New features in SmartPass, September 2022 Edition

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🔁 Recurring Future Passes

At most schools, students have places they go to every day or week at the same time. Now, instead of recreating that pass every time – teachers can create future passes that will automatically repeat.

This is perfect for repeated library passes, guidance appointments, and other “permanent” passes. Students and staff will see these passes on their dashboards.

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📧 Email Notifications & More Notifications

It’s finally here! Students and teachers will get notifications from all of the important activity happening in SmartPass. Just in case it gets too noisy, staff can turn them off – but we’ve made it so students will always receive them.

Plus, we have 4 new notifications incoming:

• For Certain Students: Notifications whenever a certain “frequent flyer” has a pass start. So the instant that student has a pass, you’ll know about it.
• Weekly Summaries: Simple, actionable emails that let you know what’s happening with SmartPass in your school.
• Prevented Encounters: When an encounter prevention is triggered, you’ll get an email.
• Incoming Reports: When a staff member reports a student, admins will be able to receive a notification that the student was reported.

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🔐 Restrict Ending Passes

You’ll now have the option to restrict students from being able to end their pass themselves unless they’ve actually made it to the room. This is ideal for situations where you want verification that a student isn’t ending the pass prematurely.

How does it work? When enabled for the room, when a student tries to end their pass, they’ll be prompted to enter the room’s code. This verification code changes every 30 seconds automatically, so students can’t memorize the code and walk away. Teachers can access this code on the My Room tab.

Alternatively, teachers can end a student’s pass by entering their Teacher Pin on the student’s device – or end it on the teacher’s dashboard.

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📵 Disable Phones for Students

We know many of your schools might have zero cell phone policies for students, so now in SmartPass, admins will be able to prevent all students from signing into SmartPass on their phones— just as an additional measure to make sure they don't have a reason to use their phone in school.

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🪪 Kiosk Mode Improvements

We’re bringing three big improvements to Kiosk Mode:

1. Dedicated Login. Now, teachers and admins don’t have to use their own email and password to set up a Kiosk. This SmartPass-dedicated username and password will just sign a teacher in as a Kiosk – and nothing more.
2. ID Scanning. If you plug in an external ID scanner into Kiosk mode, students can now simply scan their ID card and tap where they want to go. When they return to class or their destination, just scan and their pass is automatically ended for them.
3. Type in ID Number. In case you don’t have third-party ID Scanners, you can still toggle Kiosk Mode to only allow students to type in their ID numbers. Learn more.

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🙈 Room Visibility Grade Levels & File Upload

We’ve heard your feedback, and we’ve integrated Grade Levels and file upload into Room Visibility. Now, you can set a room to be visible only for a certain grade level. Plus, you can import lists of students directly from a spreadsheet.

Last but not least, Wait in Line and Parent Accounts features are coming soon! Sign up for Early Access if your school wants to get it earlier.

If you have any questions or feedback, visit our wishlist to post your feature idea or send us a chat. And don't forget to share SmartPass with your colleagues!
It’s the end of September, which means we have to wake you up (cc: Green Day) and tell you about all of the new features coming to your school next week.

Get ready, because this update includes: Recurring Future Passes, Email Notifications, Restrict Ending Passes, Disable Mobile Phones, Kiosk Mode improvements, and Room Visibility updates.

But before we dive into it– do you love giving feedback on SmartPass? We’re forming a Customer Advisory Board to get continuous input from customers on new features we develop! Members will get exclusive sneak peaks at SmartPass features, hands-on time with the SmartPass team, and of course SmartPass swag. Learn more.