SAM SPECTRA

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

FULLY INTEGRATED TOOLS:

​

ActiveParent
SAM Spectra’s parent portal allows the viewing of classes, grades, attendance, discipline, transcript information, student and parent demographics, and even AIM messages. ActiveParent also has an iOS app available for download for free from the Apple Store.

​

 ActiveStudent
SAM Spectra’s student portal allows the viewing of almost everything seen within ActiveParent and more! ActiveStudent gives students the opportunity to request courses for their next school year and empowers students with ownership over their academic records.

​

AIM Call Notification System
Rapid Alert and Call Notification System, seamlessly integrated into SAM Spectra. Administrators can send alerts directly from SAM Spectra, reaching out to thousands of parents all at once. Free mobile apps are available for iOS and Android devices.

​

MSIS Reporting
SAM Spectra successfully interfaces with MSIS on many different levels throughout the application.  Central Access works with MDE to ensure all SAM uploads are fully compliant. Through SAM, administrators have the opportunity to resolve most data errors reported by MSIS prior to ever submitting the file.

​

SAM Spectra and Marathon Integration
The SAM Spectra and Marathon Integration synchronizes employee demographics for all schools within your district.  This includes basic demographics, license numbers, endorsements, addresses, phone numbers, and emails.

Gradebook
SAM Spectra’s gradebook has been recognized nationally as one of the most robust, easy-to-use, and powerful gradebooks available in the K-12 market. This gradebook allows for automatic, term-specific averaging, student specific translation tables, automatic GPA, QPA, Class Rank, Honor Roll calculations, and so much more! Also included within SAM Spectra is a skills-based gradebook geared towards primary schools.

​

Student Demographics
An extensive, constantly evolving catalog of information is compiled within SAM Spectra to form a student’s full set of personal and academic demographics to be stored within the electronic cumulative folder.  Hundreds of utilities and reports have been created to allow for the entering and viewing of this information.

​

Student Attendance
SAM Spectra allows for the tracking of both daily and period attendance and is fully compliant with the 63% attendance ruled implemented during the 13-14 school year.  With integrated Check-In/Out functionality, SAM Spectra helps ensure that only authorized guardians can take a student from school. Student badges with barcodes can also be scanned to speed up the Check-In/Out process and get students in their classes sooner.

​

Scheduling
Within SAM Spectra, users can build complex and detailed Master Schedules with little effort.  Administrators can work on “next year’s” schedules long before the current school year is over. SAM Spectra’s Auto-Scheduler can fully build student’s schedules with just a push of a button. SAM Spectra goes through many checks and balances to ensure the schedules are near perfect, and the extensive reports provide suggestions for make it even better.

​

iCAP
Individual Career and Academic Plans (iCAP) provides an easy way for counselors and students to visualize graduations plans for a student. These colorful visualizations are available for all students, not just CTE students, and are visible through SAM Spectra, ActiveParent, and ActiveStudent.

​

Discipline
Discipline within SAM Spectra is fully MSIS compliant and allows for both state reported and non-state reported incidents. Discipline is totally user-defined and allows for easy tracking and reporting of many different aspects including suspensions, auto-setting of attendance,and infraction and action counts.

​

News
SAM Spectra’s News provides an easy-to-use line of communication that allows Administrators to create News for displaying to SAM Spectra users or for keeping parents and students informed through ActiveParent and ActiveStudent. Central Access also uses the News to communicate pertinent information to the administrators regarding updates, suggestions, upcoming deadlines, and news from MSIS.

​

Address Validation
Address Validation confirms that addresses entered for a student or parent/guardian are truly valid United States Postal Service addresses.  This functionality auto-completes an address as you are typing and corrects spelling errors and abbreviations.  Address Validation will also warn users that an address is missing an apartment number or is considered a commercial address.

​

Early Warning System
To help promote your students’ academic success, Central Access has worked very closely with MDE to provide all districts with a system to rank students based upon their likelihood to drop out.  As research indicates, a student’s decision to drop out of school is a gradual process that starts well before high school. SAM Spectra predicts at-risk students and empowers districts with the knowledge to successfully intervene.

​

Township, Range, and Section
SAM Spectra has the ability to automatically calculate a student’s Township, Range, and Section based upon their validated address. No more staring at maps or pulling county land rolls to get this information!

​

Teacher Attendance
SAM Spectra allows for the tracking of teacher attendance and substitute teachers. At any point during the day, administrators can quickly determine which adult is responsible for a student.

​

ActiveFlag
ActiveFlag gives Administrators the ability to track user-defined fields throughout the application via tooltips. In strategic places throughout SAM Spectra, these tooltips display important information for students that are assigned to these ActiveFlag groups. For example, when creating a discipline record within SAM Spectra, ActiveFlag alerts the user that a particular student cannot be subjected to corporal punishment.

​

Previous Years’ Archives
Administrators can view past years’ archives of their data instantly through SAM Spectra. The archiving process is fully automated and requires no effort from the user. Past years report cards, transcripts, attendance and discipline reports, student demographical data, audit records and much more can all be viewed through SAM Spectra’s Archive.

​

Student District Transfer
The Student District Transfer functionality enables the instantaneous and secure transfer of student records among school districts using SAM Spectra. Schools have the ability to instantly search all SAM Spectra districts for the student data they wish to acquire.

​

Administrative Dashboards and Graphical Reporting
SAM Spectra provides administrators with powerful, interactive, and customizable dashboards to assist in making important decisions with just a quick glance. These dashboards portray your SAM Spectra data in a never-before-seen manner. Accompanying the dashboard, several reports also have the ability to display in a graphical format so that data can be more easily understood.

​

Social Media Integration
SAM Spectra integrates with both Facebook and Twitter!

 Forgot Password Functionality
SAM Spectra, ActiveParent, and ActiveStudent all have Forgot Password Functionality allowing users to receive an amial to reset their password rather than consulting an administrator to change it for them.

​

Bookmarks
With SAM Spectra’s bookmarks, users that frequent a certain set of pages within SAM Spectra can add these pages to their bookmarks for quicker access without having to drill deep into the menu.

Ad-Hoc and CA Data Agent
Every day, SAM Spectra Administrators find a need to export their data into Excel or to import into other packages used throughout their district.  The Ad-Hoc and CA Data Agent gives users the tools needed to export required data in a CSV format.  Central Access works with over a hundred 3rd party vendors in the education field to ensure smooth workflow within districts throughout the state.

​

C2C Integration
SAM Spectra interfaces directly with C2C via web services that requires no interaction from the user. No more setting up the CA Data Agent or uploading CSV files.

​

Lesson Plans
Within the SAM Spectra Gradebook, Lesson Plan functionality gives teachers a place to create and share their Lesson Plans.  Administrators have the opportunity to view, annotate, and approve Lesson Plans. Lesson Plans can be seen in both ActiveParent and ActiveStudent, giving another method for communication from teh teacher to the students and parents. Lesson Plans fully integrate with Common Core Standards and allow for documents to be attached to each plan created.

​

Field Level Security
SAM Spectra boasts a very user-definable security model that can be as strict or lenient as desired by the administrators. Alongside the page access that can be granted, the viewing of many different fields within a page can also be controlled by administrators.

​

Rest APIs for 3rd party vendors
Similar to the way that SAM Spectra integrates with Marathon, C2C, and InfoSnap. SAM Spectra contains a generic API that allows any 3rd party vendor to, with the administrators permission, directly interface with SAM Spectra without any interaction from the user.

​

Document Management
In strategic locations throughout SAM, users can utilize the Document Management utility to save documents to the cloud for later retrieval. Once saved, these documents will be available from any location where a user can access SAM Spectra. These documents can also be shared among multiple users based upon rights granted.

​

Technology
SAM Spectra is fully Web-Based application built on Micrsoft’s.Net Framework 4.0 and uses Microsoft SQL Server for data storage.  SAM Spectra fully supports all of the most popular browsers including Microsoft Ineternet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, Apple’s Safari, Google’s Chrome, IOS, and Android platforms and browsers.  Using SAM Spectra only requires the installation of Adobe’s PDF Reader.  Most districts take advantage of our hosted solution that is backed up nightly, but districts may host their own data if they feel it is necessary.

​

SIF Compliance
SAM Spectra is fully SIF compliant.  SIF allows for the transporting of data to other SIF compliant vendors.

​

Security
SAM Spectra utilizes the highest encryption cypher available at this time – TLS 1.2.  All passwords are encrypted using irreversible, MD5 technology. District data is backed up off site, and our servers utilize RAID 10 fail-over technology.

​

Data Integrator
The Data Integrator empowers districts with the ability to connect their SAM Spectra data with almost any 3rd party client.  Data can flow both into and out of SAM Spectra via a fully automated tool that requires very little setup at the beginning.  Administrators can receive daily emails regarding the status of the data flow. Imagine the possibilities! Data can automatically flow to and from your already existing LMS, transportation package, nursing package, IEP package, student registration packages, dashboard packages, library systems, assessment, and more.