Understanding Accelerus Comment Banks

A comment bank is a collection of pre-defined comments that a teacher may draw upon when writing student reports. The comments may be used as the basis of more complex and personalised final comments for students. When set up, special control text is inserted into the comments so that, when linked to a particular student, the comments are personalised, showing the student's name and/or appropriate pronoun.

Comment banks in Accelerus have a hierarchical structure.

Comment bank – may be for a particular subject, learning area or purpose, eg English 7, Mathematics, AusVELS, work habits, etc.

•	Categories – broad groupings into which comments for the comment bank fit, eg Reading, Writing, in an English comment bank.

•	Values – categories are broken down into values, eg Reading may have values of A, B, C, D, E, into which comments are further organised.

•	Comments are set up for each value.

The following is an example of an English comment bank, showing the way comment banks are structured in Accelerus:

Category	Values	Comments
Writing	High	{He/She/Name} has submitted an excellent folio this semester.
		{His/Her/Name's} writing folio showed an ability to express complex ideas in fluent pieces of writing.
		...
	Medium	{He/She/Name} was able to show through {his/her} writing folio an ability to communicate ideas for different audiences and purposes.
	Medium	...
	Low	Some pieces were partially prepared for a writing folio, but the number and degree of completion of pieces was inadequate for a student of {his/her/Name's} ability.
	Low	...
Reading	Excellent	{He/She/Name} enjoys a wide range of reading material and actively engages with the material {he/she} reads.
	Excellent	...
	Good	{He/She/Name} enjoys a good range of reading material but should look for a different type of books every now and then to increase the range.
	Good	...
	Fair	{He/She/Name} delivered adequate responses to the books chosen.
	Fair	...
	Needs improvement	...
Next category	...	...

There are two types of comment banks in Accelerus: school and teacher.

•	Teacher comment banks, as the name suggests, belong to a teacher.

In order to be able to create, modify and use a teacher comment bank, the school must allow teachers to have comment banks via a setting in the School Settings window. Otherwise, they will be limited to school comment banks which they cannot modify, but can draw upon.

The teacher owning the bank may create, modify and use the comment bank in all classes taught by them. Their bank is not available to other teachers but the Accelerus administrator can make it available, if required.

•	School comment banks apply across the school and can be assigned to different subjects.

To be able to create and assign a school comment bank, a user must have a school role or a subject role with rights to administer comment banks. These privileges are set via Tools > Security. As shown below, a subject level role called Subject Coordinator has been set up and the role has the Administer Comment Bank permission.

Com Security SubjCoord

As far as teachers are concerned, they may draw upon comments in school banks that have been assigned to their subjects, when writing comments for their students. They may also export and print out listings of school comment banks. However, they may not make changes to a school comment bank.

There are two levels of administration of school comment banks:

➢	Those with a school role, who are allowed to administer comment banks, have full access to all comment banks, both teacher and school level, and may assign comment banks to all subjects.

➢	On the other hand, a user with a subject level comment bank role, eg a subject coordinator, can create both teacher and school comment banks, but may only modify the school comment banks they own, but may assign any school comment banks to their own assigned subjects.

Comment banks are stored in the Accelerus database and are not separate files. They may be worked on directly from Accelerus by administrators, subject coordinators and teachers alike.

Teachers working in Accelerus directly or via Accelerus Web have access to the comment banks stored in the database.

Also, where teachers are using offline files, when their offline class files are exported or collected, comment banks that have been associated with the class also form part of the offline file. Any changes made to the comment bank, eg by the Accelerus administrator, will be updated with other changes when the teacher synchronises their offline file.

In addition, when a teacher creates their own teacher comment bank in their offline file, this will be transferred to the database when they synchronise.

This means that:

•	Access to all comment banks may be had through the Accelerus database, where comment banks can be set up and associated with subjects and their classes. These will be automatically exported out as part of teachers’ offline files.

•	Changes to comment banks, made by those with privileges to do so, are updated into the Accelerus database when the teacher’s offline file is synchronised, so that the changes become available to the teachers who have access to the particular comment banks.

•	Schools can keep control over comment banks, if they wish. On the one hand they can allow teachers full access to creation of teacher comment banks. On the other hand, a school may restrict the creation and management of comment banks to the Accelerus administrator only.

•	Where teachers are working offline, they only have one file that contains all of their classes and comment banks, rather than a number of each of these files.

•	A teacher's own comment banks are always available to them from cycle to cycle and year to year.

•	Comment banks that belong to a particular teacher will be listed in the Welcome Screen, along with their classes, subjects and cohorts.