5 Tips to get more out of SmartPass for your School

SmartPass is a platform for managing your student movement. It allows you to make digital hall passes, generate actionable insights about your students, and makes your school safer.

One of the best things about SmartPass is how adaptable it is to the needs of your school. Today, we'll show you 5 tips to make SmartPass work harder for you.

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1. Color code your hall passes

SmartPass allows you to add colors and icons to your hall passes. You can use them to organize and differentiate your hall passes. A couple ways to color code them:

• By grade level. Different grade levels have different colors
• By building floor or wing. A Wing is Blue or First floor is red.
• By activity. Restrooms are blue, classrooms are orange.
• By Pods or teams

Every school is unique and allows you to make your pass system look like the way you already run your school.  

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2. Use room visibility settings to create special privileges for students

^ Interesting way that Hackettstown High School uses room folders and visibility settings in combination!

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Every school is unique and this is why we made SmartPass so customizable.  We have found that schools are brilliant at finding new ways to use SmartPass.  A few of our favorites are:

1. Maybe you want to give special privileges to those students who have proven to be excellent.  Create a space just for those students or an event and simply limit the visibility to those students who an take advantage of the program
2. Need to add senior privileges for your students? Just create a pass just for them and limit it by grade level.
3. Every school has students who need special considerations.  If you have students who need extra movement in the hallways because that will set them up for success you can make passes exclusively for these students so they have access to the programs they need.  Other students will not even see the passes and probably never know they exist.

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3. Load your hall pass data into Google Sheets for more analytics

You can do quite a bit of searching and analyzing right in SmartPass.  You can also download any of the information into an excel spread sheet or CSV.  From here the sky is the limit to what analytics you can create.

Maybe you want to create a pivot table of your top frequent flyers or you are curious what teachers are letting all of the students out of class.  These are just a few examples of the type of analytics you can create.

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4. Use the student search to keep in touch with students

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Student search is pretty cool!  Here are a few reasons why you will love this

1. Every 6 period teacher is incredibly curious if that student who asked to leave every day from their classroom is also leaving the 5 periods prior.  You care and want to make sure your students have the time in class they need to be successful.  
2. Maybe you are looking to raise test scores and need to know how much time students are out of class.  You can now know with just a few clicks.
3. Most schools these days have at least a few students who take advantage of the autonomy students are given and will say they are going to the bathroom but will walk around the halls for extended periods of time.  We know this does not benefit students and will take away from valuable time in the classroom.  The student search will tell you how often students are coming back late from a pass.  Powerful!

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5. Use encounter prevention to prevent groups of students from meeting in the hallways

This is probably the most used feature in SmartPass.  Principals have said this is a game changer for their school.  

This is for the groups of students you have always wished could never make passes at the same time.  Whether you have students who love to wonder around the building together or you are protecting one student from another Encounter Prevention will make it easy for you to keep these students from purposely or accidentally meeting up when they should be in their learning environments.

You can make as many groups as you like and put as many students in each one that you need.

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I hope you find these 5 tips helpful.  Stay tuned for more tips and tricks to create the ultimate hall pass system for your school.

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