Announcements#

Announcements provide a mechanism that can be used to alert users of important information. You could use an announcement to let everyone know of a school closure, a parents evening, school play or more every day items like letting a student know that they should go and see a staff member at break/lunch.

Tip

The Form Overview includes a tab where form tutors can see all announcements for the students in their form. So if they want to they can pro-actively remind the students of the things in the announcements.

Creating a New Announcement#

To create a new announcement click the Create option from the Announcements section of the side bar.

You can then enter the required information for the announcement.

  • Title

    • The title of the announcement, containing a summary of the content of the announcement. This is shown within the notifications that users receive.

  • Detail

    • The full detail of the announcement, this can contain links to other areas of the system or external websites.

  • Visible Date Range

    • The start and end dates between which the announcement is visible to the selected users.

  • Show as Pop-Up

    • Should the announcement be displayed as a pop-up announcement on the user’s home page.

Tip

You’ll only see the “Show as Pop-Up” option if you’ve got the “Create Pop-up Announcements” permission.

Caution

We only recommend creating pop-up notifications for exceptionally important announcements such as school closures. The invasive nature of the pop-up mechanism means users will become frustrated if they are over used and they will lose their effectiveness.

You’ll then need to select the recipients, you can do this in two ways, selecting group recipients and selecting individuals.

Selecting Group Recipients#

This mechanism allows you to choose the whole of a group or a subset of users within a group. It’s specifically useful for contacting parents/students for “normal” school groups such as form, house, year, class groups.

You should first select the user roles of the users you want to send the notification to. If contact is selected you’ll also need to confirm the priority levels of the contacts to send to (the school can set the normal default values here so it’s likely you won’t need to change anything).

You then need to select one or more groups from the available drop down lists. Once selected the users within those groups will show up on the right hand side of the screen.

You can then make further selections of users allowing you to contact only those people you need to. Use the checkboxes to include or exclude a user, there are Select All and Select None buttons allowing you to select all or none of the users in the list. These selection options work with a filtered list when a search term is entered making selection of sub sets easier.

Selecting Individuals#

If you want to send an announcement to a individual you can select them from the third step. Just tick the individuals that you’d like to add in the relevant drop down list.

Once you’ve selected the recipients you can move onto the final step. This step is included to summarise the selections you’ve made to reduce the chance that you send an announcement to the wrong people or with a mistake in. These messages are sent on behalf of the school and as such represent the schools public image with users. For that reason it’s worth you double checking the announcements content and recipients are valid before sending. Once confirmed click the Create Announcement button to create the announcements.

When the announcements have been created successfully you’ll see a green message on the screen.

Editing an Announcement#

To edit an existing announcement click the View / Edit option from the Announcements section of the side bar. This will open your currently active announcements.

You can edit an announcement by clicking the corresponding checkbox and clicking the edit button on the tables action bar (or by double clicking the row in the table). This will open the announcement for editing.

You can edit the announcements title, details, visible range and show as pop-up options. Once updated click the save button to save the changes. A green popup message will confirm the changes were saved successfully.

Tip

You can’t currently edit the recipients of an announcement. If you want to send the announcement to additional people, just create a new one and select them as the recipients.

Deleting an Announcement#

To delete an announcement click the View / Edit option from the Announcements section of the side bar. This will open your currently active announcements.

You can delete an announcement by clicking the corresponding checkbox and then clicking the delete button from the tables action bar. You’ll be asked to confirm the choice before the announcement is deleted.

A green popup message will confirm the announcement was deleted.

Permissions#

This page is protected by the following permissions:

  • Create Pop-up Announcements

  • Delete Announcements

  • Delete All Announcements

  • Manage All Announcements

  • Manage Sixth Form Applicant Announcements

  • Manage Sixth Form Applicant Contact Announcements

  • Manage Staff Announcements

  • Manage Student Announcements

  • Manage Student Contact Announcements

This page is available to users with the following roles:

  • Staff Members

    • Available with permission