Whether you're starting to use Satchel One for the first time or are just in need of a refresher, we've compiled some helpful best practice tips to help you get the best experience of our learning platform.

When you publish a task, it is automatically accessible to all of your colleagues from your school within My Resources; staff need only search for your name in the relevant filter and they will be able to locate and reuse your task.

If you ever wish to share your work externally (outside of your own school for other teachers to find and reuse), you can visit your published task and click the 'Share to Community Resources' toggle. This will instantly make this task visible and reusable to any staff using Satchel One around the world who may visit the Community Resources area.

Before sharing a task to Community Resources, please ensure that your task and it's attachments contain no sensitive data.

Comments that staff send to students on the Assess tab of a published task will be visible to:

You can choose to multiselect students on the Assess page; if you are sending a more personal message to a student, please ensure that they are the only student that you have selected. You can check this quickly by looking at the 'You have selected...' area at the top of the student activity stream.

Comments posted by staff and / or students on the Discussion tab of a published task will be visible to:

Please note while parents / guardians can view all comments on Satchel One, they are unable to respond.

When you award Behaviour points*, Referred Incidents and Detentions with Satchel, you have the option to write comments which may be communicated to students / parents.

On each app, you will be advised if / how these comments will be communicated.

⚠️ Important: Remember that the comments you choose to share with students and parents will be sent to all selected recipients, therefore please take care when recording sensitive information.

*Comments are only available for schools using our premium Behaviour Writeback app

When users are no longer seen as active on your MIS, they will be marked as 'Leavers' in your Manage Users area of Satchel One.

Please ensure that an Admin user at your school routinely visits this area and removes anyone who is no longer at the school to ensure that they no longer have access to your school's data via Satchel One.

Click here for instructions on how to delete your leavers.

It's a good idea to carefully consider the best way to communicate a message to your students; if you don't need a submission or response from them, it may be best to avoid setting an 'Assignment' entirely.

If you need students to submit a file back to you-

We'd recommend setting this as an Assignment or Classwork task on Satchel One and asking for 'Online Submission via SMHW'.
Please also be aware that if you ask for 'Online Submission via SMHW' and students do not submit anything to you by the due date, they will receive a 'Not Submitted' status.

If you'd like students to be able to send you a comment about your message -

We'd recommend setting a Flexible Task as this does not allow students to submit any work, meaning that they will not receive any 'Not submitted' statuses or overdue reminders. Flexible tasks do, however, allow students to send comments to the teacher which can be useful.

​If you simply want students to be able to view your message but you do not require any kind of interaction -

We'd recommend sharing this message as an announcement on the Satchel One Noticeboard; you can choose to share the announcement with specific classes / year groups or the whole school in one easy step!

The announcement will not appear on their to-do list (which helps to stop this getting cluttered with unnecessary communications) but will instead be seen on their Noticeboard area of the site. Students can see but not engage with the communication on Noticeboard.

When you've published a task on Show My Homework and students have handed in their work, they and their guardians will be looking forward to seeing updates on Satchel about their submission status, grades and any feedback you may give them.

If you've asked students to submit via Class Submission or any 'Other' method, you will be required to manually update the submission status before assigning grades / comments. Taking this action will notify students and parents that their work has been received and processed.

If you've asked students to submit their work online via SMHW however, their submission status will update automatically based on whether they have or have not submitted their work. All you'll then need to do is visit the Assess page and provide a grade and a comment if needed!

Click here to learn more about our different submission methods.