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Find a more in depth introduction to contributors and their role for network services here, or independent services here.

In this guide:

If you recently received a notification naming you as a contributor for a team member, congratulations! Being a contributor means you can be a part of someone's professional development and offer insight and assistance along their journey as an educator.

You may have been selected as a contributor because:

Depending on your level of access as a contributor, you can contribute in various ways.

A contributor can contribute by:

Portfolio stories allow you to reflect and document evidence of your work over time.

When you first publish a portfolio story it is private to you as the author but you can make it visible to any or all of your contributors by clicking the dropdown arrow in the top right of the story preview card and selecting which of your contributors you'd like to give access to.

Contributors can then respond to the portfolio story, just as they would with child stories. The responses area can be used to make suggestions, give feedback or provide encouragement.

Portfolio plans are flexible spaces where you can set, plan and work towards developmental goals, inquiry, appraisals or accreditation/registration as well as anything else related to your professional learning and development. Contributors can support this work by collaborating on any plans that are shared with them. This could include editing or commenting-only, depending on the plan's permissions.

Note: Managers can also edit certain plans (depending on the template permission settings) but this is intended to support educators in setting up their plans. After that, we would suggest that most interactions happen through comments.

Conversations are private to the selected recipients.

That could be a two-person mentor-mentee conversation about planning your next one-on-one meeting, or it could be an all-contributor or all-team conversation about planning a team project, inquiry or review. You can start conversations with your contributors, as well as contributing to existing threads.

Educator reports can be used to analyse trends in how tags have been applied to portfolio stories, over time.

These might be tags applied to portfolio stories and related to your professional development (eg. teaching standards tags), or tags applied to child stories that you've saved to your portfolio (eg. curriculum tags). Your contributors will be able to observe differences/similarities over time which will help them to focus their support.

Cycles are set up by your network and include a set of focus areas with a start and end date. They are generally used for professional growth, appraisal, induction or leadership. A cycle can also include a self-review and/or manager review at the end of the cycle period, but does not have to.

Your managers (but not your standard contributors) can see the links you've made to your focus areas. If the cycle includes a self-review or manager review, they can contribute to this and then view it afterwards.

1. Go to your Contributors page and tap the 'Add contributors' tile.

2. Place your cursor in the search field and either begin typing or select from the educators listed (you can only select a single contributor at a time). Note: Managers can also select the level of access each contributor has.

3. Tap the 'Add contributor' button and they will now appear on your Contributors page.

Contributors get their own dashboard with quick access to your portfolio and any plans that have been shared with them. See an introduction to contributors.
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Currently, you can invite any teacher who has a Storypark account and works at the same service/s as you. If you wish to invite a mentor from another service within your organisation, you could ask your head office administrators to set up a 'Community Hub' service and invite all teachers to it. This means that you could then invite any teacher from your entire organisation as a contributor.
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As a portfolio owner, you can remove any contributor, but you cannot remove a manager or direct manager (or admin contributor for independent centres).

On any contributor's tile, tap the small triangle in the top right corner and then tap 'remove'.

That contributor will now no longer have access to your portfolio.