The following steps will assist you in adding and/or modifying Predefine Comments for usage in Secondary or Elementary report cards.
Before You Begin
Some things to keep in mind as you adjust Predefine Comments:
- Illuminate does not have any translating feature built-in. This means if you add only English predefine comments in Illuminate, Illuminate will not on generate a report card for a Spanish student or automatically translate the English comments to Spanish.
- Do you plan to build/administer other report card templates aside from English? For example, in District X, they give out an English and Spanish elementary report card. If so, you probably want Spanish translated comments to show on a Spanish report card template and English comments to show on the English template. Please ensure that for each English comment, you add a Spanish equivalent.
- Illuminate does not support gender placeholder (ie. [He/She] is the best student in the whole wide world!) replacements within your comments. The idea is that with the placeholder in the comment, the system will replace the [He/She] placeholder with regards to the student's gender. Whatever you enter for the comment, is exactly what will come out on a printed report card.
1. Select the Admin gear.
2. Under Other, click Code Management.
1. In the search box, type in or scroll down the code sets,to find the set called "Grade Comments".
2. Once found, click Load to list the codes/comments within this set.
The page will refresh and list all predefine comments that currently exist. You can either Add Code (1) to add a new predefine comment, or click on the pencil/paper icon (2) of an existing comment to edit that specific comment.
1. Enter a unique key/value for the comment you are adding. By unique, Illuminate expects a unique Code Key for each unique English comment. A few things to keep mind:
- When adding another language comment that is a translation of English, you must use the same Code Key value as the English. For example, if the English comment was "1 - Student is smart!", then the Spanish comment equivalent would be "1 - El estudiante es inteligente."
2. Enter the expected comment sentence/string.
3. Please choose the site that you would like this comment affiliated to, generally this would be the District site. If this is a district-wide comment that applies to all schools under it, choose the District site.
4. Is this comment used for Elementary Standards-based report cards? Although it states "K-6", it's not limited to just those grade levels. K-6 means that you plan use or not use it within the Elementary report card module.
5. If you have purchased and are using Illuminate's Secondary report card module, do you want to make this comment available within that module? Just like #4, although it states "7-12", it's not limited to just those grade levels, but rather to the Secondary report card module.
6. Do you want this comment to be active/deactivated? Choose "No" and this comment no longer appears as a choice for teachers when giving grades.
7. Do you want this comment to only appear for Special Ed students? Generally "No", but this is how you can limit comments to only SPED students.
This field must be populated as either yes or no and cannot be left null.
8. Choose what Language this comment is for. Please be sure to choose the correct language that matches the Code Translation in step 2. This is how Illuminate will know if a student has a Correspondence Language of "Spanish", that when generating a report card it will pull the "Spanish" translated comment instead of English.
This field must be populated with a language and cannot be left null.
9. Grade Comment Types are ways to categorize your comments. If you plan to use this, please be sure that you first add the Grade Comment Types (Code Management > Grade Comment Types) and they will appear within this drop-down to choose from.
10. State ID isn't used in this case as report card comments are not reported to the state. You can leave this blank.
11. If you have a certain sort order you would like your comments to be sorted in, you can manage the sort order here with a number.
Select Save to save changes.
If wanting to support other languages such as Spanish, you will repeat the above process. Everything will be the exact SAME except Code Translation and Coorespondance Language.
2. Type in the Spanish version for Code Translation.
8. Select Spanish for the Coorespondance Language.
Yes, there will be two comments with the same Code ID, but one is for English and one is for Spanish.
After you've gone through the pain of manually adding comments and have gotten to comment #10, you are likely wondering why you are copying from an Excel sheet to paste into Illuminate. Just wait, there's hope. If you should have more than 25 comments (including translations), Illuminate can help to assist in importing your comments. Anything less than 25, you can probably beat us to the finish line. Please provide the comments in the format above and send the file to help@illuminateed.com. Within the ticket, please ask for Illuminate's assistance to import your list of predefine comments. The list of fields to include are:
- Code Key
- Code Translation
- Site ID
- K-6
- 7-12th
- Active
- Is special ed
- Correspondence Language
- Grade Comment Type
Attached is a sample file with comments in English and Spanish to get started. Make unique and alter for your site. Then, use this file to send to Illuminate to Mass Import into your site.
Next Steps
Need other advanced setup advice? Visit Setting Up Secondary Report Cards for Admin.