BES School admin help

The school admin page is where you set up and manage your school details and different user accounts. It is useful to set up this information when you first start using Encounters, however you can come back, change details and add new accounts at any point. 

You will need to add your school name and a logo under the school details section. The name and logo will appear on community page posts as well as your school dashboard. If you are not a school but are an organisation working with schools or a group working with primary school age children, just add your organisation/group name and logo here instead.

Educator accounts are used by teachers, support staff, volunteers or group leaders. The account you signed up with will already appear here however you can set up more accounts (e.g., for other teachers in your school) that link to your school. With an educator account you can post on the community page and use the educator zone (e.g., access the resource hub). You can also work on badges however you will need to set up a class first. You can keep track of which accounts are active by clicking edit.

There are two main ways for students to engage with the Encounters platform: either by working with a teacher/group leader as a class (where the teacher logs activities to earn badges) or working individually through their own accounts. You can have both class accounts and student accounts - for example you may wish to do activities as a class but then some engaged students may wish to also do activities independently in their free time. We've found that this option works best for most schools. To set up a class all you need is to enter a name and choose an avatar. Similarly to educator accounts, you can also edit whether a class is active or not. This could be particularly useful for at the end of the school year where you can 'archive' a class (you could change the name to add the school year) and create a new class for the new academic year to start working through badges.

You can set up student accounts for students to work independently on Encounters here. From a student account you can work through badges (the same as from a class account), see the community page, and see a reduced help page. Student accounts cannot access the educator zone. To set up a student account enter the information into the fields. You can assign students to a class if set up but it is not necessary (if you don't assign them to a class they will appear under 'No assigned class'). Note that you do not need to enter an email address for student accounts. You will need to make a note of the password as you will not be able to view or edit this from the school admin zone. As with educator and class account you can edit whether an account is active (e.g., if they have left school/your class).