School Communication

Real Time Communication for your School

Powerhouse Campus provides contextual information for each member of your school community. This information is shared instantly and delivered in the following communication categories:

• School Announcements
• Activity (Co-curricular) Announcements
• Staff Notices
• Daily Notices
• Class Notices

In addition to the published announcements and notices, teachers and students also communicate in Forums and in the Assignment Dropbox.

School News

The School News icon is featured on the Powerhouse Campus dashboard toolbar. When School News icon is selected, the member can view the latest information that relates to their profile. For instance the teacher can view School Announcements, Staff and Daily Notices.  

 In addition to reading the news, the teachers can add a news item instantly by selecting the yellow edit button and adding a news item. As soon as the teacher publishes the new post all members of the community can view the news entry in real-time.   

Class Notices

The Class Notice function is presented as a widget on the Teacher Dashboard. The widget allows teachers to post important information to students in their class.

Adding a class announcement is easy. Click on the Add Notice button below the title bar of the Class announcements widget.  

In the pop up, fill in the details of the new announcement and mark it as normal or important. Click the Add Class Notice button when you have finished.

The class news is automatically published in the Student and Parent dashboards. If the news has extended information, the student or parent can click ...more  to view the full notice.

Co-curricular and Performing Arts News 

Coaches and staff responsible for Performing Arts activities can add an Activity Announcement by selecting the Announcement tab on their dasboard. All current activities are published and there is the option to add an Activity Notice. After the notice has been added, all players, or members of the activity and their parents will have immediate access to this news via their respective dashboards.

Staff and Class Forums

In the class forum, students can contribute to and start new topics related to the class subject. If a class does not have a forum set up, you will see a message in the class forum widget that has a link to setup the forum. Click on the link and the Add Class Forum window will open. Enter the title and a description of the forum you wish to add and click the Create Forum button.

As with the teacher forum, to view a post, click on the read more link in the speech bubble shown in the forum widget. This will open forum page and you can read through the posts for the selected topic.

To post a reply in the topic, click the Post Reply button at the top of the page or the Post Reply link below the post list. The Post Reply message field will appear below the post list and you will be able to type in a message. Click Post to add your new message to the topic.

To view all of the forum topics, click on the All Topics button at the top of the forum screen. A list of the topics will be displayed along with the author. To view a topic, click on its title (blue text on the left) and the topic will open.

The Assignment Dropbox

The Assignment Dropbox is the area of the class dashboard where students will upload their completed assignments and where you will download them for marking. As mentioned in the homework widget section, you can set up a dropbox when you set an assignment or you can add a dropbox by clicking on the Add dropbox button at the top of the Assignment dropbox page.

To view the dropbox for an assignment, click on the view dropbox link for the assignment in the homework widget or click on the assignment dropbox tab at the top of the class page.

The selected dropbox will open.

  You can download an individual assignment by clicking on the file name and choosing Save. If you want to download all of the submitted assignments in one go, select the tick box beside the Student Name text at the top of the list to select all students and then click the Download Selected button.

Click OK to download a zip file containing all of the assignments. A text file containing the details of when the assignments were submitted, the titles of the assignments and the students who submitted them will also be saved and included for your records.

The dropbox will close automatically at the time you specified when you set it up. Once closed, students will no longer be able to submit assignments. You can also choose to close the drop box at any time by clicking the Close dropbox now button above the list of submitted assignments.  

After you have downloaded the assignments and reviewed and marked them you can share the marks with the students by clicking on the Mark Assignments button. The dropbox will go into mark mode. Click on the not marked button beside each student’s name to write in their mark. You can also add a comment by clicking on the Add button in the comment section for each student. To upload the corrected assignments, click on the Browse button for each student and select their marked assignment. When you have added all the assignments, click on Upload Marked Files to upload all of the marked work.

To send the assignments back to the students and share their marks with them, click on the Finalise Entire Dropbox button. If you only want to send marks back to selected students, tick the box next to their name and click Finalise Selected.

When the students login into Campus and review the dropbox they will be able to see the marks and comments that you have added as well as download the marked assignment files.