Teacher’s manual · Chapter 8 of 12

Notes and reports

Teachers · about 3 minutes

Writing a note

At the bottom of a student's page there is a box: *What did you notice? What should they work on next?*

Type the note, choose who can see it, and press Add note. Notes appear newest first, each stamped with the date and who it is visible to.

Who can see it

There are two settings and the choice matters.

Setting	Who sees it
Staff only	You and other staff at the school with access to that student
Show the student	The student, at the top of the screen next time they sign in to practice, as well as staff

The default is staff only. That is the right default: a note you wrote quickly during a lesson should not appear in front of the child without you having decided that it should.

A note shown to the student appears once, above the writing area, with your name on it, and they can dismiss it. Keep those short and keep them about the writing. *"Your ovals are much rounder this week"* is worth more than a paragraph.

There used to be, and it did nothing. A school student has a login code and no account, and no parent is linked to them anywhere, because under the school data rules the school holds the record and a parent goes through the school. There was no parent for the system to share with, so the note was stored, shown to staff, and read by nobody.

To get a note to a parent, use Print / PDF at the top of the student's page. That prints the whole report, notes included, and it is the version to take into a conference.

What makes a useful note

The numbers already record what happened. A note is for what the numbers cannot see.

Good: *Holds the stylus in a fist. Grip is the reason the ovals are square, not the demonstration.*
Good: *Left handed. Turned the tablet 30 degrees and accuracy went up immediately.*
Less useful: *Struggling with a.* The data already says that.

Reports for a conference

Two buttons at the top of the student page:

Print / PDF gives you the page as it appears: the three measures, what needs more practice, what took the most tries, every attempt, and the notes. This is the version to bring to a parent conference. It reads as a report rather than a spreadsheet.
Export CSV gives you every individual attempt as data: level, target, date, try number, score, path accuracy, target coverage, size and placement. This is the version for your own analysis, or for a specialist who wants the raw numbers.

For a whole class or a whole school, use the same two buttons in the school view, where they export the level you are currently looking at.

Printing

Everything in the teacher screens is built to print. Backgrounds, buttons and navigation drop away and the tables carry across pages with their headings repeated. Use your browser's print command anywhere, not only where there is a button.

Not covered here? Write to support@skhillzacademy.org, or use the support page, which tells you what to include so nobody has to write twice.