Besides, if you still have questions, you can always reach out to HelpDesk for help. We love making new friends! Just contact HelpDesk with an FDmail message or call our toll free number 866-805-3116.

We’re excited to announce we’ve partnered with Twilio, a reliable and robust platform built specifically for sending texts. Thanks to this upgrade, you can expect smoother and more reliable text message delivery from here on out!

With this partnership, all text forwards and auto-text notifications will come from FastDirect Communications as the official sender along with a designated number, +1 (855) 586-0135, eliminating those confusing random short codes.

Here is more great news about this update:

  • The overall feature works the same – no changes needed from you!
  • Twilio has our back and sends all texts in a timely manner, including addressing any possible carrier issues in the future.
  • All auto-text notifications will have a link to the school portal to sign in for easy access!
  • The Make Your Own Report has been improved as well! Any cell phone numbers that have been entered incorrectly or have an invalid area code will be highlighted in red.

Want to know more about the text forwarding and auto-text notification features in FastDirect? Head to the FAQ section and click on FDmail in the menu.

Are your schedule codes correct? If a student is marked tardy and has the wrong minutes missing, it is because the schedule code might need to be changed. The schedule codes are used for attendance and is what determines the start and end time for all students.  In other words, when a teacher marks a student tardy, the system needs to know when school starts in order to know how many minutes that student has missed. Schedule codes are assigned to homeroom teachers and feed down into the student’s account. If necessary, there is also the option for the student to have a different code than their homeroom teacher.

Here are the steps for viewing/editing the schedule codes (start/lunch/end times for the school):

  1. Click on Settings
  2. In the left hand menu, click on Monitor
  3. Under the heading ‘Set School Schedule’ click on the link ‘Change School Schedules’
  4. Each schedule code can be edited individually with a change button in the far right column

Please note that schedule codes can not be deleted but if they are no longer needed, make sure to not have them assigned to any homeroom teacher.

To check a homeroom teacher’s schedule code, you will follow these steps:

  1. Go to People, the Staff
  2. Click on the name of a homeroom teacher
  3. In the teacher’s information will be a schedule code selected but if needed you can click on the drop down to see or select one of the other schedule codes

If the school year has already started and the start/lunch/end times are appearing incorrectly for students in Monitor (minutes tardy, etc) then the first thing you will need to do is adjust your schedule codes to reflect the new times. This will make sure that moving forward, all tardies are following the correct times. Then, for any previous day where there were tardies, you will need to mark the student present and then mark them tardy again (to refresh the system).

Did you know that the events a teacher creates in her GradeBook are automatically fed to a student’s assignment calendar?  Assignment Calendars are one of the easiest ways to help strengthen the communication between school and home. Your grade book events are posted automatically, thus requiring no extra work from you! If a teacher creates events before they occur, the students and parents can be better informed and prepared. Here are some advantages to creating events before they occur:

  • Gives students and parents a ‘heads-up’ for the days and weeks ahead
  • Planning your lessons for the week goes hand-in-hand with creating the GradeBook events
  • Attaching files and links to future events can help students and parents prepare for upcoming assignments, tests etc.

For students (and parents on a browser), the assignment calendar can be found on the Home screen underneath their FDmail messages.  There will be a black and white grid showing you all the viewing options available for the child’s grades.  One of the columns is labeled ‘Assignment Calendar’.  Click the ‘View’  button and a new window/tab will appear displaying a month’s worth of dates.  The month can be changed so that the parent or student can see a different range of dates. For parents in the App, the assignment calendar is found under Grades.

We have a Parent App and the start of a school year is a great time to get it downloaded and logged in!

Parents/guardians can click on their phone’s App store icon below to download the FastDirect App. After it’s downloaded, parents can open it and follow the prompts to get logged in! After logging in once, their login will be remembered.

 

Watch this video tutorial to find out more about FDpay, our electronic payment component!

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