This article contains the following:
1. Overview
2. What is the teacher experience?
3. What is the student experience?
4. What is the family experience?
5. Turning Messages on or off
6. Accessing Messages
Overview
With Messages, Teachers can now communicate with students parents directly from the Clever Portal! From the Messages tab, teachers can search for a student or parent and send them a message. From the student/parent Messages page, any of their teachers who have enabled Messages will be listed and available to receive a chat. Teachers can turn their Messages on or off at any time. To find out more, read below!
Coming soon: If a district has turned on the Family Portal, teachers will be able to message with parents, too!
What is the teacher experience?
To get started, teachers will:
- Navigate to the Messages tab at the top of their Portal. Once there, they can customize how their account will be displayed to students.
Clever Tip: Teachers can change how their name is displayed, and upload a custom picture or image by selecting the upload icon.
- To begin a chat with a student, the teacher can simply type in the student's name in the search bar or select the student's name from the list on the left-hand side.
Teachers can also filter their students by class. To do this:
- Click on the Classes drop-down menu to find the desired class. Once a class is selected, only students from that class will appear in the list of students below.
- To send a message, select Send or press the return key.
- Once the message has been sent, the student will receive a notification in their Portal letting them know they have a new message from their teacher.
- When a student sends a message to a teacher, the teacher will receive a notification at the top of their Portal.
- A numerical value will appear to display the total number of new or unread messages.
- Once the teacher clicks on Messages, they will be directed to the Messages page.
- Unread messages will remain in bold on the left-hand side, with a blue marker signifying that they are unread.
- When the teacher clicks an unread message from a student, their chat thread with that student will open and they can read the message the student sent.
- As a result, the red notification number at the top of the screen will decrease to the total number of unread messages that remain.
What is the student experience?
As long as one of their teachers has Messages turned on, students will see the Messages icon on their Clever Portal.
- When they receive a message from a teacher, they will be notified at the top of their Portal.
- From the Messages page, students can view new and previous messages from their teachers and send a reply to continue the conversation.
- On the left-hand side, students will see all of their teachers who have Messages turned on. From there, they can start or continue a chat with any of these teachers.
Please note: If a teacher has not turned their Messages on their name will not be listed.
What is the family experience?
As long as one of their teachers has Messages turned on, families will see the Messages icon on their Family Portal.
- When they receive a message from a teacher, they will be notified in the navigation bar of the Family Portal and the appropriate teacher message will be highlighted within the Messages tab:
- From the Messages page, families can view new and previous messages from their teachers and send a reply to continue the conversation. Families will see all threads from teachers who have enabled Messages in the Messages tab. If a teacher has enabled Messages, the family member can start or continue a chat with these teachers at any time.
Please note: If a teacher has not turned their Messages on their name will not be listed.
Turning Messages on or off
District Admins do not have the ability to disable messaging for individual teachers. However, teachers can turn messages on or off at any time for their account!
- To disable messages from being sent or received, teachers will select the 'Settings' link next to their name. Once there, they can toggle the switch to the 'off-position' and select 'Save'.
- A student will be notified when a teacher has turned off Messages and will not be able to chat with that teacher until they have turned Messages back on.
Teachers can turn Messages back on at any time from the 'Settings' link to begin chatting again!
Accessing Messages
All Message history between a teacher and students/families will be saved for the length of the school year. A Clever District Administrator can request access to a specific chat by reaching out to Clever Support or their district's Success Representative.