The extensible school portal
With elements, you have the building blocks to create a central point of communication and information for your parents, students and teachers, accessible anywhere and anytime.
With out-of-the-box features and integration to key school systems including Synergetic and Canvas LMS, it is now easier than ever to engage with your community and ensure they stay actively involved with your school.
Keen to learn more? Simply hover your mouse over a feature or connector in the image for more information!
Identity Management
Make life easier for your students, parents and teachers by removing the need for them to remember and enter in multiple passwords and usernames.
elements allows for single sign-on through your identity management solution, and currently supports:
- SAML Connector (StudentNET / ADFS)
- AD Connector
- StudentNet
This function assumes schools have setup the relationship between their school management system and the identity provider whereby the school management system user ID must be passed through into elements via the identity provider - ideally as the username.
Mobile App
With the elements Mobile App, schools can now empower parents, students and staff to access personalised information and support services, no matter where they are.
This enables teachers, parents and students to access important information such as calendars, contact details, student records, from any location and device. Whether you need to notify parents of a change in excursion pick up times, inform students of cancelled extracurricular activities for the following day or require a teacher to substitute for an after-school activity, your entire community will never miss an important notification again.
element's Mobile App will provide the following capabilities:
- Instant push notifications. Send notifications directly to mobile home screens, prompting parents, students and teachers to view important school updates in real-time and respond in a timely manner.
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Real-time news and notifications. Deliver personalised updates and messages from different staff members to segmented audiences including timetable changes, avoiding the need to send mass emails that get lost in inboxes.
- Academic and non-academic student timetables. Give users access to their latest academic and extracurricular activity timetables, pulled directly from Synergetic.
- Easy events promotion. Increase awareness in events with the ability to send alerts and reminders.
- Up-to-date documents. Make it easy to access and view the latest documents and PDFs on mobile, from lunch menus and staff rosters to school policies and procedures.
- Intuitive forms. Prompt users to fill in consent, medical, payment, annual leave and other forms, ensuring information is captured and processed well before deadlines.
- Faster and easier access. The mobile app requests a single log on and allows users to remain logged in for future visits.
- Administration control. Administrators have control over what types of notifications are pushed to users.
Dynamic Widgets
Simplify publishing for your busy staff. The Elcom School Portal lets you quickly add content anywhere throughout your site, with easily configurable feeds of dynamically generated information called widgets.
Each widget provides a specific function such as displaying specific events, news, blogs and other resources feeds, lists of documents, gallery of images and libraries of assets.
Publishers can easily create widgets based on filters including date range, article type and more, while keeping the look and feel standardised and consistent.
Security permissions also ensure viewing and editing privileges are maintained.
Forms & Workflows
Given the sheer number of forms used in schools including enrolment, absentee, excursion permission slips, medical, staff annual leave, expense and online compliance forms, automating these traditionally paper-based forms can save countless hours and minimise data inaccuracy significantly.
The elements Form Designer enables you to quickly build up and visualise your form by dragging and dropping fields. In addition, users can show specific fields if they belong to a particular user group and much more.
Combine this with an advanced workflow tool that automatically notifies and requests approval from the appropriate person or team, based on the form fields submitted.
Timetables
Timetables are at the heart of school life. With the out-of-box Synergetic integration, the elements school portal is able to provide your teachers, students and parents with personalised, up-to-the-minute timetable information.
elements timetables are displayed in a user-friendly and mobile responsive format, ensuring your users can easily view their timetables from any location and any device.
This timetable information incorporates both:
- Standard class timetables
- Co-curricular classes
Dashboards
Go beyond providing users with general school information. Elcom’s personalised dashboards will transform the way students, parents and teachers interact with your school.
Dashboards enables users to quickly locate and review school information that pertains to them (and their families). New events, notices and notifications are pushed to dashboards to alert users in a timely manner.
The dashboard offers each user certain choices, this includes the ability to select the delivery mechanism for the types of notices they receive such as:
- General information
- Priority information
- Reminders
Calendars & Events
The calendar all schools have been waiting for …
The elements School Calendar includes the following elements, plus much more:
- Mobile responsive
- Calendar notifications
- Specify event attendees utilising security groups
- Event categories driven by taxonomy
- Specify a publication date and expiry date for the event
- All-day events and recurring events
- Custom approval process that ties into notifications
- Upcoming calendar events widget displaying events for the coming week
- Calendar event bulk upload capability
Notices & Notifications
Ensure students, parents and teachers never miss out on any important information, and help them stay actively involved with all aspects of the school.
Two separate and important pieces of functionality for any school portal, elements offers key Notifications/Alerts, as well as a Notices, capabilities.
Notifications:
- Triggered when there is a new fee statement or student report from the school management system
- Triggered when a given elements form is due for submission
- Calendar alerts from the elements school calendar
- Includes mark as read functionality for notifications/alerts
- Ability to trigger push notifications for each of these notifications/alerts to your preferred mobile app
Notices:
Introduced as a concept to assist in cutting down of email
- Quick short messages that can be sent to targeted groups
- Includes mark as read functionality for notices
School Management and Information System
elements offers two-way integration between our portal platform and school management systems such as Synergetic. For example, this means that data from Synergetic is not only surfaced in elements, it can also be updated within elements by users and pushed back into Synergetic.
To maintain the quality of data, updates made in elements such as profile information or medical forms is automatically added to a workflow to be approved by the appropriate administration staff before being updated in Synergetic.
Our out-of-the-box integration includes:
- Staff timetables
- Student timetables
- Student reports
- Fee statements
- Profile pictures
- My daughter/son element
- My Profile page for each user type (parents, students and staff)
- Absence forms
- Medical forms
- Photo permissions forms
- Parent directory
- School contacts element
- And more!
Learning Management System
What is a school portal without a Learning Management System? Elcom has partnered up with Canvas to be able to offer you a single view of your Canvas elements* from within the elements school portal. This is particularly helpful for parents to stay connected to their child's learning, development and school related activities - all through the elements portal. If parents have more than one child, they can easily toggle between each child with one click - all from the same interface.
The following capabilities are included:
- Recent course feedback - Pulls through course feedback from Canvas for the child's grades
- Coming up - Pulls through items coming up for the current week from the Canvas calendar of the child
- To do - Pulls through assignments/quizzes that are due in the coming week for the child from Canvas
- Grades - Pulls through grading for courses the child is enrolled in from Canvas
*Canvas elements are only available in the parent portal and the information presented is related to the logged in parent's children.
BI & Analytics
Gather intelligence to create reports, improve performance and provide better experiences for parents, students and staff.
Analytics tools such as Octopus BI and Power BI will have access to the SQL server database that forms the backbone of the Elcom platform and the Elements school portal solution. The SQL server database can be consumed by the analytics tool as a data source to be used for creating powerful dashboards quickly and efficiently. Relevant school information is presented through colourful, easy-to-understand graphics. The analytics tool can consolidate data from not only Elements but also any integrated third-party solutions such as the Synergetic School Management System. Reports created in the analytics tool can then be embedded in elements and displayed in user-friendly dashboards, so everyone from administrators and teaching staff, to students and parents, can view this data and take quick actions to improve underperforming areas.