Overview of BrightArrow within PowerSchool

We have a lot of features in PowerSchool to help you get exactly what you need. Let's take a look at some features you may want to take advantage of.

1. Contact Tracer (formerly COVID Tracer) can be used to message students and staff who come in contact with a specific student through the day. For example, imagine a student has lice. With the Contact Tracer you could send a message to all parents of students who were in contact with the student with lice, notifying them that they should start checking their child.
2. In the BrightArrow Search page created for teachers, you can display sections in whatever way makes the most sense to them.
3. If you allow parents to make changes in our parent portal page, you can make sure your current selections always use their changes instead of what's in PowerSchool.
4. Admin Functions turns on the basic features within the PowerSchool admin portal when off the entire system is off within that building.
5. Filters allow you to control what data is being used. Do you want homeroom information to be the teacher's last name for whatever class a student has period 1? There's a setting for that. Want to send messages only to contacts who have either lives with or custody checked or those who have created a parent portal account? There's a setting for that. With filters you fully control how we interact without needing to bounce all over for settings.
6. BrightChat allows for communication between teachers and their classes.
7. Staff contacts come with BrightArrow plugins. They are User based fields (not SchoolStaff) so they do not duplicate when a teacher teaches in more than one building. You can allow your users to update their own data as well, so a PowerSchool user who has a new cell phone can update it themselves. You also have the option to make it read only so they can only see the current values.
   * We can work with your custom fields as well. If your fields are SchoolStaff we will be recommending that you allow us to assist you in converting to User fields to remove possibility of errors.
8. Report Emailing allows you to run object reports, report card reports, and form letters in bulk and we'll break the PDFs into single students and send them to parents/guardians or the students themselves.
   *This also works with MBA reports from their plugins and other HTML based reports.
9. Teacher Portal is similar to the admin functions options as it is the entry point to allowing BrightArrow to show up in PowerTeacher and PowerTeacher Pro. Enabling for a school allows teachers who have been granted access to send messages the ability to do so from PowerTeacher and PowerTeacher Pro. Teachers who have not been given access will not see the integration at all. This option also includes the BrightArrow Search tool that allows teachers to pick multiple sections and specific students and put them in a single current selection list to send a message, giving teachers more flexibility with their students just like we have in the admin portal.
   * Teachers only see their own students by default. If a person is a teacher and admin user they'll see whatever they can see from the admin side in the teacher side as well. 
10. We know that schools don't always want to give teachers everything and sometimes a feature works well for one school but not another. Every new feature that goes into PowerTeacher/PowerTeacher Pro gets it's own on/off switch so you can decide if/when they get that feature. Those features are surrounded by a black box in the settings page.
11. Teacher -> Final Grades allows you to give teachers the ability to search for students in their gradebook who have a percent within a range for a given store code. Teachers can look for at risk students or look for their high achievers to send them congratulations.
    * This can also be done as a weekly export for the entire school or district so teachers don't need to do this by hand.
12. Teacher -> Missing Assignments allows you to give teachers the ability to search for students with missing assignments that were due within the last X days (determined by the user). The teacher search version only allows for searching based on number of days, while the weekly export version allows you to pick to the beginning of the semester, trimester, etc. Users can also determine what still counts as a missing assignment. Is an assignment marked missing that also has the collected flag on still eligible for an email? What if the attendance flag is marked? Users can individually choose what counts.
    * This can also be done as a weekly export for the entire school or district so teachers don't need to do this by hand. The automated version also has more options.
13. Teacher -> My Lists adds a link to the PowerTeacher home page to take them directly to BrightArrow main page. Previously it went directly to the My Lists page (thus the name). Originally, the teacher integration did not include this as everything teachers did was a current selection so it wasn't necessary. More and more schools are finding it useful to allow teachers to go in and see more things in their accounts. As promised when we added this new feature, we gave it its own toggle so you can decide if you want teachers to have this or not.
14. Teacher -> Guardian Portal is the same as the regular guardian portal (16) but reveals what parents see to the teachers in PowerTeacher and PowerTeacher Pro. If you have a building where parents tend to call the teachers about questions instead of calling the school, you can use this option so they can see what the parents are seeing and answer their questions.
15. Teacher -> Report Emailing is the same as the admin side in that it allows teachers to email out object reports, report card reports and mba reports from their portal as long as they have access to BrightArrow.
16. Guardian Portal allows parents to see past messages and what phone/email you have sent us to use. Before giving the parents this view you can set it to show only in the admin portal. The admin portal can see all BrightArrow pages that other portals have in the same way they do. So you can know what parents are going to see and then decide if you want to actually give it to them or not. 
17. Only include enabled schools. If you have schools that you use to track data but shouldn't be messaged, such as an adult education school or perhaps a school tracking home schooled students, you can leave the school disabled and BrightArrow won't show up when you are in those buildings within PowerSchool. If you also want to exclude them from the exports, you can use the toggle at the top so that our PowerQueries only include data from schools that are enabled and all other schools will be ignored.
18. District vs School settings. When a school views the settings page they can only see their own, not all the other schools. Districts retain the ultimate control as you can change each school from one spot, but you can also restrict all schools from using a feature by disabling it at the district level. If the district doesn't have it on, then the schools can't turn it on either. Do you have a district policy that teachers aren't to email reports? Disabling that option in the district row forces it to be disabled for schools. However enabling a feature in district does not force that feature on a school, it only makes it possible that they can enable it if they choose.
19. Mass enable/disable across multiple schools. If a feature is something all the schools should use, you can mass enable them using the drop downs just above the first school. If you mass enable the Admin Functions, it will enable BrightArrow for all schools. The other columns will only take action on schools that are enabled, so any school that you do not want using BrightArrow will be ignored with the mass change drop downs.
20. Different settings for different schools. Not all schools want or need the same options. You can determine which things are right for each building and enable those or disable them as you see fit.
21. Access to the help documentation is available on all of our pages via the beacon. Click on the beacon and you can search through documentation, view articles, and see screenshots. Click on the article header again and it'll open in it's own tab in your browser.