Newsletter Autumn 2019/2020

Welcome
Firstly, may we wish a warm welcome to the many new schools that have joined us over the past few months. Our Newsletters are sent out each term and contain many useful reminders as well as details of the new features we have added to SOLAR and some additional information that you may find useful these are now available to all SOLAR users.

New Feature – School type

A new option within school settings has been added to school setting within Admin>Setting>School Information. This is a drop-down menu where you can select the School type from a drop-down menu that fits the majority of the pupils. We unequivocally do not share this information with other schools. This setting has been added to work with a new report we are currently building that will allow you to make a percentage comparison against the same or different school types.

New Feature – Show Intervention

When you have used the support pupil function on the assessment screen to create an intervention this intervention will now be displayed clearly under the pupil’s name/ photo on the assessment screen.

New Feature – Required fields

As I’m sure you are all aware one of the best things about SOLAR is how versatile it is. So many parts of it can be customised by schools. You are able to turn of fields and add you own custom fields as well as remaining things to better suit your needs. There are however some fields within IEP and Behaviour that are required by SOLAR in order to run reports. We have now clearly labelled these in settings.

Permissions Icons

Within the Permissions Menu we have relocated the Icon for each section to the bottom of each list making it easier to locate for when administrators are turning on or off features for their staff

New feature – Click to View Newsletter

A new feature has been added to SOLAR all users where the first time that you log in when there is a new SOLAR Newsletter is available you will see a notification at the top of the screen on the Assessment Screen asking you to click here to view the SOLAR Newsletter. Our Newsletters contain vital information about the new features that have been added as well as how to access and use these so we have now made this important information easily accessible to all.

New Feature – Enhanced Audit Trail

We have worked hard over the Summer to make enhancements to our Audit Trail to make it easier and faster to find the information that you need.

Two new areas for filtering the Audit Trail on SOLAR are:

1. Search Bar for Actions

2. Drop Down for User groups

We have added a search function where you can search by key word or multiple words to find actions competed.

The User groups filter shows which user groups and name have been working on SOLAR

These actions will be a choice from a drop-down list

e.g. Teacher Group, Date, User

Term Dates

Over the summer holidays we have entered standard term dates for all school’s that had forgotten to add next year’s terms. For any of these schools who wish to change the dates that we have entered you can do this in Admin>Lists>Terms and click on the edit button.

It’s important that terms are named Autumn Term, Spring Term and Summer Term. If you for example just called your term ‘Autumn’ SOLAR would not recognise this and add dummy dates for you causing duplicates.

Help Desk

Our Help Desk is open Monday to Friday from 8:30 am to 16:30 pm.

You can contact the Help Desk by email or phone. We prefer email, as this creates a written record of your request and ensures that information can be passed efficiently between team members. It also helps us manage our workflow and prioritise our response more effectively.

support@solarforschools.org.uk

Sometimes we need specific information to diagnose a problem. If you see an error message, please tell us what it says. If it’s relevant, we may also need to know the assessment framework, subject, pupil, level and even the statement and star.

You can take a snapshot of your screen by using the Windows snipping tool or Apple’s screenshot facility and attach the image to your email. You can also show us a SOLAR screen by copying and pasting the URL into your email.

It would also be helpful for you to include your school name in the request as some e-mail addresses do not indicate which school you are in 😊

New Support Feature

When you click the Help button within SOLAR instead of providing you with our entire manuals it will now direct you to our Help Library.

Within our Help Library you can view our webinars, view help articles, view how to guides and videos and also view all of our newsletters. You can search by a sentence or key word and a list of articles will then populate just like you would with a Google search.