Using Private Areas

May 4, 2017 | By Arthur Howie in Customer Training, Development | Tagged jotter tips, primary school, school jotter 2, school website design

Storing information securely is a key concern for schools. For that reason, we you might find it useful to have a private area on your website for governors, teachers or OFSTED.

School Jotter makes it easy to add and customise access to your own private area, requiring a login for users to access it.

1 - Firstly, make sure you have a user login set up. You can do this by going to the ‘admin’ section on your jotter site and clicking ‘add user’.

Fill out the details there with whatever you want the user to log in with. Check Read More →

Newsletters as file downloads

May 5, 2016 | By Cieran Douglass in Customer Training | Tagged files, jotter tips, newsletters

While School Jotter does offer Newsletter capabilities, we appreciate that, for those who want a more rich and designed experience, you can't beat PDF downloads. Often these are created to send home with pupils, with digital copies uploaded to the website. The latest release of School Jotter makes it easy to present these in a sensible and attractive way, rather than just a string of links!

To start with, go to where you want the newsletters to be embedded (we recommend a dedicated page for this but you can do it anywhere) and enter Edit mode, then click Insert Item Read More →

Using timed content to create a term’s worth of homework in an evening

April 21, 2016 | By Cieran Douglass in Customer Training | Tagged excercises, features, homeworke, jotter learn, jotter tips

Coming soon

Last week we showed you how to use Exercises in Learn to create and manage homework assignments and more. These are a great tool, and using some basic built-in Jotter functionality, we'll soon be able to extend it to make it even better. Note that, while you can set this system up now, it won't be enabled fully until an update in a couple of weeks, which we'll make you aware of!

First of all, for this to work best we recommend setting up a dedicated Learn page for homework and assignments - if all the objects are on Read More →

Exercises and homework-setting in School Jotter Learn

April 14, 2016 | By Cieran Douglass in Customer Training | Tagged exercise, homework, learn, saviong time, school jotter tips

This week we're going to discuss one of the most powerful parts of the Learn VLE, and one which can reduce your workload and bring a lot more things online. Everything I'll be doing today will cover setting up and administrating the homework - next week we'll be showing you how to "set and forget" a whole term's worth of it!

To start with, go to the Learnsite you want to embed the homework on - whether this is a dedicated page or part of another one is up to you. Enter Edit mode and click Insert > Exercise.



Once you've Read More →

Adding a sitemap to School Jotter

March 31, 2016 | By Cieran Douglass in Customer Training | Tagged jotter tips, school jotter, search engines, seo, sitemap

Before we start, don't forget to check out our new helpsite and knowledgebase at education.webanywhere.co.uk.

It's running our custom-built Promatum software for distributed training, meaning it's easy to use, lean and you can get it on any device you like. Give it a spin and let us know what you think - the same resources are there, they're just now in a much easier, more accessible format!

Today we're looking at sitemaps. Before we begin though, a bit of background on what a sitemap is. First of all, it's a tool for search engines to use, not for end-users! It tells Read More →

Our new helpsite is here!

March 23, 2016 | By Cieran Douglass in Customer Training | Tagged promatum, school jotter help, school jotter site, support, training

If you've been using School Jotter for any length of time, you might have come across our help site at wa.schooljotter2.com. We built this in School Jotter to provide a knowledge-base for our customers looking to know more about the system. As helpful as it is, we've always found (and heard) that it's a bit hard to navigate and find your way around though, and we think we've come up with a solution.

Presenting education.webanywhere.co.uk

... Read More →

Embedding a readable document in School Jotter

March 17, 2016 | By Cieran Douglass in Customer Training | Tagged document upload, embed, jotter site, pdf

Ofsted requires that you include certain documents on your school website, and all this means at its minimum is that they must be provided as downloads. But, for accessibility, wouldn't it be nicer to have them readable and embedded on your website? You can probably see where this is going - yes, School Jotter lets you do that! First of all, take a look at this page for an example of what I'm talking about.

Setting this up is easy - first of all we're going to go into Edit mode, click Insert Item, then choose Document.



You'll be asked where Read More →

Create a self-marking quiz with Resources

March 3, 2016 | By Cieran Douglass in Customer Training | Tagged automation, learn, marking, quiz, resources, vle

You might have heard a lot of talk about School Jotter's function as a VLE. While a repository to store learning materials is all well and good, a VLE really needs a way to actually assess students' learning - it's a good thing, then, that Resources and Learn (bundled together) offer this capability!

First of all, you're going to need to go to the Resources app from your School Jotter dashboard (you can also create Quizzes from within Learn itself, but we'll do it this way as it's much the same method). Click Create Resource at the top of the page, then choose Quiz from the dropdown.

... Read More →

School Jotter now features pictographic logins

February 25, 2016 | By Cieran Douglass in Customer Training | Tagged accessibility, jotter tips, picture login, sen

Not everyone is proficient when it comes to using the keyboard, and this is especially true when talking about students - certainly in the early years, even spelling their own names and passwords can be tricky for some.

That's why, in the latest version of School Jotter, we've added Picture Logins as a feature. Rather than entering names and passwords using a keyboard, pupils (or teachers - we're not here to judge) can log into their Jotter account by entering the correct series of icons from a grid. Setting it up is easy too!... Read More →

The new accordion feature in School Jotter

February 18, 2016 | By Cieran Douglass in Customer Training | Tagged faqs, information, school jotter, site

We released an update to School Jotter last week, and it's added a few new things which I'll be covering in the coming weeks.

The first new object we'll be looking at is the (rather strangely-named) Accordion. It's a great way to create an information-packed page that also embraces minimalism and interactivity. As with all School Jotter objects, you can find it from the Insert menu in Edit mode.

Choose where you want to put it. The accordion will look like a series of headings that stretch across the space allocated to them. They look, once populated with content, something like Read More →