Admin: Tips for a Successful School Year Start
As the new school year begins, here are a few quick setup tasks to help your district run smoothly in Mastery Connect. Throughout this document, there are links to further resources to show you how to complete each of these tasks.
Restrict Tracker Creation
District administrators have the ability to restrict users from creating trackers. This can help to ensure teachers are waiting to create trackers until rostering data has been uploaded and reviewed for accuracy.
Set District-Approved Pathways
Beginning this year, district administrators can set District Approved standards, which restricts the available cores when creating maps, trackers, and assessments to those cores that have been selected by the district.
Confirm Scale Levels
We allow districts to choose whether to measure mastery on a three or four tier scale level, and set custom labels. Making this change mid-year can create disruptions and may require trackers and materials to be recreated. Make sure your district is using the correct scale levels to avoid interruptions later in the year. If this needs to be updated, please reach out to the Mastery Connect support team.
Set a Support Contact
Administrators can enter the contact information for a school or district support contact when managing customer support settings. This contact information will be visible when users within the district select the ? Help icon in the Global Navigation.
Update User Roles
While teacher accounts can be created by school or district administrators, only district administrators can assign school or district administrator roles to user accounts. If a user needs school or district administrator permissions, roles can be edited from the Manage Teachers tool.
Verify School Assignments
Mastery Connect data gathered by teachers and viewed in reports by school and district administrators is organized and filtered by the teacher’s school location. By making sure a teacher is assigned to the correct school before creating their trackers, you can ensure the data is reported correctly.
How do I check which school my account is assigned to?
- To check which school your account is assigned to, select your account menu and click the Profiles option. Then click the My Profile link.
What should I do if my school assignment is incorrect?
- If your district is providing school assignments via a nightly sync with an SIS, please work with your district/administration to make sure the school assignment is correct in the SIS.
- If your district is not syncing with an SIS (or the school assignment in Mastery Connect needs to be different from what is provided via the SIS), any user with the District Administrator role can change the school assignment from their Manage Teachers tool (and prevent the school from changing with a sync).
Check and update our grades and subjects
- In addition to your school, your account will also show which grades and subjects you teach. This is set and can be edited by each teacher.
Share Expectations with Staff
To ensure a smooth start, let your teachers know when and how to set up their trackers. If you use Canvas, we highly recommend creating new trackers directly from a Canvas course. This is the most efficient and reliable method to properly link the course and tracker, saving time and preventing issues later.
Help with Setup
- Check Help Documentation
Many common questions and concerns are answered in our Mastery Connect Community guides on various topics. - Refer to your District’s Processes
Your district may have specific contacts who are assigned to work on and with Mastery Connect. If your district has a specific process in place, please refer to those processes first. - Utilize the District Contact in the “?” Icon
If your school or district has a specific technical contact in place, it may already be listed in the “?” help icon in the top, right-hand corner of Mastery Connect. - What information do I provide when reaching out to support?
If you encounter an issue that needs to be addressed by Mastery Connect, our Mastery Connect support team is available to help. To best expedite your request it is best to specify the problem, and provide any error messages received, screenshots of the problem, as well as 1 or 2 examples of the issue (specific students, specific teachers, specific tracker, etc.). For security we ask that you only provide student names, and not ID numbers, when submitting your request.