Notes are an essential part of tracking a learner's journey throughout their time in your school. Anyone who is assigned to a learner can record a note including teachers. Notes are a way to capture interactions you have with, or on behalf of a learner such as a phone call home, a meeting with a parent or a record of a discussion at a care team meeting. Notes are also a great way to record observations for a learner and can even be used as part of a referral system.
Another benefit of adding a note in SchoolWise is security. Notes are only viewable to those people who are assigned to a learner. In addition, you can also secure a note so that it is only viewable by a certain role or role group such as management, guidance or the pastoral care team. Notes that are part of a referral are automatically secured.
Let's take a look at how you can add a note to a learner profile in SchoolWise.
Open the Learner Profile where you want to add a note. Click on the Add Note button to display the New Note screen.
You then walk through the steps for adding a note. The first step is to create a Title and then the Details. Once you have this step complete click on Next.
You can optionally add a category to the note. This makes searching and finding notes much easier later. Simply click on an existing category or start typing to search or add a new category.
You can also add any documents or files to the note by clicking on the Add a document button.
Note: there are no built-in categories provided. You will need to build this list but it is important not to double up or be too granular with your categories. Otherwise, when you try to search for notes, you will need to search across multiple categories. It is best to decide on this list upfront.
Finally, you can optionally set additional security on the note. The default security for a note is that the note will be viewable by anyone with access to the learner profile through Learner Support and has permission to view notes. The default security also prevents subject teachers from viewing the note. You would have to explicitly set this to enabled You can learn more about note security in this article.
Note: if you enable the option Viewable by Subject Teachers, each of the subject teachers will receive a notification message alerting them that a new note has been added to that learner profile
If you are part of a role or role group that allows you to secure an individual note, these will be displayed underneath. If you want to secure a note for any of these roles simply click on the toggle to set it to enabled (green).
Note: The built-in system role for Management can see all notes. The exception to this are notes set to Viewable by Guidance and Counselling only. Guidance and Counselling can only see their own notes.
You can view the individual people who can access the note by clicking on the security icon (eye).
Once you are done, you can click the Create button to add the note. Alternatively, you can click the Note Summary button to review all the steps before you click Create.
Adding to the list of roles that can secure an individual note
If you want to add or remove the list of roles that can secure a note, you need to add a Dynamic Security Role Group. Role groups allow you to group both the built-in system and any custom security roles together. You can then restrict the view access for notes so that they are viewable by the role group only.
For example, let's say you want to create a Dynamic Security Role Group called Pastoral Care Team. In that role group, you want to include management, guidance and counselling, and year heads. You want to be able to restrict notes so that they are viewable by the Pastoral Care Team only. This is where you would use the Dynamic Security Role Group feature of SchoolWise. You can learn more or create a role group in this article.