Using the News Builder

The News Builder is a great tool to digitise the most important articles you'd like your App users to see.

The Safer Schools Scotland News Builder enables the account Admins for the school or Local Authority to create, curate and customise content that can be published directly to all users of your App, or just specific roles. You can use it for sharing important news, like new exam results, articles the school may have been mentioned in, or relevant safeguarding updates. These will appear in the Latest News tile in the App. You'll also be able to add articles by Category.

Using the News Builder

Once logged in to the Portal, you'll be able to begin creating and sharing your articles using the News Builder. These articles can be made available to whichever roles (users/audiences) within your school community that you'd like to see it. For example, you could have an article regarding a safeguarding concern for staff only, or an article on the school sports team that everyone could see.

Where do the posts go?

You'll be able to review published articles in the Latest News tile of the main menu carousel - the first thing you see when you first open your App.

Let your users know!

Once you've written and published your articles, draw attention to them by sending a Push Notification to your users linking them to the new article. For example, if you've just published the new lunch menu, sending a Push Notification to parents might read:

🍕 New School Lunch Menu! 🥗 : Click here to see this term's new lunch menu 👈🏻

Then select the audience you want to send it to, and select the lunch menu article from the "news builder article" option under Location.

Making a New Post

Only Account Admins in each school can make and upload News Builder Articles. To make one, you'll need to log in to your Web Management Portal, and navigate to News Builder on the left hand menu, and select Add New Post from the options.

STEP 1 This will open an editor. Add a title, select the roles you want to be able to see the article within the app (e.g: if it's not suitable for pupils, do not allow it to go to 'all'), put it in a category and if you wish you can select it to be published later, or save it as a draft.

STEP 2 If you wish to upload a file, such as a poster, handbook or school lunch menu, you can do that with the file uploader under the title dialogue box.

STEP 3 You can now move on to the body of your article. This is typed in the dialogue box below, and you have options similar to a word processor. You can centre align the text, use text effects, apply different fonts, add pictures and even imbed coding or videos!

Once it is complete, scroll back to the top and click Preview if you want to see how it'll look on multiple sizes of device, and when you're happy click Save. If you set it to be Public and Final, it will appear in your app when you 'pull to refresh'.