creating comment banks - spto.co.uk · creating comment banks ... by this help card. 1. school...

This Help Card was last updated: 09/02/2018

Creating COMMENT BANKS

This HelpCard is to support you in creating and sharing COMMENT BANKS

To help you write Annual Reports more quickly, you can borrow and write COMMENT BANKS to add to several pupil reports.

The Annual Report Writer caters for EYFS and Year 1 to 6 reports in your school. There are two separate report formats and each has their separate comment bank.

If you are writing reports for children in Year 1 to Year 6, please click on and refer to all the ‘Y1-Y6’ links. If you are writing EYFS Reports, please click on and refer to all the EYFS links.

You can create your COMMENT BANK by clicking on the

Create and edit your COMMENT BANK link in the Annual Report

Writer menu. Your link may not be at number 4.

This HelpCard

Section 1: The Report Writing Process

Section 2: What is a COMMENT BANK?

Section 3: How to create your own COMMENT BANK

Section 4: Saving and searching COMMENT BANKS

Section 5: Using the COMMENT BANK

Summary of the features you will be able to use when writing your reports:

Create and share a Comment Bank – a bank of statements that can be added to your children’s individual reports quickly

and easily. School PUPIL TRACKER Online will automatically ensure that there is the correct use of gender specific language

too. HelpCard: www.spto.co.uk/documents/annualreport_bank.pdf

Auto Comments – School PUPIL TRACKER Online will automatically create individual comments for writing, reading and

mathematics based on a pupil’s current attainment, their progress and the APP aspects or targets they have achieved through

the academic year.

Auto Grades – School PUPIL TRACKER Online will automatically enter grades for progress and attainment, and fill in latest

assessment data in your report saving you time [writing, reading, science and mathematics].

Write a whole class comment – comments that can be used across every child in your class.

Keep track of your reports – see which have not been started, which are underway and which reports your have finished.

Work on reports wherever you log into School PUPIL TRACKER Online – you can work on the reports of any of the

children you have access to with School PUPIL TRACKER Online – this means job share teachers or teachers who teach

across a number of classes can work on their parts of the reports too.

Work on reports as either a whole class, in groups or edit an individual report – you choose how to work on your reports,

either using the Annual Report Builder where you can access groups of reports together quickly, or look in depth at one child’s

report and edit it or check it online.


SECTION 1: The Report Writing Process

This is a summary of the Report Writing Process in School PUPIL TRACKER Online. Green sections are covered by this Help Card.

1. School designs the report layouts for Y1-Y6 and EYFS

Choose how your reports will be set up and what you will be reporting to parents. HelpCard: Section 2: The Report Layout Builder: www.spto.co.uk/documents/annualreport_setup.pdf HelpCard: The different Sections you can add to your report: www.spto.co.uk/documents/annualreport_examples.pdf

2. School finalises report layouts and lets teachers access the report writer Once you have made a decision on what your reports will contain, you must finalise your layouts. We recommend discussing the report layout with your staff before you do finalise your report layout. HelpCard: Section 3: Finalising your Layouts: www.spto.co.uk/documents/annualreport_setup.pdf

3. Teachers write COMMENT BANKS and individual reports Teachers write the reports for the children in their class, including class and year group comments and COMMENT BANKS. HelpCard: How teachers write their reports: www.spto.co.uk/documents/annualreport_teacher.pdf HelpCard: Using the COMMENT BANK to write reports: www.spto.co.uk/documents/annualreport_bank.pdf

4. School unlocks auto-comments so teachers can edit them We recommend that you only unlock the auto-comment boxes AFTER APP and EYFS judgements are completed and AFTER the assessments have been added in your chosen SHORT TERM column. HelpCard: Section 4: Unlocking Auto-comments: www.spto.co.uk/documents/annualreport_setup.pdf

5. Teachers finish their reports and tick FINISHED Teachers finish their reports and tick the FINISHED box for each report. The comments on the report will now be saved and fixed. HelpCard: Section 8: Finishing your reports: www.spto.co.uk/documents/annualreport_teacher.pdf

6. Leaders check the reports and tick CHECKED Leaders check each report and tick the CHECKED box for each report. This will LOCK the report so the report cannot now be altered. You may untick the CHECKED box to unlock / edit the report later if you wish. HelpCard: Section 2: Checking reports: www.spto.co.uk/documents/annualreport_publish.pdf

7. School uploads attendance and lates to add to reports We recommend that attendance is uploaded using a manual report. Transferring attendance using a CTF does not include LATES for children and so you must complete this step if you have included attendance as a section in your report. If your report layout does not include an attendance section, you may ignore this step. HelpCard: www.spto.co.uk/documents/simsreporting_attendance.pdf

8. School SAVES and PUBLISHES reports Once attendance is checked, reports can be SAVED and PUBLISHED - this locks the attendance in place and saves the report for future academic years. HelpCard: Section 3: SAVING and PUBLISHING reports: www.spto.co.uk/documents/annualreport_publish.pdf

9. Printing reports HelpCard: Section 4: Batch Printing reports: www.spto.co.uk/documents/annualreport_publish.pdf


SECTION 2: What is a COMMENT BANK?

What is a Comment Bank?

A Comment Bank is a set of paragraphs that can be used to add to children’s reports quickly and

easily.

By building up a bank of comments (such as a paragraph for high-achievers, one for above average

achievers, one for average achievers, one for below average achievers and one for well below

average achievers) you can then assign a different paragraph to different children across your class

Comment Banks can be shared amongst teachers across your school

Comment Banks are automatically individually tailored to reports – a pupil’s name can be added

and the text is modified to the correct gender of the child

We recommend each teacher invests some time in crafting considered

paragraphs for their COMMENT BANKS before beginning to build up their

reports.

IMPORTANT TIME SAVING TIP:

You might not need to create COMMENT BANKS for the CORE: Writing,

CORE: Reading, CORE: Mathematics or CORE: Science boxes as

School PUPIL TRACKER will craft individual comments for every child if

you are using School PUPIL TRACKER to set targets or record NC2014

objectives.

You will be able to quickly assign a different coloured comment from your COMMENT BANK to each child in the Report

Builder. [name] will be replaced by each child’s name and any gender specific language will be replaced by the

corresponding correct gender specific pronouns for each child – it really is easy!

Auto saving

COMMENT BANK boxes save automatically.

The boxes do not go orange, but look for the Saving last changes in

the upper left corner.

You should look for the save confirmation on the page to reassure

yourself it has saved. Please wait for the last box to save before

beginning work on your next box to ensure your comment or grade has

been saved.

becomes

Troubleshooting: If the ‘Saving last changes’ stays orange your comment has not saved – you should click on it

again and click away to another location on the page to try to save the box again.


Spell checking your comments

All modern browsers have built-in spell checking functions which are quick and easy to use. Each browser is used slightly differently.

Spell checking in Chrome, Internet Explorer 10 and 11, and Firefox Type in a text box as you would normally type. Incorrect spellings will be underlined in red.

Right click on an underlined work to be given an option to correct your spelling, for example:

Click on the correct word you require (such as worked in the example above) and your text will be corrected. Spell checking in Safari When working in a text box, right click on the underlined word.

Now click on Spelling and Grammar and then click on Show Spelling and Grammar Follow the guidance to correct the spelling.


SECTION 3: How to create your own COMMENT BANK

This Section will guide you through creating your COMMENT BANKS

You can create your COMMENT BANK by clicking on

the Create and edit your COMMENT BANK link in the

Annual Report Writer menu. Your list may not be number 4

depending on the choices made by your school.

If you are working on EYFS reports, please click the

EYFS link.

If you are working on reports for children in years 1 to 6,

please click on the Y1-Y6 link.

The first time you open your COMMENT BANK at the

beginning of each academic year’s reports, it will be blank

(unless the software has been able to locate any comments

you made last year for the same subjects).

Don’t worry if this page is blank, your last year’s COMMENT

BANK has been saved – but you may need to search for it –

more on that later.

Each column in the grid represents a section in your school’s

Annual Report that needs to be completed for each child.

IMPORTANT TIME SAVING TIP:

You might not need to create COMMENT BANKS for the CORE: Writing, CORE: Reading, CORE: Mathematics or CORE:

Science boxes as School PUPIL TRACKER will craft individual comments for every child if you are using School PUPIL

TRACKER to set targets or record APP.


The rules of creating good Comment Banks

When creating all your COMMENT

BANKS remember to DO these things:

Use [name] to refer to a child’s name using square brackets

Use [name]'s and it will be replaced with (e.g.) Peter's

Use gender specific language such as he, his etc. – this will be

automatically changed later depending on each child's gender

We recommend writing comments for a male as this converts to

female comments very accurately

Write paragraphs that are linked to the colour coding (dark green

for excellent, green for good etc.) – this will be explained further below

You SHOULD NOT do these things:

Do not use pupil’s names

Do not leave spaces or dots (...) for pupils names – use [name]

instead

Do not use (name) in round brackets - use [name]

Do not mix up ‘good’ paragraphs and write them in the red boxes

When writing your COMMENT BANK, we have created a

simple five grade system to help you create paragraphs for

your reports.

Darker green box – for very good or excellent comments

Light green box – for very good or doing well comments

White box – for average comments

Light red box – for needs to improve comments

Red box – for lots of improvement needs comments

This will help you write a range of comments and will also

allow you to store and share your comments consistently

across your school and for use next year.

There is also an extra handy sixth ‘ungraded’ box – you can

use this to enter any comment that you wish. We call this the

‘Flexi-comment’ as it can be very versatile, as you will see

later.


For example, I can type an ‘excellent’ comment in the darker

green box (Comment 1) as shown on the right.

In this way, you can build up a bank of graded comments for

each of the columns or sections in the report.

You do not need to use all five boxes if you do not wish to.

The box will auto save when you click away at any other

place on the screen.

You may enter text in these boxes by:

Typing directly in the box

Copying and pasting text from (for example) Microsoft Word

Clicking the will DELETE or clear the comment (this cannot be undone).


SECTION 4: Saving and searching COMMENT BANKS

This Section will guide you through saving, sharing and searching through COMMENT BANKS

To the side of each COMMENT BANK box is an edit button:

You can click on this icon to access other people’s

comments, save your own and share comments.

Clicking on the button opens

the COMMENT BANK pad.

1. The current column you are writing the comment for (e.g. Reading or PE)

2. Click a numbered box to jump to a different graded comment.

3. Your current graded

comment – you can edit the comment here too

4. Clear or delete the comment 5. Archive a comment – save

the comment forever (see below)

6. Assign a comment to a

specific year group (see below).

7. Search other COMMENT

BANKS (see below)

The COMMENT BANK Pad

The COMMENT BANK Pad is a useful tool that lets you access your own COMMENT BANK, and also search through

other comments written by teachers at your school or by School PUPIL TRACKER. Your own COMMENT BANK

paragraphs are always located on the left of the pad – to the right is a search tool to explore and find other comments.

2

3

4

5 7

6

1


Search through other people’s COMMENT BANKS

You are able to access ALL the comments written in your school.

You are able to access ALL the comments created by the staff at School PUPIL TRACKER.

You CANNOT access comments from other schools.

School PUPIL TRACKER will try to search for similar comments for you whenever you open the COMMENT BANK Pad.

When you are writing, saving and sharing your paragraphs in

the COMMENT BANKS, School PUPIL TRACKER is

automatically categorising them and labelling them with year

groups – it does this based on the area of report you are

writing for and the year groups of children you are accessing.

You can access previous and current COMMENT BANKS by

using the search areas on the right side of the COMMENT

BANK Pad.

First select a comment bank theme, such as ‘geography’ or ‘creative skills and development’.

Next choose a year group from the second drop down menu.

School PUPIL TRACKER will automatically look for matches.

For example, if I search for ‘ICT’ and ‘Year 4’, School PUPIL

TRACKER will look for any matching comments.

We can see it has found a range of graded comments and

has opened these up below the search drop downs.

Each comment is colour-coded based on the graded colours

we looked at earlier (e.g. dark green for excellent, green for

good etc.).

I can see that I am looking at comments written by someone

else in school as they state ‘Written by someone else’

Please note, comments with exact matches of text will not be

duplicated on the list to reduce clutter.


Clicking on the bold title for each comment will open up the

full paragraph so I can preview it and decide whether this is

the sort of comment I would like to use.

Notice how this comment includes [name] instead of the

child’s name – this will be changed automatically by School

PUPIL TRACKER on the child’s report later.

If this is the comment I would like to use, I simply click on the

blue arrow and the paragraph will be automatically

placed into my own comment bank area on the left.

The comment has now appeared in

my own COMMENT BANK area and I

can add to it or amend it as much as I

like.


Archiving your own COMMENT BANK

The comments you have written in your current COMMENT BANK are saved for you and will be shared automatically

across your school. They will also be available for you for next year’s report too.

However, each time you change or update your current COMMENT BANK, your comments in the COMMENT BANK are

over-written. If you wish to write more than six comments for each subject area, so that you save comments you

particularly like, then you can ARCHIVE the current comment you are looking at in the COMMENT PAD.

Archiving a comment will save it so that it is fixed and will not change in the future – even if you then go on to re-write or

delete all your current COMMENT BANK comments, the archived comment will still be available.

To ARCHIVE a comment FOREVER so it is not accidentally

overwritten or deleted in the future by yourself, click the

yellow Archive comment button.

Once you have Archived a comment, you will be able to search for it using the search tool shown above.


Creating comments for different year groups across school

You may wish to create comments for a subject across the whole school in one go – for example, if you are the ICT

teacher who teaches ICT in every year group you may have to write comments for Year 1 through to Year 6 and you want

to file these comments away linked to year groups so you can find them more clearly later.

To do this for each year group choose the report column (subject) you wish to write your comments for:

1. Enter your comments into the column of boxes as normal.

2. Now click on to access the COMMENT PAD.

3. Use this drop down below the box of text to file the comment in to a

specific year group - for example, choose Year 4 for Year 4 comments or KS1 for Key Stage 1 comments. This

means when you or another user searches for Year 4 comments, the comments you have filed in Year 4 will

appear.

4. IMPORTANT: For each comment, once you have filed them into a year

group, click on the Archive comment button to archive the comment.

5. Use these buttons to move from one graded comment to another:

6. Click on to return to your column of comments to write new comments for a different year

group. You may choose to delete the original comments in the column or edit the comments to create a new set.


Editing and deleting comments I have archived

To edit or delete comments you have previously archived,

you will need to locate them in the search tool. For example,

I will look for comments in creative skills, Year 3.

Any comments linked to Year 3 and creative skills will

appear.

To the right, we can see that it has located a number of

comments.

The first comment is in my current COMMENT BANK. I can

only edit or delete this comment in the COMMENT BANK

itself – you can see the cross on the right is greyed out. This

is to prevent me accidentally deleting this comment.

The second comment, however, is one I have archived. As it

has been written by me and is not in my current COMMENT

BANK, I can edit or delete this.

I can click on the to EDIT the comment and change its

text or link it to a different year group.

I can click on the to DELETE the comment.

You cannot edit or delete comments written by other users.


SECTION 5: Using the COMMENT BANKS

Using COMMENT BANKS in the Report Builder

Access the REPORT BUILDER from the Completing your

Annual Reports pod. It may have a different number than

the one shown.

Please note that the EYFS Report Builder is different from

the Year 1 to Year 6 Report Builder so you must make the

relevant choice here to work on each report.

Each section of the report has a box for each child where you can enter text.

Use the spell-checking built into your browser to check the text.

Use to clear or delete the contents of the box

Clicking on the COMMENT BANK buttons 1 to 6 will add the COMMENT

BANK statement to a child’s report box.

For example, clicking will add

the number 1 comment from your

COMMENT BANK at the top of the

column.

Comment Bank - comment 1

Individual report

You may notice that School PUPIL TRACKER has replaced [name] with the pupil’s name. It will also ensure your gender specific pronouns are used correctly as it knows the gender of each child.

School PUPIL TRACKER Online will try its very best to spot all gender-specific pronouns and alter

them to the correct pronouns, but we cannot guarantee this.


Using the Flexi-comment

The sixth, ‘Flexi-comment’ box can come in very handy here – you can keep altering the comment in Comment 6 to fill in

different children down the class. For example, if six children have completed good work painting Van Gogh’s sunflowers,

enter the text ‘His work painting Van Gogh’s Sunflowers was excellent.’

Now choose each child to give this short comment to and click on the relevant .

These children will have this comment added on to their current report box.

You could now change the comment to something different and go down your class list to add the new comment to a new

set of children.


Using COMMENT BANKS in the Individual Reports

Access each child’s INDIVIDUAL report from the Pupil

Report Progress List from the Annual Report Writer Menu.

Click on a child’s name in the list to go to their

Individual Report.

You may choose any COMMENT BANK by selecting the section title from the

drop down choice in the COMMENT BANK pod – this is highlighted in red on

the right.

Choose the Section Title you require (such as ICT as shown on the right) and

your personal COMMENT BANK will load in the pod.

will clear or delete the comment (this cannot be undone)

will take you to the COMMENT BANK pad

will transfer the paragraph into the current report (see below)

To transfer a paragraph FROM the COMMENT BANK into

the Individual Report:

First select the report text box you would like the

paragraph to be placed into. Do this by clicking on

the box you require. It will turn blue (see right)

Now click the button next to the comment you

wish to copy across. The paragraph will now

appear in your chosen box. The child’s name and

gender-specific pronouns will be automatically

adjusted to ensure it is personalised.

You may now edit or add to the text as you require.

creating comment banks - spto.co.uk · creating comment banks ... by this help card. 1. school...

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