Feb 26th, 2020
Background
Edsby provides a built-in Alerts facility for each student. This is available in the upper right corner of each student’s Panorama page. Alerts are visible to all staff members that can see a student’s Panorama page.
Out of the box, the Alerts panel displays two kinds of alerts:
- Alerts that are automatically generated by Edsby based on teacher-entered data (e.g. “failing classes based on gradebook information)
- Alerts added by administrators using the Edsby Alerts facility (shown here)
When an alert is added in the Alerts panel, it flows to the “Recent Activity” streams of the teachers who are teaching that student:
Alerts Customizations
The Alerts facility in Edsby may be customized in different ways. Options include:
- Support for the manual creation of some or all types of alerts in Edsby can be turned off. This is done by a simple customization to either remove some alert types, or to remove the ability to add new alerts completely.
- Alerts data can be sourced from outside data sources (such as the SIS). This data usually includes the following fields:
- SchoolID (string) Unique ID of the school the student is enrolled in
- GUID (string) Unique ID of the student the alert is for
- Severity (string) “1” is low, “2” is moderate, “3” is high, “4” is severe
- Alert (string) Name of the Alert type (e.g. “Allergy”)
- RecordID (string) Unique ID of the alert record (optional – supports syncing)
- MedicalAlertString Text describing the alert
- Status (string) “Active” or “Inactive”
- Source (string) can be used to identify the source (e.g. “SIS”)
- CreatedDate the date/time the alert was created (optional)
- ModifiedDate the date/time the alert was last modified (optional)
- RecordDate the date the record expires on (optional)
Alert information can be filtered by Edsby at import time so that only a subset of available information is imported into Edsby. For example Edsby could be configured to import alerts of type “medical” (e.g. “peanut allergy”) but ignore alerts of type “medical condition” (e.g. “has ADHD”).
Privacy Considerations
When dealing with sensitive information such as medical data it is critical to consider privacy implications. Although touched on above, key a consideration include whatever alert information is created in Edsby or imported to Edsby is displayed in the Alerts panel on the Edsby Panorama page. Any Edsby user that has access to a student’s Panorama page will have access to the alert information showing in the Alerts panel. This could influence the kind of information an organization chooses to surface in the Alerts panel (either through importing or through direct entry).
Additional Notes
Note 1: When Edsby reads alerts from an outside source it ensures that only the active alerts from that source are shown in the Edsby Alerts panel. If an alert is deleted on the source side (e.g. the SIS) it will be removed from Edsby on the next SIS sync.
Note 2: Alerts sourced from outside sources such as the SIS cannot be edited or deleted on the Edsby side.