Information for Administrators
If you have Scholantis SIS Data Sync enabled on your portal, teachers can invite parents or guardians to the Parent Portal. Once invited, parents can view and comment on portfolio posts. They can also see a list of their child's class sites. Teachers can also send out group emails to all of the students' parents or guardians.
Getting Started
Start by reading this guide! You should understand how parent login works for both a teacher and a parent. You will also want to understand how to troubleshoot parent issues and common problems you might experience.
The second most important thing is to edit the included Parent Portal help pages to meet the needs of your school or district:
- Parent Registration Help - Explain to parents how to find the security challenge question required for them to login. Teachers can also provide the verification to a trusted parent or guardian from the Student Information page.
- Parent Portal Help - Provide information and help to parents explaining how you use student portfolios in your school and district. Just as with students or teachers, parents need help understanding how portfolios are used and what the expectation from them is.
Registration Process
Below is a summary of the registration process. To learn how teachers invite parents to register see our Information for Teachers.
- Teachers invite parents using the Parents settings page in their class site.
- Parents receive an invitation by email which includes a secure registration code.
- Parents open the parent portal (or navigate to yourportal.com/parents) and are required to enter all of the following pieces of information:
- Email address - as registered in your Student Information System.
- Registration code - unique to each invitation, parent and student.
- Parent Verification field. This is a security challenge question set by the district. By default, this is the student's ID number typically included on student correspondence such as report cards. For more information on where to find this information, see: Student Information#ParentRegistrationVerificationFields
- The parent is now logged in - they have verified their email address is trusted and have associated the specific child to their account.
Important Notes
- Parents need to be invited for each of their children, by each child's teachers.
- Parents will only be invited once for each student, even if their child has multiple teachers. Any of the student's teachers can resend invites. A new registration code is created and all previous codes are immediately invalidated. Registration codes do expire (see System Dashboard for details).
- Once a parent has access to a student's portfolio they will see posts and classes from all teachers. Teachers can choose when to make portfolio posts visible to parents.
- Administrators cannot invite parents or access student or guardian information. Invites can only be managed by one of the student's teachers, as defined in your SIS.
- Teachers can disable a parent's access at any time from the Parent Access page in their class site.
Sign-in Process
To learn about the parent login process see our Information for Parents. Here are the scenarios and steps for parent sign-in:
Parent receives an email notification:
- Parents receive email notifications which include a secure tokenized link that they can use on any device to access the new post.
Parent visits the Parent Portal
- Visiting yourportal.com/parents, the parent enters their email address to receive a single use sign-in code.
- Parents can choose to stay signed in (if they are using a trusted personal device).
Important Notes
- Parents can see their last login time and the device type used.
- From the My Account page, parents can see a list of current signed in devices and sign out from any device.
- Requesting a new sign in code will invalidate all previous codes sent to that parent. Only the most recent sign-in code will work. Sign-in codes do expire (see System Dashboard for details).
Troubleshooting
The Scholantis System Dashboard includes information and diagnostic tools for the Parent Portal:
- The User Diagnostic tool includes an audit log of all parent access including the verification process, login and content access events. Search for a student to access the event log for a specific parent.
- The System overview displays Parent Portal configuration details such as: duration of registration and sign-in codes, duration that users remain signed in for, how many times login can be attempted before their sign-in code is invalidated.
Common Problems
Parents not receiving emails
Ensure parents check their spam folder and that your outbound email server is not blacklisted as a source of spam. We recommend using a service such as MX Toolbox. If you are having problems with email being delivered to parents too slowly or not reliably, consider switching your SharePoint system to use a dedicated SMTP mail relay service such as Socket Labs (no affiliation).
Parents can also customise or disable email notifications via the My Account page in the Parent Portal.
Parent email address changes
We rely on your SIS to provide parent email addresses. If a parent's email address changes it will first need to be updated in your SIS via your existing process. Once Scholantis SIS Data Sync has imported the new email address the parent will need to be re-invited by the teacher. There is no way for us to create a mechanism to transfer or update email addresses. We are also unable to notify teachers when a parent's email changes.