Custom Teachers You Add

Use this for somebody your SIS rosters no students to: an interventionist, a consultant, or a teacher whose courses we do not import because they are not tested subjects, such as Learning Strategies or ESL.

For the teachers your SIS sends with a gifted or inclusion course, see Gifted and Inclusion Teachers instead. The two kinds work differently throughout.

Before You Start

• A base school. Required for a person on no SIS file. It is where we file them, and your SIS never changes it.
• An email on your staff email domain, if they are going to log in. The address is what gives them a login, so it has to be a mailbox your district created, with a Google or Microsoft account on it. An outside consultant needs one of your addresses before they can sign in. Leave the email blank for somebody who will not log in.
• A staff email domain set for your district. Until one is set, nobody can be given a login at all. Open a Helpdesk Ticket if yours is not set.

Adding a Custom Teacher

Step-by-Step Instructions

1. Navigate to the Teachers page, then Teacher Actions, then Custom Teachers.
2. Click "Add custom teacher".
3. Either choose an existing teacher, or fill in a person on no SIS file.
4. Choose their base school. For a person on no SIS file this is required.
5. Choose their subjects, up to four.
6. Choose whether they get impacts and a tracker or a tracker only.
7. Click "Save custom teacher", then name the students they work with.

Naming the Students a Custom Teacher Works With

Step-by-Step Instructions

1. On the Custom Teachers page, click "Students" beside that person.
2. Click "Assign" beside each student they work with. It saves straight away.
3. Click "Remove" to take somebody off the list.

A student is named for the whole school year, and only for the current one. The school year control shows an earlier year's list as it was, with nothing to change.

A student who has since left your district stays on the list, marked No longer active, and can still be removed. The grade and school shown are the ones the student had when they were named.

Naming a student does not move their scores to a different teacher or school. What it does give the custom teacher is described below.

Assigning a Whole List of Students from a File

Clicking "Assign" once per child is fine for a handful. For somebody who works with fifty or a hundred students, send a file instead. The Students page has a Download CSV button and an Upload CSV box, and both belong to the one person whose page you are on.

The File

The file has four columns:

teacher_id,first_name,last_name,student_id
4821,Jane,Okafor,123456789
4821,Jane,Okafor,234567890
4821,Jane,Okafor,345678901

One row per student. The three teacher columns are there so that you can tell whose file it is when you open it later, and we read nothing from them except the check described below. Any other column you add is ignored.

Step-by-Step Instructions

1. On the Custom Teachers page, click "Students" beside that person.
2. Click "Download CSV". If nobody is assigned yet, the file comes down with a few blank rows, which is your template.
3. Put one student ID in each row's student_id column. Paste extra rows in beneath if you need more, and leave their teacher columns blank: we do not need them filled in.
4. Save the file as a CSV.
5. Back on the Students page, choose the file under "Assign students from a file" and click "Upload CSV".

The page then tells you how many students were assigned and how many the person's roster holds for the year.

What the Upload Does and Does Not Do

• It adds. A student already on the roster who is not in your file stays on it. To take somebody off, use the "Remove" button on the page.
• It is safe to upload twice. A student already assigned is not assigned a second time, so sending a corrected file in full costs nothing.
• It assigns for the current school year only. An earlier year offers the download and no upload.
• It never creates a teacher. Add the person first, as described above. The file only says which students they work with.
• It cannot be aimed at the wrong person. If the teacher_id in the file belongs to another custom teacher, the upload is refused, tells you whose file it is, and gives you both ways out: open that person's page, or change the column. If it belongs to somebody who is not a custom teacher, it says so. That is the only thing that column is for, and a blank one is never a problem.

If Something in the File Cannot Be Used

Students we can use are assigned and the rest are listed in a pop-up, one per line, each with the row number you see when you open the file and the student ID on that row. A row usually appears there because the student ID matches nobody in your district, because the student is no longer active, or because they are at a school your access does not cover.

A row with the student_id cell left blank is skipped quietly. There is nothing in it to tell you about, and the template arrives with blank rows.

If the whole file cannot be used, nothing is assigned and the pop-up says why: it is not a CSV, it could not be read as one, it has no student_id column, it holds no rows, every row's student_id is blank, none of its student IDs could be used, or it is far larger than one person's roster could be. Where none of the IDs could be used, the pop-up lists every row, so you can see which IDs to check.

A file is read up to 500 rows, which is five times the largest caseload we have seen. If you genuinely have more students than that for one person, upload the file in two parts: the upload adds, so the second part does not disturb the first.

Three things the file can get away with. Extra spaces around a student ID do not matter, and neither do leading zeros, so a spreadsheet that turned 000123456 into 123456 has not broken anything. Saving it from Excel as CSV UTF-8 (Comma delimited) is also fine.

What a Custom Teacher Your District Added Gets

Once you name the students a custom teacher works with, their numbers come from those students' scores, in the subjects you chose for them:

• Impacts: MAAP, K-2, Feeder and Compacted, whichever the students' scores call for, the same kinds a classroom teacher gets. A second grader's scores count toward K-2, for example. Where none of the students has a score in the custom teacher's subjects on an assessment, there is no impact for it.
• Grade impacts, when the students they work with are in two or more grades.
• A tracker listing those students' scores, opened from Data Tracker on their teacher page.

If the person later picks up classes of their own, those students are added to the same impacts. Nothing you named is dropped.

Tracker Only

A custom teacher set to A tracker only gets the tracker and no impacts, for the students you named and for any classes they later teach. Switching someone to tracker only stops new impacts, and every impact already built for them keeps the numbers it was built with. Switch them back to Impacts and a tracker and their impacts are built the next time an assessment's impacts are built.

When a Newly Named Student Is Counted

Impacts are built when an assessment's impacts are built, not when you click Assign. A student you name after an assessment's impacts were built is counted the next time that assessment's impacts are built.

Where Their Impacts Appear

A custom teacher's impacts are listed alongside every other teacher's: on All Impacts and its PDF and CSV, in the school-wide PDFs under PDF Options on the Impacts page, and on a school's Report Cards. Every custom teacher's row carries a label, so you can tell them apart, and the CSVs carry it in a Custom Teacher column: Added by district for someone you added, Gifted Teacher or Inclusion Teacher for a roster your SIS files send, Gifted and Inclusion Teacher for someone sent both, and the kind followed by (added) for someone who is both.

Each label follows the year of the impacts listed, not today. A gifted or inclusion label follows that year's roster, so a teacher who taught an inclusion course in an earlier year is not labelled one now. Added by district follows the year you named their students in, so an existing teacher you made a custom teacher carries no label on impacts from the years before that: those are their own classes'.

A School User who can see a custom teacher sees every student on that teacher's tracker, including students at other schools you named for them. Gifted and inclusion teachers already work this way.

They are listed under the teacher's school. For a person on no SIS file that is the base school you chose. For an existing teacher you made a custom teacher, it is the school your SIS file gives them.

Which Numbers Cannot Move

Naming a student never moves a score to a different teacher or school, so your district's numbers, every school's numbers, and the student's own teacher's numbers are exactly what they would be if you had named nobody.

The student is counted in two teacher impacts, though: their own teacher's and the custom teacher's. Gifted and inclusion teachers already work this way. Nothing in the app adds teacher impacts together, so no total changes, but if you add up teacher rows from a CSV yourself, a named student appears in both.

Giving Them a Login

The email on their record is what gives a person your district added a login. There is no separate button and nothing is sent to them.

• Put an email on your staff email domain on their record, and they can sign in at that address. The page tells you the address the login was given at.
• Clear the email, and they can no longer sign in.
• Change the email, and they sign in at the new address instead.
• Untick Active, and they can no longer sign in. Tick it again and they can.

They then get the same pages, trackers, impacts, reports and PDFs as any other teacher, for their own students and nobody else's.

When No Login Is Given

The record is always saved. Where no login could be given, the page says which of these it was:

• Your district has no staff email domain set. Nobody can be given a login until one is. Open a Helpdesk Ticket.
• The address is not on your staff email domain. The save is refused and the message names the domain it has to be at. Leave the email blank instead if they will not log in.
• The address has a character a login address cannot hold. A login address holds letters, numbers and the characters . _ + - @ only, so an apostrophe or a space inside it is refused and the message says so. Retype it without them, or leave the email blank if they will not log in.
• The address already belongs to somebody in your district. One address is one login, so give this person an address of their own. The record still saves with the shared address.
• The address is already tied to an account in another district. A person can belong to only one district, whether their account there is active or not.

If the person already had a login and you move their email onto an address one of the last two refuses, their login stays exactly where it is and they go on signing in at the old address. The page says so and names that address, so you can see at a glance that nobody lost access. Their record now carries one address and their login another, which correcting the email puts right.

Taking a Login Away

Clear the email, or untick Active. Either one takes the login away and keeps their record, their students and their history, so putting it back brings the same login back.

Your nightly SIS files never change or remove one of these logins, and never move it onto a different teacher.

Deactivating a Custom Teacher

A person your district added who is on no SIS file stays active until somebody deactivates them. They are never removed for having no students named, and your nightly SIS file never touches them. To deactivate one:

1. On the Custom Teachers page, click "Students" beside that person.
2. Click "Edit".
3. Untick Active and save.

Their record, students and history stay, and any login they held is taken away with them. To bring them back, find them under Inactive Teachers, open their page, then Assigned Students, Edit, and tick Active again. Their login comes back with them.

An existing teacher you made a custom teacher still comes from your SIS file, so they go inactive like any other teacher the night your file stops listing them.

When Your SIS Starts Sending Somebody You Added

If a person your district added starts appearing in your teacher files, give their record the SIS teacher id your files use for them:

1. Open their edit page, as above.
2. Enter the id under SIS teacher id and save.

Their record, students, login and history stay as they are, and from then on your files keep their name, email and school. An id another teacher in your district already holds is refused, and the message names that teacher.

From that point their record is one your SIS maintains, so the email on it is your file's rather than yours, and it no longer decides their login.

Where Each Field Is Edited

There are two edit pages, and which one you need depends on the field.

Their Active box is on the custom teacher edit page and nowhere else. The member pages, where you deactivate everybody else's login, offer no control over theirs: their access follows their record, so two controls over it would disagree. That page offers no Make District Admin button for them either, and the rollover user review will not deactivate them, for the same reason. A person your district added who also needs district-wide access should be given it on a login of their own rather than on this one.

The Edit button on a teacher's own page opens the general teacher form, where a person your district added has their name, email and Active box shown greyed out. That is deliberate, not a fault: those fields are yours, and the custom teacher edit page is where they are set, because saving there is also what brings their login into line with them. That form tells you so and links straight through, so you do not have to remember which page you are on.

Getting to the custom teacher edit page

1. Navigate to the Teachers page, then Teacher Actions, then Custom Teachers.
2. Click "Students" beside that person.
3. Click "Edit".

Or follow the link on the general teacher form, which takes you straight there.

Need Help?

• Helpdesk Ticket: Helpdesk Ticket
• Website: https://tkganalytics.org