Shown above is the main RISC database form, filled with some information to the point where it is ready to be Saved. the first step of entering a contact is to find the student in the Student Database. RISC is a relational database which contains base student details which you export from your School Admin package (OASIS/CASES21/MAZE etc.), and the contact (or incident) database itself. The use of your existing student enrolment data means you don't have to re-key this information into RISC!

To find the specific student, you just type in some of the student's surname into the blank form and press the Enter key (or click the Find Name button). In the above example, we typed brown and pressed Enter.  Once found, the student's roll class (home group), Parent contact and telephone numbers are displayed automatically. As soon as you find a student in the enrolment database, RISC goes through all of the records it has currently stored for that student and displays a Quick History for that student on the right-hand side. The Quick History contains the latest 25 records stored against a student's file. You can see the date the records were stored as well as the Type of contact record for each.  If you hover your mouse over each record (in the real program), it will pop-up the contact description of that record, so you can very quickly get a good overall picture of the student's record. The RISC Quick History appears and disappears as required automatically. In the Quick History, the red coloured text for each of the incident types indicates the records are all negative in nature - as indicated by the smiley faces, detailed more below.

The six fields shown above with arrows beside them are all user-definable pick-lists, meaning you don't have to type them, making data entry very simple. You can name these fields what you like and you fill them with whatever content you like.  These fields categorise the contact. The two large fields for Description and Action allow for sentences to be entered describing the contact. To make data entry even easier, clicking on the two large fields with your right-mouse button pops up a Shortcuts Lookup allowing you to quickly insert commonly used Codes, Phrases or entire Sentences into the form. It is also possible to Spell Check the Description and Action fields, by simply clicking the Check Spelling button. Once the fields are filled in, the contact can be saved using the Save button. Of course, RISC contacts can be about students at-risk, discipline, commendation/merit or other issues.  The "smiley face" descriptor above very quickly describes this contact as positive (happy), negative (sad) or N/A (middle).  One click is all it takes to set the descriptor.

To continue the tour, please click on the Save New Contact button above
(it's at the bottom left of the form).