Aeries Communication for Counselors and Others
Feedback:
- One option for Special Teachers is to elevate staff permissions to Admins - drop them into the Security - Group - School or District Admin - the members would then have Dashboard and all-member access (you'd also want to ensure each person is associated with the correct school or the district in Security - School Access)
- If you're not looking to elevate permissions (making a person an Admin), we can assist with setting up Groups right now for your Special Teachers - We can set them up to use the "Student Groups" feature in Aeries and automatically upload those relationships into Aeries Communication. Just shoot a message to support@signalkit.com to start the process. If you can wait until the start of next school year, we will be pulling the Aeries Student Groups to our system anyway.
- Coming Soon:
- We will also soon be allowing Special Teachers/Staff to have basically the same UX in AC as a teacher without the elevated privileges workaround.
Example: A counselor would have a ‘roster’ of assigned students, broken into groups by grade, and could filter those just like classes and groups today + message individuals or groups of kids. - Also, within direct messages, we will be adding a “Message Team” feature, providing the ability to bring in a student’s team into a DM conversation.
- We will also soon be allowing Special Teachers/Staff to have basically the same UX in AC as a teacher without the elevated privileges workaround.
- Staff members should be able to direct message any other staff member right now.
Creating student groups is not an option for us. It would literally be many hundreds of SGs that would need to be created, and then maintained. Year after year. That just isn't practical or possible. The people in these groups already have Loop School Admin access and that does not give them what they need, since they aren't teachers. Giving these special groups total and complete access to Aeries Communications via the Loop Admin group is a very poor (in my opinion) work-around, but one we will probably end up going with.
Gotcha - we ultimately want to ensure our feature releases meet your district's needs (and, all districts for that matter!). With that said, I'll shoot you an email - we'd love to schedule a follow-up to discuss in detail. Thanks for your feedback!
Maureen Sharkey
We will stop using SchoolLoop next year in our district, so there has been a scramble to fill all the holes that will result from that. One of those is communication to students and parents by Counselors, EL Specialists, Psychologists, and a host of small groups of people who interact with students and parents, but do not teach. We have set them up to use Aeries Communications, but they cannot send to other staff members, nor can they send to parents at their site or students at their site. Is there a plan in place to fix this hole? All these groups of people are excited about the features of Aeries Communications, and were thrilled to discover they could direct message in English to a parent who speaks/reads another language.