3. Gain an understanding of the core features
Nicholas Hillier avatar
Written by Nicholas Hillier
Updated over a week ago

Passes

Passes are how your students sign out of the house. We have two pass types, Open Passes and Event Passes. 

What are Open Passes?

An Open Pass is a way to show that a student is off campus. There are many different types of open passes that can be setup, such as a pass which a student needs to request for a weekend off campus, or to travel to a college visit. Passes can also be setup for a quick trip off campus that student's can activate on their own. Each pass can be fully customized to require a request & approval from parent, hosts and multiple staff members, or can be configured for a quick signout without any permissions needed. Passes may also be reserved for staff use - for team signouts on an trip to an away game, or for health center staff to send students to appointments.

These passes have no restrictions for when they can be applied for, hence the name, open pass. 

What are Event Passes?

Student Informed: Are used for a specific event, such as a holiday break. Differs from an Open Pass in that you can set when you would like the submission time to open/close, and set reminders to be sent leading up to the submission close time. Students will be providing the details of the pass (ie departure/return times & transport).  

School Informed: Is used when the school is planning a trip and will provide the logistical details. Students will then be able to opt in/out of this event and a quota can be added if applicable.

Event Passes require submission time frames so these can only be applied for at certain times (specified by you). 


Rolls

A roll check in Boardingware is a way to take attendance for all (or some) of your students and have a record of that attendance check. Boardingware has three types of rolls which are described below.

Daily Roll Checks

This roll check is to be used anytime an attendance check is needed. This could be a school assembly, an evening check-in at bedtime, or when out on an excursion. A daily roll check allows to you to select all students, a specific house, or group of students to mark. Students are typically, marked as present, late or absent but these states can be customized and added to. Staff can either work on this roll alone, or, can share the roll with a colleague (making it a live roll) so multiple staff members can work together to account for students. 

Emergency Roll Checks

This roll check is to be used in the event of an emergency situation. This roll functions as a daily roll check does, but with the added ability of sending notices to staff, students & parents at the start and end of the roll. Most customers will set up an emergency roll for any possible situation that could occur, so they may craft the appropriate messaging to fit with the scenario. In an emergency roll, you can also opt to allow students to mark themselves as Safe or In Danger, and they can add a message and share their location.

When notifying staff, students and parents, you can either use push notifications, emails, in-app notifications or upgrade your account to include text messaging as an option. 

Automatic Roll Checks

This roll check goes on in the background of your account at a specific time that has been set by an Admin. No action from Staff is needed to begin the roll. The roll will use your student's location and parameters setup on the backend to mark students in various states while the roll is taking place. For example: Structured study hall beings at 6pm. At 5:45pm a study hall roll will begin. Students will check into Study Hall using an NFC checkpoint, by staff member, or through the Boardingware Checkpoint. As long at they are checked into the study hall location by 6:05, they will be marked as present. Anyone checking in after 6:05 will be marked as late, and if no check in takes place, the student will be marked as absent. Students on approved passes will be marked as excused. Once the roll completes, a summary will be sent to specific staff, and a message can be crafted to be sent to students who are absent.

Pastoral Notes

Pastoral notes are a way for you to communicate and log wellbeing notes to ensure the physical and emotional welfare of your students.

Pastoral notes are a powerful tool, as they allow you to assign a pastoral type, name the event, provide a description and add any additional notes and attachments. There is also the option to mark a note as sensitive and to add it to the watchlist . Sensitive notes restrict which staff may review these notes and the watchlist will add an icon next to your student's name so the incident is highlighted for other staff members to be aware of. 

Activity Feed

The Activity Feed provides you with an overview of exactly what has been happening either in your individual houses or your full school. You will gain insight into what has been logged for student wellbeing (pastoral), attendance (rolls), late returners (passes), when it is a student's birthday and the option to create shift reports/ share comms with your boarding team. 

An easy way to grasp the concept of this feature is to think of this like your Facebook newsfeed but for Boardingware.

Gating

Let’s face it,  there will always be students that misbehave. It’s human nature. But when students start to repeatedly misbehave, then you may need to take disciplinary action. 

In boarding schools, “Gating” students from going on leave / passes or signing-out to certain activities has proven to be a very effective form of punishment. But most of the time it can be tough to manage and keep track of exactly which students are gated and how long they’re gated for. Not anymore.

To help you enforce disciplinary action, we’ve made it possible for you to gate your students on the Boardingware platform.

With our gating functionality you can:

  • Gate students to automatically block them from requesting leave/ passes or signing out

  • Send alerts to inform and align residential staff about gated students

  • Customise gating details to suit the nature of the incident

  • And much more!

Workflows

Workflows have been developed so your team can completely streamline internal processes with this extremely customizable feature. Workflows allow you to apply three types of steps; Task, Approval and Alert so you and your team are completely in sync about task assignments and approvals. 

Currently this is a standalone feature so feel free to start using it without affecting other areas of Boardingware.

Here are a few examples of how our current customers are using workflows:

  • Excursion planning

  • Pastoral reports

  • Missing student reports

  • Injury reports

  • Medical bookings

  • Emergency reviews

  • Maintenance reports

  • Jobs lists

  • Staff onboarding

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