Comment School Settings

In the School Settings window, Accelerus administrators have access to several settings that relate to the use of comments in Accelerus by teachers, in addition to the setting that allows or disallows the use of teacher comment banks.

These are found on the Comments tab of the School Settings window.

Com SystemItems

Each of the settings found therein have an effect on the use of comment banks by teachers.

A school can determine the number of spaces between sentences that it finds acceptable, eg 1 or 2. Based on this setting:

•	When teachers are selecting comments from a comment bank, the number of spaces set in this field will be added automatically after each comment is double clicked and inserted.

•	When running a spelling and punctuation check on comments, if the spaces between sentences does not match the number in the School Settings window, this is reported as an error.

As shown here, only one space has been found between two sentences when the school setting requires two.

This setting determines teacher permissions in relation to the creation of their own comment banks. A school may decide to disallow the creation of comment banks by teachers where, for example, it wants teachers to only use comment banks set up by the school.

Where this setting is ticked, teachers may create and control their own teacher level banks of comments, as well as using any comment banks set up by the school.

This setting has two uses:

•	It determines whether the student's given name or preferred name is displayed in the Student column of the class and subject results windows, and in the Student dropdown box in single student view.

•	It allows schools to choose the name format to be reflected in comment banks in single student view, ie the student's given name or preferred name. The checkbox that follows takes this further and allows or disallows teachers to change the default.

In relation to this, the setting and its checkbox allow three options:

➢	Teachers may toggle between given and preferred name in comment banks in single student view.

As shown here, both Given name and Preferred name buttons are available, and the comments will reflect the name format chosen, eg Ben for preferred name, instead of Benjamin.

The name will default to the format chosen in the School Settings window, but teachers may choose the other.

Com SingleStudentViewStep5

➢	Only the given name, or only the preferred name may be used.

In these two cases:

®	The checkbox Teachers can choose between name formats is not selected, only the selected default name format appears in all comment bank comments in single student view.

®	The buttons to toggle between the name formats are not available in single student view.

Com SingleStudentViewGivenNameOnly

As shown above, the comments show Jennifer’s given name and teachers are not able to select the student’s preferred name, eg Jenny.

This setting does not mean that the maximum number of characters that has been set for a comment may be exceeded:

•	Where ticked, when teachers are working on comments, they may type or select comments from comment banks that take them beyond the maximum number of characters set for a particular comment.

When they go over the maximum set, the comment is shaded red and becomes invalid. It will not be saved until it is edited and falls within the maximum number of characters set.

Com SingleStudentViewMaxOver

•	Where not set, teachers will not be able to type beyond the maximum number of characters.

Also, when they are drawing from comment banks and the comment selected would take them beyond the set maximum, a message appears, informing them of the number of characters that will be truncated.

Com SingleStudentViewTooLongMsg

The Words table at the bottom of the System Items tab allows words to be added to the dictionary so that they do not come up as spelling mistakes when running a spell check, either on comments written for students or when spell checking comment banks.

For example, you may want to add your school’s name, or particular spellings of words that you find acceptable, or words you discover are missing from the dictionary supplied with Accelerus.

Words are typed into the table, one word per row.

Com SystemItemsWords