This article is for administrators of a group of services on a 'network' account, and who've subscribed or are trialling Storypark's Educator Portfolio platform.
An introduction to planning templates
If you haven't worked with planning templates before, here's a quick summary before we begin discussing educator portfolio templates specifically.
A planning template is a plan that is pre-populated with regularly used content such as headings and descriptive text, from which educators can start a new plan. Templates are designed to save your team time so they don't have to start from a blank slate every time they want to create a plan.
As a network administrator, you can create network-specific templates so that all of your educators are planning in a consistent way and you are embedding best practices across your network.
When you create a planning template, you can choose whether it is a Service template or an Educator portfolio template.
Service templates can be accessed by any educator in a service and are generally used for service-wide planning, room planning or child planning.
Educator portfolio templates can be accessed by individual educators and their managers within their own portfolios and are generally used for their own capability development. We'll be discussing educator portfolio plans in this article.
Accessing your network planning templates
To access your network planning templates:
Click on Network setup in the blue bar at the top of the page
Click on Planning templates just beneath this.
This page lets you create and select the network planning templates you wish to make active across all your services. There are three main areas on this page:
The bottom left list, 'Head Office templates' displays every template in your head office and can only be seen by network administrators. This list is made up of both service templates and educator portfolio templates. You can select templates from this list that you want to apply or 'make active' across all your services.
The top left list, 'Active templates', displays any planning templates (service and educator portfolio templates) that you've made active. These templates can be accessed by all your services/educators.
The area on the right displays the template name, the status (Active or Inactive), the type (Service or Educator portfolio), a snapshot of what the template looks like, and buttons to Activate/Deactivate and Edit template.
Create a network-wide educator portfolio planning template
1. Click 'New template' in the Active templates list.
2. From the dropdown, select 'Educator portfolio template':
3. A new blank Educator portfolio template will open:
4. Click on 'Untitled' and name your template:
5. Assign permissions to your template:
6. Add any headers and content to your template. Learn how to build your plan here.
7. Once your template is ready click Save and exit.
Activating your network templates
To make a planning template active and available to all of your educators, select the template name in the bottom left list under Head Office templates and click the Activate button on the right.
You'll template will now be listed on the left under Active templates and can now be seen and used by all of your educators.
What your educators see
Once a network template has been activated it is available to all educators in their own portfolios. Now, whenever an educator creates a new plan in their portfolio, they'll see any educator portfolio templates you've created and activated in their displayed list of available templates:
See create an educator portfolio plan to understand what educators see when they start a plan.
Deactivating a template
To deactivate or remove access to a template from all your educators, select the template name in one of the lists on the left and click the Deactivate button.
Your template will disappear from the Active templates list. It now can't be seen or used by any of your educators in their portfolios. Your template will still be listed under Head Office templates so you can choose to activate it again at any time.
Updating a template
At times you may wish to change or update one of your templates to bring it into line with the latest thinking, curriculum changes or best practices.
You can only access educator portfolio templates from Multi-site Management. Unlike service planning templates, they do not show in your Head Office service planning area.
Editing a template will not affect any plans that were started from that template.
If you edit a template from Multi-site Management, your changes will be applied in real-time. So that an educator does not start a plan from a template that you're in the process of updating, it's best to either make changes at a time when your educators are unlikely to be creating new plans, or start a new plan and then when you activate it, deactivate the outdated one.