Step 5: Set up portal features

As shown in Step 2 - Define the Family and Student Roles, depending on what Aspen features your district uses and the information you manage through Aspen, there is a lot of information that you possibly can allow families to access on their children, and students to access on themselves.

Before giving them access to this information, some setup is required.

Note: Check your school, district, state, and federal confidentiality policies before giving any user access to view another individual's information. This is particularly important when allowing Student and Family users to view a student's health, conduct, and special education information.

These are some of the features that require setup:

Feature

Setup Required

Online course requesting

  • Enable online course requesting in the district schedule preferences.
  • Set up staff online course recommendations.
  • Instruct teachers to enter course recommendations for next year.
  • Manage student requests.

Email notification
  • Define email subscriptions
  • Create jobs for email notifications procedures.
  • Train users on how to subscribe to email notifications.

Gradebook/Announcements
  • Make category of assignments, all assignments, and scores private/published.
  • Train teachers on how to create section-specific announcements.

Groups
  • Set up groups.
  • Add students to groups.

See Creating Groups.

Note: Groups and Pages are combined in Aspen. In order for a Page to display in the portals, you must create a group and then enable a Page for it outside of the portals. (For example, an Aspen system administrator has to create a school Page in order for parents and students to view it in the portals.)

For complete instructions, see Managing Groups and Pages.

Contact verification
  • Set up contact verification workflow.
  • Publicize process to families.
Configure Destiny

Integration with: 
Self-Serve Account Registration
  • Enable/disable student or family account creation
  • Customize account creation
  • Set up special security roles
  • Send or resend verification emails
  • Enable user accounts for verified users