Setting your school up

Eight things, and they genuinely are in this order – the first three decide who can get in, and everything after that is easier once somebody other than you can reach a screen. Most schools do the first four in one sitting and the rest the following week.

The order

1. Claim your email domain. — Admin → Set-up

   Ten Points shows you one verification record to add to your DNS. Until it is verified, nobody can ask for an account using an address at your school, which is exactly the protection you want in place before you tell three hundred people about a new system.

2. Register how your staff sign in. — Admin → Set-up

   Microsoft, MyLogin, or both, on the same screen as the domain. They are together because a school establishing itself does all of this in one sitting, and three separate wizards built at three different times read as three separate products.

3. Set the floor for second factors. — Admin → Second factor

   The level your school requires of everybody. Raising it later locks nobody out: it asks them to enrol on their way in and gives them the screen to do it on.

4. Name your values. — Admin → Settings → Values

   Every point is awarded against one of these, so use the words your school already uses – ideally the ones already painted on the corridor wall. Five or six is plenty. A list of twenty turns a two-tap job into a decision nobody wants to make in a corridor.

5. Add your houses. — Admin → Settings → Houses

   Name and colour each one. Pick from the palette rather than matching a jumper by eye: the colour is used on the corridor board, in every chart, and behind small labels.

6. Check your classes. — Admin → Settings → Classes

   If your MIS is connected, these arrive by themselves overnight. If it is not yet, add what you need by hand: what is on the door, what kind of class it is, and who is in it.

7. See what your plan includes. — Admin → Settings → Modules

   Included in your plan lists everything you have, switched on or not. Worth reading once, before somebody asks you why they cannot find journals.

8. Invite your staff, then watch the requests. — Admin → Staff, then Admin → Access requests

   Invitations go out from hello@tenpoints.io. Anybody who signs in through your provider before you have given them a role lands on a screen offering to ask – and lands in your Access requests list, where you pick their role.

Work you do now is not thrown away when the sync arrives

The nightly sync takes your MIS as truth, but a field you have locked stays yours until you unlock it – so the child whose name your MIS spells wrong keeps the spelling you gave them. Values, houses and plan settings are yours entirely, and the sync never touches them.

Three things you do not have to do

Connect your MIS. That one is ours. Tell us which system you use and we set the connection up with you. It is the only screen in Ten Points where somebody chooses a school they do not work at, which is exactly why it does not sit beside the screens where a school decides who may sign in at its own.

Create a login for each child. Children reach Ten Points through a class code and their own secret. There is nothing to issue and nothing to reset in bulk. See Student logins.

Add a second address to your safe senders list. Everything we send comes from hello@tenpoints.io, and everything you reply to arrives back there. Allow the one address and you have allowed all of it – the invitation, the sign-in code, and the notice that a credential is about to lapse.

What to have ready

• Somebody who can edit your DNS, for about ten minutes
• Whoever gives admin consent in Microsoft, if you are using it
• Your school’s values, in the words you actually use
• Your house names and their colours

Who can do this

An administrator role at your school. The sections are guarded separately – a data manager who only checks the sync holds a different permission from somebody deciding who may sign in – so your Admin screen may be shorter or longer than a colleague’s. It draws the cards you hold and nothing else.