Inbox Design Limited

February 2024

Welcome to 2024! Clear Your Cache!

There have been many updates to SchoolBridge over the past year. To make sure that you are using the most up-to-date version, please be sure to clear your browser cache.

How to clear your cache
Watch video for Chrome & Edge

New Feature: Dashboard Icon Groups

If you have always wanted to organise your dashboard icon into groups to make them easier for your users to find, now you can! In addition to making additional groups of icons you can also add additional ‘Content’ sessions to provide titles above your sections as well as add image sections.

New Features: Staff Forms

At the end of 2023 we added a host of new features in support of EOTC management, but some of those new features are useful in other types of staff workflows.

Restricted Status
This feature allows you to send forms to groups of staff. Useful for Personal Growth/Staff evaluations etc.

Approver Forms
This feature allows you to have a form that is used by your approver team that is saved along with the forms from the submitter. Think of this like a FOR OFFICE USE ONLY section on a traditional paper form. You can also set if the approver form is visible or hidden from the submitter.

Email Actions
This feature will automatically email the form to any email address, once it receives final approval. Useful for staff reimbursement workflows where the submission needs to be sent to a service like HubDoc or Xero for processing.

Default Evaluation Stage Settings
Many school workflows benefit from a review process to enable teams to reflect on outcomes. Now you can pre-set an evaluation stage for any workflow that you create.

Keep Open
Using this option allows you to create a form that does not become locked once the user submits it. Like the Approver Forms, this option can be used to give the submitter a ‘Notes’ page or to create a form that the user can continue to update once submitted and approvers can lock after a certain period of time.

Reminders
Now you can create reminders to your staff that relate dates set in their submission. Use this to remind them of tasks before, on the day of, or after the date set in their submission.

Data View
This feature allows you to quickly view all of the submitted data from all of the submission of a given form in a table view.

Read all about these new features in the help guide.

Coming Soon: Lockdown Manager

Last year we were contacted by several schools asking if we could develop a tool to help them manage lockdown situations. The schools sent us a list of features they thought would be useful, and we have been working with them to develop a prototype.

Core features

Key administration staff have the ability to invoke Lock Down Mode. This triggers an alert to all staff via the SchoolBridge Mobile App, email and the web version of SchoolBridge.
Staff receive updates from the administration team as the situation evolves via SchoolBridge and email, and can view your lockdown procedures so they know what they should be doing.
Via SchoolBridge, staff can indicate if they are Safe, Offsite or Not Safe, as well as let the admin team know where they are and how many students are with them. This information is reported back to the admin team in an easy to read chart.
As the situation develops your admin team can continue to send status updates to staff, as well as receive updates from them.
At the conclusion of the lockdown event, staff are shown the post lockdown procedures and can notify the admin team when they have been released from their location.

Caregivers & Staff Next-of-Kin
Of course notifying caregivers and staff next-of-kin about these emergencies is also a concern. The SchoolBridge Alert Message system is a great communication tool, and we also plan the following enhancements for use during emergencies.

We are adding a brand new interface to allow staff to add their own next-of-kin contacts, as well as the ability for admin staff to bulk import these contacts. Next-of-kin contacts will then be an option when selecting Alert Message recipients.
To help streamline external messaging, your team will be able to create message templates to save you time when you need to send external messages in a hurry.

Our team has been hard at work on Lockdown Manager over the holiday break and hope to have a demo version out for testing soon. When the final version is released, it will be made available to all schools with a SchoolBridge subscription free of charge.

Streamlining EOTC

Last term we hosted a series of workshops to help schools improve EOTC management using the new features we have added to support the EONZ 2.0 tool kit. If you missed the EOTC workshops last year don’t worry, we will be announcing additional workshops for EOTC soon. In the meantime you can watch the video from last year here, as well as the updated help guide.

Support For Intermediate & Primary Schools

While secondary schools have been able to use SchoolBridge for several years, late last year we began working with several Intermediate and primary schools so they can take advantage of the tools within SchoolBridge to solve problems common to all schools. Staff Forms, Permission Slips and Caregiver & Student forms, Parent/Teacher conference booking, and the mobile app are all features that are equally useful for Intermediate and primary schools.

This is a great benefit to caregivers that may have students at your feeder schools as it means that they can use one app for all of their children. If you know of an intermediate or primary school that could benefit from SchoolBridge, please let us know.

Helping Caregivers Sign In: Check Their Email Address

Even though we have made sign-in easy for caregivers, from time-to-time you may be contacted by someone who says they are having trouble.

Check what kind of email account they have.

If their email address is connected to one of the supported sign in quick sign-in options, sign-in will be quicker and more convenient for them.

New Help Guides