I have a bit of a mea culpa this week – turns out that when I told you how to embed a Twitter feed a couple of weeks ago I was giving you a way which, while acceptable and functional, was both harder to use and gave less customisation options. With that in mind, here’s how to create much more attractive, functional Twitter feeds anywhere on the School Jotter platform.
First of all, you’re going to want to go to your twitter page and click your profile icon in the top right, then click Settings. Alternatively, visit twitter.com/settings/account.

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Adding forms is fairly easy to do, but it can be a little difficult to work out where you need to go at first. Forms can be a great way to gather information or collect responses from parents. They’re a simple tool with genuinely hundreds of uses.
To start with, we’re going to need to create the forms in the Jotter management area.

This will bring up the form management page. Two are created for you by default, for contacting the school and for reporting absences – we’ve found these two can be very helpful to schools on their own. Let’s have a look at how to create your own form though – click Add Form at the top of the box and you’ll see this screen.

Note that what we’re creating here is more of a “container” for the form questions to sit in. Here’s an explanation of the fields:

• Name – The name of the form, only used internally
• Introduction Text – Text to appear before the form, to tell people what it is
• Additional Action – Whether you want the form to email people with completed responses
• Email – The address to which completed forms should be sent

Click Add Form and it’ll be added to the list of forms from before, alongside Contact and Absence. Click the link marked Fields to the right of your new form name, and you’ll get this screen – note that this is one of the prepopulated ones, if it’s a new form it will be blank.

All you can do here is click Add Field, which brings up the fields page. This is where we start to actually build our form, and there’s a number of types of field you can create. It’s important for your data that the proper categorisation is used:

• Text Field – plaintext, such as a person’s name
• Phone – A phone number – it’s important this isn’t text or numeric in order to keep the leading 0 in phone numbers
• Email – An email address
• URL – Somebody’s website
• Numeric – Raw numerical data
• Text area – A larger, multi-line box for more detailed feedback
• Dropdown – A list of options – specify them in the third box which will appear, separating them with commas only (not spaces)
• Date – A date box
• Captcha – A field used to ensure a human is completing the form (and not a web-crawling robot)
• Radio – similar to dropdown, let people choose an option from a list

The Required checkbox will specify whether or not that field needs to be filled for the form to be submitted. Once you’re happy with your field, click Add Field. You’ll need to do this a few times to build your form out, with items such as name, phone number, email address etc – it’s up to you what you add!
You can see a preview of what a complete form looks like by clicking Fields next to the Absence or Contact form, as shown above.
To get the data out of your forms, you’ll need to click on Submissions, which will let you filter them and download them as a CSV spreadsheet if you need to.
Now let’s put the form on your website – you should be familiar with how this works by now, but here it is!

Go to your website, click Insert Item then select Form. Choose where you want it to be. You’ll then be asked to insert a form – you can also manage your forms from this box. You can change this later from the grey dropdown at the top of the window.
And that’s it, you should now have a form on your website!

Is your school tweeting? If you aren’t, you really should be, it’s a great way to both engage with parents and really get your name out there (and if you are, give us a follow!).
While School Jotter has a twitter widget which is easy to add to your site, you need to do some things in your Twitter account to make it work, which I’ll be running you through today. Continue reading →

Welcome back to the new year – here’s your first tips post of 2016!
There are many reasons you might want to add a private page to your website. Perhaps you’d like a hidden section for governors’ meeting minutes, or a repository of information to a specific class, or a form that only parents can access – the possibilities are endless.
Luckily, creating a password-restricted page is easy. First of all, enter Edit mode on your site and click Manage then Pages.

Continue reading →

You might have heard a lot about cloud storage in the last few years, but did you know you already have unlimited storage through School Jotter? All Jotter customers have access to the Files app, which lets you store, access and organise anything you like.
If you’ve been with us since the beginning, you might remember how I showed you how to add files to this as part of the slideshow process, but we’ve got quite a few new faces since then, so I’ll recap it for everyone’s benefit.
This is what you see when you click the Files app in your dashboard. You’ll notice it looks a lot like your computer’s Exporer or Finder – this is intentional, it’s meant to be easy and familiar to use.

Using the options at the top you can add files (note that the maximum upload size is set by your administrator) and folders, as well as rename, copy, move and delete existing files or folders. You should have some folders already created to help you organise things.
Uploading the files can be a little tricky the first time, so here’s how we go about doing that. First, navigate to the folder you want to upload into, then click Upload file in the top bar.

The system supports drag and drop, so all you need to do is literally drag files from your computer’s folders and drop them into the window. They’ll then appear in a list below, as I’ve done up there. You can also click Add file to manually upload them. When you’ve put your files there, click Start Upload and they should be uploaded into the cloud – the loading bar to the right will tell you how the progress is.
And that’s literally all there is to it! You can store anything in Files – images, text documents, homework sheets, even videos. Downloading is easy – just find the image in Files and click the blue Download button on the icon. You’ve got unlimited storage, so don’t worry about quotas either!
Jotter tips will return on January 7th – from everyone here at Webanywhere, we hope you have a lovely Christmas and a great New Year.
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We’ve found that schools really like this feature, so today I’m going to be showing you how to add a Google Translate button to your website using the Embedded Code widget. First of all, you’re going to want to enter your site in Edit mode and visit the page you’d like the button to be displayed on. Then, click Insert item > Embedded Code.

It’ll ask you where you’d like to put the button, just click on the location as you would with any other Jotter item. You’ll then get this window:

A little background information on what we’re doing here – basically, this is the “free HTML” box that we’re adding. It’ll let you add any snippets of things you find across the web, such as interactive content, videos or anything else. You can paste these into the Custom box at the bottom left, though do be very careful what you paste in – code can be malicious!
What we’ve also provided, however, is a group of pre-made widgets for you to insert. The image above shows search widgets, so you can quickly access sites like Google, Wikipedia or Wolfram Alpha. Where we’re looking today, however, is in Miscellaneous.

Just click on the Google translate rectangle there and you’ll be done! It might look a little off at first, but once you’ve saved and published your page you’ll have instant access to Google’s translation services – a lifesaver for ESL students and their parents.
Using the widget is as simple as picking a language – Google does the rest. I’d show you an example using my demo site, but it’s full of Latin dummy text, so it wouldn’t really work!

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Advance notice – Jotter Tips of the Week will not be publishing over the Christmas holidays. We expect to publish the last post of the term next week on December 17th. After that, the next update will be on January 7th, nice and ready for the new year!

We’ve recently had a lot of new schools sign up to our Spellings app, so it seems like the perfect time for a rundown of how to get started using the Spellings platform. Want to find out more? Drop us an email at education@webanywhere.co.uk and we’ll sort you out with a demo.
Users of Spellanywhere can also have all their content migrated for them – we’ll take care of this, so if you’re a Spellanywhere user you really have no excuse for not upgrading!
Anyway, for those of you who are currently using the platform, here’s a basic rundown of how it all works.

There’s two sides of the Spellings app we can deal with – the admin view and the user view. We’re going to focus on what the admin sees today, but if you’d like us to cover the students’ perspective, please do let us know. Logging in as an admin, here’s what you’ll see:

Assuming your permissions have been set properly, you’ll see this screen here. Note that I’ve already added two types of test in here, so it should be blank for you.
Now, we’re going to start with the easiest way to add spelling tests to your site – using our premade bank of them. Click on “Preset Lists” in the menu to the left and you’ll see this screen:

These are all lists we’re providing to you for free – there’s over 70 of them, categorised by numbers of syllables. They’ve been created with the curriculum in mind, so you shouldn’t have any issues using them. To see what words are in a test click on View list, to practice taking a test yourself click on Preview, and to copy it to your library so you can set it yourself, click Copy. Note that the Community Lists tab contains a near-identical interface, but is populated by custom lists submitted by other schools.
This will bring up the “New Spelling Test” dialog, which we’ll discuss below. For now, it should have appeared in the Spelling Lists tab to the left. Before you can set it as a test, you’ll need to assign it to some groups – this is done through the standard Jotter groups dialog; type the name of the group and it’ll auto-suggest one. Once that’s done, click Set As Test to give it to those groups specified before.
But what if you want to create your own tests? That’s easy too – click Create Spelling List at the top of the page to get this dialog.

I’ll go through the sections bit-by-bit (as I always seem to do!):

• Name – What the spelling test is to be called
• Description – A bit of descriptive text to tell the pupils (or staff) what it’s about
• Folder – You can create and specify folders for organisational purposes
• Mode – There are three modes you can choose from:
  Audio: The audio file of the word will play (see below)
  Flash Card: The word appears on a flash card that disappears once typing begins
  Delayed Flash Card: As above, but the card does not disappear immediately
• Options – Choose whether it’s active and whether you’d like the question order shuffled to prevent cheating/rote memorisation
• Words – the actual words you’d like to test

Spellings has an audio option for some words – if audio for a word is available, the symbol to the left of it will change to a speaker. Not all words have sounds associated with them, but this is something we’re actively working on with common ones. Add more words through the Add Word button below, and once you’re done click Create.
Of course, testing is all well and good, but you need to be able to see results. Luckily, Spellings can offer that in a very detailed way – click on Results in the left menu to see a detailed breakdown of all who have taken the tests.
And that’s pretty much it! We’re really pleased with how Spellings has come out, and we hope you are too. Don’t have it but are interested? You can get a free 30-day trial in your App Store – try it out with your students!

Our Messages app lets students and teachers privately and securely message each other within the School Jotter platform, and is a fantastic communication tool. It can also be used to teach a valuable lesson in staying safe online, as we’re about to show you here.
The crux of this lesson will be that you as a teacher are going to create some fake “spam” messages to send out to your class. Since these aren’t real emails, there’s nothing actually at stake, and the purpose of the lesson is to teach pupils not to trust messages from unknown or suspicious sources. Continue reading →

Tables are one of the most helpful, but also infuriating aspects of web design. They can be invaluable for organising items on your page, but can also be a bit of a headache to set up. Here’s how tables work in the School Jotter interface.
You can insert tables into any regular text object in Jotter, click where you’d like to put your table, then click this button in the toolbar at the top:

The easiest way to put in a table is through the “Insert table” option, mouse over it and this matrix will pop up.

You can then pick how big you want your table to be – bear in mind you’ll need header rows at the top, sides or both. If you’ve used Microsoft Word, this should all be pretty familiar to you.
You can then type the text into the cells which have appeared. You can adjust your table’s properties in various ways. First of all, the Table properties.

By default, the table will fill the width and height of the space you give it, but you can change that here. Additionally, cell padding determines the distance between the cell contents and the cell borders. Alignment determines whether it’s left, centre or right-aligned. Note that, by default, your table will not have any borders – you’ll need to add these in both the table and cell properties menus.
You might also want to take a look at the Advanced tab for some more interesting customisation options. Note that these are also available for individual cells and rows via the other options in the table menu:

If you’re familiar with HTML markup, you can put custom styles in the box at the top – otherwise we recommend leaving this blank. The other options are relatively straightforward – Border width is how wide the cell borders are, Border style is what style they’re in, and the two colour options determine border and background colours of the table.
Some of the more advanced capabilities of the table are available through the Cell, Row and Column menu options. These will allow you to perform actions such as merging cells, for example to provide info like below, for Mr W:

Want to add or remove rows or columns? Again, under the Row and Column options you can insert/remove these. Note that, in the case of inserts, they will be inserted above (rows) or to the left of (columns) your current cursor position.
And that’s pretty much all there is to it! Tables are one of the oldest text items still used on the web, and it’s not hard to see why!

Those of you who logged into School Jotter recently might have noticed a new button in the top right of your dashboard – a shield.

This is Jotter Safety Shield – our latest tool to help you, your students and your staff deal with potentially harmful or offensive content. It’s a free update, included with all relevant School Jotter products, and you won’t have to do anything to activate it – it should have already appeared in your dashboard!
So what does clicking it do?

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