When something goes wrong

Organized by what you are looking at, not by what caused it.

Signing in

A student's code does not work

The screen says *That login is not working. Check the card and try again, or ask your teacher.* It says that for every possible cause, so work down this list.

1. Check the address. It must be skhillzscript.com/student. The home page and the ordinary sign-in page will not take a student code. This is the cause about half the time.
2. Check the code against your class table. Open the class in your classroom and read the Code column. Codes are easy to miscopy: 0 and O, 1 and I.
3. Check the license. If the line under your school name says *no active license yet*, no student at your school can sign in. Speak to your administrator. Everything you have set up is intact and will start working the moment the license goes active.
4. Check the student is in a class. A child who was never imported has no code at all.

Capitals, lower case, dashes and missing dashes are all fine, so none of those are the problem.

A teacher cannot sign in

Teachers sign in at skhillzscript.com/signin with an email and a password, not a code.

• If they have never signed in before, they must sign up with exactly the email address the school gave us. An invitation held against one address and a sign-up with another will not meet, and the result is a teacher signed in with no school attached.
• If they signed up with the wrong address, do not delete anything. Email support@skhillzacademy.org with both addresses.

Signed in but the classroom is empty

If they see *Set up your school* asking what the school is called, they are signed in but not attached to a school. Do not create a school here. That form is for independent teachers, co-ops and tutors, and using it will create a second, empty organization. Email support@skhillzacademy.org instead.

Importing a roster

"Before adding students, an administrator must accept..."

Nobody at your school has accepted the School Data Privacy and FERPA Addendum yet, and no student can be created until somebody does. Nothing is wrong with your file.

If you are an administrator, the banner at the top of your school carries the form: type your name and press Accept on behalf of the school, then import again. If you are a teacher, ask whoever set the school up. It takes them about ten seconds, and nothing you have already typed is lost. See Accepting the School Data Addendum.

"Nothing to add yet. Type a student in, or paste a list."

You pressed the button that sends the list before anything was on it. Typing a child into the boxes is only half the step: press Add to the list first, check they appear in the table underneath, then press Add 1 student to this class.

"No students found in that"

The file has no first name column that the import could recognize. Open it and check there is a column of first names. If the file has no heading row at all, the columns must be in the order first name, last name, grade, age.

Students imported twice

They did not. Importing the same list again does not create duplicates. The result table says how many were added and how many were already there.

If you genuinely see the same child twice, it is almost always a spelling difference: Katie and Katy are two different children as far as the import is concerned. Email support@skhillzacademy.org to have the duplicate removed and the practice merged.

The import was refused because of seats

You have reached the number of student places on your school's license. The import is refused rather than partly completed, so nothing is in a half state. Your administrator can see seats used against seats licensed in the school view, and adding seats is covered in Administrator setup.

A name is spelled wrong

Fix it before the child reaches level 3, which is where they write their own name. Email support@skhillzacademy.org with the school, the class and the correction.

Writing and scoring

Every score is low, for everybody

Look at the input device before you look at the children.

• A mouse produces poor handwriting from a competent adult. Scores in the 40s and 50s across a whole class using mice are the mice, not the class.
• A finger on a tablet is better than a mouse and much worse than a stylus.
• A stylus is what the scoring was built around.

If you have no styluses, a trackpad beats a mouse, and it is worth telling children plainly that the tool is making it harder, so they do not conclude they are bad at cursive.

One child scores low on everything

Check how they are holding the stylus, and check whether they are left handed and dragging their hand through what they just wrote. Turning the tablet 20 to 30 degrees clockwise fixes a lot of left handed writing immediately.

Then look at their student page and see which of the three measures is actually low. Low accuracy and low placement are different problems with different lessons.

A child says the score is unfair

Open their page and look at Every try for that target. The five individual scores are all there. Usually one of these is true:

• They passed and did not notice, because the pass is on the average of the five, not on the last one.
• Their accuracy is genuinely high and their placement is low, meaning the letter is well formed but off the line. That is worth saying out loud, because the child is right that their letter looked good.

The demonstration will not play

Press Replay Model. If nothing happens, reload the page. If it still does not play on that device but plays on another, it is that device, and the fastest path is a different one for that lesson.

The writing area does not respond to the stylus

• Check that palm rejection is on, if the tablet has it.
• Check the child is not writing with the stylus button held down.
• Reload the page. Nothing that was already submitted is lost by reloading.

Progress and records

A child's work has disappeared

Almost always one of three things.

1. They were signed in as somebody else. If a child took a tablet without the previous child pressing Finish, their work went onto that child's record. Check the other child's page for practice at that time. Email support@skhillzacademy.org to have it moved.
2. The device was offline. Work stays on the device it was written on and goes up the next time that child signs in on that same device. Send them back to the same machine.
3. They practiced at home rather than at school. A family account and a school account are entirely separate. Home practice does not appear in your class records and never will.

A child is on a different level than expected

Levels unlock in order and cannot be skipped, so a child on level 1 has not finished level 1. Open their page and look at Needs more practice for the targets still under 70.

A student page says "Not available"

That student is not in one of your classes. If they should be, email support@skhillzacademy.org with the school, the class and the child.

Printing produces a blank page

Reload the page and print again. If your school uses a managed browser, check that printing background graphics is allowed, which is a browser setting rather than anything in Skhillz Script.

Certificates

The certificate is not there

It appears when level 6 is finished, not level 7. Level 7 is open practice with nothing after it and is not part of the certificate.

The name on the certificate is wrong

It comes from the name the child was imported with. Have it corrected, and the certificate will carry the corrected name.

Still stuck

Email support@skhillzacademy.org. Include:

• your school and class,
• the child's first name and login code,
• the device and browser,
• what you expected and what happened instead.

Those four things are the difference between an answer today and three emails over a week.