Storing information securely is a key concern for schools. For that reason, we you might find it useful to have a private area on your school website for governors, teachers or OFSTED.
School Jotter makes it easy to add and customise access to your own private area, requiring a login for users to access it.

1 – Firstly, make sure you have a user login set up. You can do this by going to the ‘admin’ section on your jotter site and clicking ‘add user’.
Fill out the details there with whatever you want the user to log in with. Check their application roles have ‘Site’ set to ‘Viewer’ or above.

2 – Then, return to the site. Click ‘Manage’ and ‘Pages’ and then find the page you want to make private in the left hand side. Click ‘access’.

3 – Check ‘private page’ and then enter the name of the user you want to be able to access the page. Set their access to ‘view only’. This will be automatically saved.

Log out of School Jotter and when viewing the page as a non administrator you will be asked for your login credentials.

You can use your new private area to upload confidential documents and share meeting dates, improving communication between staff, governors or your PTA.

We have recently introduced a new feature to School Jotter 2 which allows you to make content blocks on the website time sensitive.
In the example below,we are going to create an important notice that is set to display between a specific set of dates. Here is how to do it, step by step:

Step 1:
Make sure you are logged in to the website and click Edit Page in the green bar at the top.

Step 2:
Click on Insert Item and decide which type of block you are going to add to the page. In this example, we are going to add a Text block, so select Text from the Insert Item menu. See the screenshot below for illustration.

Step 3:
Decide where you are going to add the block to the page and click the black Insert text here bar.

Step 4:
Type in the text you wish to use as an important notice. In this example, we are going to type “IMPORTANT NOTICE: School re-opens on 5th September.”

Step 5:
Highlight the text that you have just typed in and use the font size icon in the toolbar to set the size of the text. If this text is going to be an important notice, make sure that it is large enough so that it is clearly visible on the page. In our example, we are going to set the font size to 18pt.

Step 6:
When you are in Edit Page mode, you will notice that a set of white configuration icons appear when you click on a specific block on the page. In order to make our Important Notice time sensitive, we are going to left click on the block we have created and then we are going to left click the white cog shaped icon. See the screenshot below which shows where this is located.

Step 7:
You then need to enter the dates that the block will be visible from and when it will be visible to. You can enter the date directly into the box provided using the correct format of yyyy-mm-dd. Alternatively, when you click the box, you will be provided with a mini calendar that can be used to select the date manually.

Step 8:
Once you have entered a date into each box, you can click the Save button, then click Save and Publish.
Please note that the time sensitive block you have created will always be visible when you are logged into the site as an admin. You should therefore log out of the website to test to see whether the time sensitive block appears or not.

If you need further help with editing your School Jotter 2 website, please visit our new online help system at http://wa.schooljotter2.com/

Making use of new the features for tables in School Jotter 2

Tips from Primary Support Desk Analyst, Matthew Basierak

On the support desk we are often asked how to add and work with tables in School Jotter 2 and we have recently introduced some new features to the system which makes working with tables easier than before.
You can now change the colours of individual cells in a table.  In order to get started you first need to create an empty table by using the table icon in the grey editing toolbar.

Once you have added the table to the page, you need to select and highlight the cells where you wish to change the colour.
See the screenshot on the right.

Once you have highlighted the cells, the next step is to go to the Table menu in the grey toolbar, select the Cell option from the drop down menu then click on Cell Properties.  See the screenshot below which shows exactly where this option is located.

You should now find yourself in the Cell properties dialogue box.  If you then click the advanced Tab in the following window there are options to set the border width, style and colour.
In order to change the colour you can either enter a value into the background field, or alternatively you can click on the small back to the right hand side.  After selecting the colour you will notice that this information is automatically added to the style box.
Please see the screenshot below, which shows the background colour box with a new colour added to it.  You can now click on the OK button to save the changes.

If you need further help on working with tables, please see our help guide using the link below:
http://wa.schooljotter2.com/sites/insert-items/tables