Switching on the Student Portal

This article provides a step-by-step guide for schools to activate the Student Portal, which enhances student engagement by allowing access to events, classes, attendance, homework, and assignment feedback. It outlines necessary preparations, including checking student profiles, resolving duplicates, and ensuring correct email addresses before enabling the portal for student use.

Using the Student Portal is a great way to increase student engagement. It allows students to:

• See what events they have coming up
• See which classes they're taking
• View their attendance and behaviour stats
• See which homework assignments they've been given
• Submit completed assignments
• View their assignment marks and feedback

Take a look at this article to see what the Student Portal looks like for a student.

Before you get Student portal switched on for your school, there are a few steps that must be taken to ensure it functions in the way you want it to.

Step 1 - Check your student details

a. Ensure all Student profiles exist

Make sure that all students you want to be able to log into Arbor have been added to your Arbor site, and are currently enrolled. If any of your students are missing, you'll need to add them.

Don't worry if you have students who'll be joining later on in the year - you can give them access when they join your school by following the instructions below again.

b. Resolve duplicate profiles

If you have a student with more than one profile, the Student Portal will not know which profile to show when logging in. To see how to resolve all your duplicate students, click here.

c. Check contact details

Option 1 - Contacting guardians

As most schools don't store student email addresses in Arbor, we recommend sending an email out with login details to their primary guardians. To be able to do this, you'll need to check all Primary Guardians have an email address on their guardian profile. This information can be found and any gaps filled in by going to Students > Parents & Guardians > Bulk Update > Guardian Contact Details.

Option 2 - Contacting students

If you want to email students with their login details or make it possible for students to reset their own password, you'll need to check all students have an email address on their profile. This information can be found and any gaps filled in by going to School > Data > Data Quality Dashboard Students > Contact Details > Email Addresses. You should add a personal email address, not their guardian's email address.

Make sure the email address used on a student profile is not also used on a guardian profile to prevent login issues. To check all guardians and students have different email addresses, click the link at the bottom of this article to download the report template. Do not open the template. You can then import it into your site by following these instructions: Importing a report. You'll need to go to their profiles to make any changes.

Step 2 - Turn on your Student portal

a. Turning on your Student Portal

When you are ready to turn on your Student Portal, follow the below steps:

1. Go to Students > Student Portal > Student Portal Settings
   
   
   
2. Click on the Student Login row in the Security & Privacy section
   
3. In the slide over, change the setting to Yes, allow students to log in
   
4. Click the Save Changes button

Students will now be able to log in to the Student Portal. If you need to turn off the Student Portal please follow the steps above, however, in Step 3 select No, do not allow students to log in. 

b. Check what Students will See

Student Portal will be switched on for all students - you can't enable it for only some students.

You might want to invite a trusted student to log in before letting all students know they can log in.

Once you've switched on your Student Portal, your Head Teacher can check all the settings are right and troubleshoot any issues by logging in as a student.

You can see more details of what is shown here: Can we change what shows on the Student Portal?

c. Choose which login URL to use

Before inviting students to log in in bulk, you'll need to decide where to direct them to log in. Take a look at the Which site should users log into? section of this article for more information on where students can log in from.

d. Get Students to Log In

Students aren't automatically notified when your Student Portal is switched on - you'll need to let them know and send them their login details.

See how to do this here: Sending and resending login details to students