Self-service portals
Six surfaces for students, staff and parents. None need a staff account. All of them carry your branding and respect the light or dark theme.
| Page | URL | For |
|---|---|---|
| Service desk kiosk | /portal | Students and staff: book repairs, track them, get help, buy items |
| Repair tracking | /track/<token> | Anyone with the link from a repair email |
| Induction kiosk | /induct | Students collecting a new device |
| Parent portal | /parent | Parents |
| Help centre | /help | Everyone |
| Public status page | /status | Everyone, if enabled |
Why these exist
Section titled “Why these exist”Because most of what arrives at a school ICT desk is not work. It is questions about work: is it ready, where is it, what do I do, is the Wi-Fi down.
Each of these surfaces removes a category of that traffic:
| Surface | Removes |
|---|---|
| Kiosk | “I need to book a repair” and “can you reset my password” |
| Tracking | “Is it ready yet” |
| Induction kiosk | “Am I on the list” |
| Parent portal | “What has my child had done” |
| Help centre | The ten questions you answer every week |
| Status page | “Is the Wi-Fi down for everyone” |
Set them up. Put a QR code on the counter. Link them from your intranet.
Getting people to them
Section titled “Getting people to them”A tablet on a stand at the service desk running the kiosk in full screen, with a card reader. That is the single highest-value physical change most school desks can make.
A QR code on the counter and on the ICT noticeboard, pointing at /portal.
A link from your intranet, on the page students already open.
In the automatic reply of your ICT mailbox, pointing at the help centre.
Identity and safety
Section titled “Identity and safety”These pages show a person’s own records, so who is looking matters.
Card tap is the primary identification. Tapping a card proves possession of the card, which is what a school actually verifies at a counter anyway.
Username entry proves nothing on its own, so it is refused by default in
production. A kiosk somewhere physically supervised can opt in with
PORTAL_USERNAME_ENTRY=1.
SSO is the right answer for the parent portal, and available for the student one. See single sign-on.
Sessions are short. A kiosk session lasts fifteen minutes by default and pressing Finish ends it immediately, so the next person never sees the last person’s data.
Modules
Section titled “Modules”| Surface | Needs |
|---|---|
| Kiosk | portal.client |
| Tracking | module.repairs |
| Induction kiosk | module.inductions |
| Parent portal | portal.parent |
| Help centre | Nothing, but it is empty without module.knowledgeBase |
| Status page | module.statusPage and module.monitors |