Drag and drop text modules

Use drag and drop heading and paragraph modules with a familiar range of editing tools to visually construct page text content. No knowledge of website markup language is required.

Auto-styling

A style template to match your other pages will be automatically applied, making it easy to add new content.

Everybody’s got their own priorities. The trick in a collaborative and co-dependent environment is synchronising and sharing these priorities adequately to avoid timing clashes or having important milestones missed. The Calendar module available on both web and class pages connects to each user’s Personal Calendar, thereby providing a synchronised way of sharing and publishing event information from multiple sources to users.

Familiar navigation

Time can be quite abstract and difficult to frame, especially when you have a lot of things happening within that amount of time. So it’s important to present timed events in a format that is relevant and useful in a school context.The Term Navigator in the Calendar module displays the full year on a weekly basis, organised by their corresponding school term. Using this more familiar frame of reference, teachers and students can quickly identify when events are happening and gauge their relationship to the school year itself.

Automatic reminders

A well-populated calendar is next to meaningless if it isn’t looked at, so strategy is important in getting users to see events details and reminders that concern them.By default, Calendar items from class pages that users are members of will appear in their “Week Ahead Planner” on the Dashboard. This means as soon as they log in to Ultranet, they get an overview of events and reminders that are relevant to them.On top of this, users also have the option of enabling the Daily Digest email reminder service. Using this, important event reminders (as well as other Ultranet-related information) gets emailed to the user every morning, so nothing slips between the cracks.

Export or subscribe

By default, Personal Calendars can be accessed directly from the Dashboard of authenticated users, so compiled event information is never far away. However, users are not restricted to only seeing these within Ultranet.Personal Calendar events can be subscribed to as a web calendar, which means you can view Ultranet events on desktop calendar applications such as Outlook or iCal. Subscribed calendars are auto-updating, so when new events get entered on the Ultranet end, those events are synchronised and will appear on the desktop view as well.In addition to this, the Personal Calendar also includes an ICS format file download, should you wish to import the events into a calendar that does not support subscription (such as particular web calendars or personal electronic organiser/phones).

Create new pages

As your content and publishing needs grow, you’ll naturally want to spread out and create a denser website. Ultranet pages have the tools built-in to create Sub Pages. Each page can have its own unique set of modules, and can be set up with different permission rights.

Navigation menu control

The navigation menu is created manually, which means you can add links to external sites (such as class blogs) directly in your website's navigation menu, making them easily accessible for parents.

Variable permissions

Some content may be created for public view, or some may be for students or teachers. That’s why each page in Ultranet has its own permission controls, which allows you to set which groups of users have access to view the page, and which groups can edit it.

Media Gallery

For multiple media items, upload photos, videos and audio files via to media gallery albums. The Media Gallery supports the following file formats:

• Photo: PNG, JPG, GIF
• Video: AVI, MOV, WMV, MP4, MPG, MPE, DIVX, 3GP, RM, MKV, QT, OGV
• Audio: MP3, M4A, WMA, WAV, OGG

Upload files individually or in bullk, reorganise uploaded media, and add descriptions. With the comments featue enabled, authenticated users (such as parents, teachers or students) have the option to comment on media within albums.

Media Frames

Display individual media items froma media gallery on the page with the simple drag and drop media frame module.

Web optimised conversion

One of the usual complications with publishing media on the web is fiddling with sizes and formats in order to produce a file that is viewable on multiple browsers and platforms without issue. The Media Gallery module looks after this for you by automatically converting your media into a web-friendly format. Photos are automatically resized and placed into the slideshow, so you don’t need to worry about it taking forever to load up a print-sized image. Video and audio files go through our integrated media converter, which produces files that are compressed into a streamable format. Once processed, it means that all viewers have to do is click on your album and start browsing.

Simple set up

No need to worry about form fields, just drag and drop the ready made form module onto your contact page.

Customisable email address

Enter your office email via the form settings in the admin section, and all form submissions from your site will be automatically forwarded to your office email address. This is a fast and simple way for parents to get in touch.

Facebook & Twitter Feeds

Social Media feeds can be embedded in both the news centre social media section and on the homepage, bringing all of your news updates to one place.

Vimeo & YouTube Videos

Embed individual videos in the news centre or the homepage to further represent your school culture and/or news.

All electronically managed

One of the advantages of having an electronic bookings register is that the information it contains can be more easily presented consistently and widely. Being web-based, any user can then log in and check availability of resource items, rather than waiting until they can physically get to a booking sheet to fill in.Unlike a calendar where time delineations for individual events are not relevant, bookings are made in fixed-time ‘blocks’, which means no overlaps or ambiguity in booking duration. The Bookings module makes this clear by graphically representing each block overlaid above a weekly overview. The weeks can be browsed using the familiar Term Navigator as featured in the Calendar module, so bookings correspond more meaningfully with the school calendar terms and holidays.Additionally, because the Bookings module is tied to the user accounts in Ultranet, each booking has a defined ‘owner’ and edit permission. So you won’t have users sneakily going in to replace other people’s bookings with their own, whilst higher level controls are reserved for administrators and moderators only.

Customisable timetables

All bookings need to be tied to a start/end time as a reference, but these are not always fixed. Some items might follow the official school timetable, others might be booked on a half-hourly basis, whilst others might only be block-booked in half-day chunks.To cater for this, the Booking module supports the creation of custom timetable grids for resources. Using this, schools can easily accommodate the various timing variances between the items they have available to be booked, whilst still maintaing a centralised record for these.

Moderation options

Just like pages and news sections, Booking Categories can be set up to organise groups of resources and their availability. Items can be made only accessible and bookable by particular user types, so levels of access can be established.Similarly, moderation can be enabled to cater for particular resources that require approval before being booked. Users can still make a reservation for that item, but the block will remain in a ‘pending’ state until the moderator or administrator in charge accepts the booking.

Online newsletter articles

Transitioning to a digital news distribution model is easy with the News Centre module, as support for news articles is built-in. A visual editor is used to create the article, with simple feature image handling. Articles are immediately available for viewing — so you don’t have to wait for the end of the week to publish some news. Archiving is built-in, in case anybody needs to flip through older news articles. Using sections and individual article controls, you can feed articles through to specific pages on your site (ie: sports articles to the sport page) or the homepage. You can also share articles to school social media accounts at the click of a button.

Centralised daily notices

Using an electronic medium such as the News Centre module, notices can be accessed more freely and dynamically by students, parents, and teaching staff. If permissions have been granted, users can submit notices themselves to sections, rather than sending though to an office administrator to re-format into a daily notice sheet. Editing is achieved through a straight-forward text field, and notices can be set to repeat until specified dates. For those who want a hard-copy, a PDF version of the daily notices can be generated and printed off.

Automatic RSS feeds

RSS feeds are basically a subscription-based model, whereby readers can get updated articles and info pushed out to them rather than having to visit numerous websites of interest to check for new content. In the News Centre module, each news section has its own RSS feed, and users can choose to subscribe to the articles, notices or both simultaneously. Once subscribed, any new articles or notices added to that section will automatically be pushed out to users subscribed to that feed.

Privacy and moderation

News sections have their own permission settings which will allow administrators to choose who can view or contribute to the section. Using the controls, a school could set up a mixture of publicly-viewable and authentication-required sections (e.g. staff or student-only notices). Moderation is also configurable per news sections, which means any article or notice submitted into that section will need to be reviewed and approved by selected moderators or administrators first before being published. Using these controls, schools can fine-tune the publishing process in their Ultranet system whilst consolidating various communication channels into this centralised service.

Homepage Slideshow

Display featured images and text via the admin section. This is an ideal module to place at the top of your homepage and immediately communicate your school vision and values through images and text to your users.

Media Slideshows

Display images from media galleries on pages in slideshows. Customise display options such as toggle buttons, slide speed, transition effects, and display media gallery description text.

News Centre Slideshows

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