/Portal Docs

Teacher Experience

Teachers check the portal between students, so their experience is one main view: the teaching day. The teacher menu is [Teaching Days] [Calendar] [Profile photo].

The day view

One card per lesson, in chronological order, each headed by the student’s name, then the time and date (“10:00 AM, Sep 5”), then the location, then the parents’ names — who the teacher hands the student back to. Two design decisions shape it:

  • Navigation is by teaching day, not by date. Lessons are sparse — most dates have nothing on them — so there is deliberately no date picker. When there are no lessons today, the page shows the next day that has any, under “Upcoming Lessons.” Arrows move to the previous/next teaching day, and the Teaching Days view is the list.
  • Attendance is easy to mark and easy to take back. Each card has attended/missed marking — the chosen button colors itself, Present light green and Absent light red, so a glance down the day shows how it went — and an “Unmark” action with a confirmation — because a mis-tap between two lessons should not be permanent. (lessons.attended: NULL = unmarked, 1 = attended, 0 = missed.)

Each card also carries the lesson’s notes and materials inline as one chat-style thread, so the teacher never has to leave the day to write a note or attach something. “Add or remove materials” opens a modal that attaches a file (stored in private_files) or a link — with a drag-and-drop zone built for dragging a voice memo straight from the Voice Memos app.

Teaching Days

Just the dates the teacher works, with where they are and how many lessons — the view that answers “am I at Bronx CC on Saturday?” Each day opens the hour-by-hour day view.

Calendar

  • Semester view — the whole semester as one chronological list: every lesson with its date, time, and location, plus the holiday weeks when a location where the teacher works is closed.
  • Weekly view — a plain chronological list of that week’s lessons, each clickable.

What teachers see of the schedule

A teacher’s standing weekly slots are their reservations; their non-teaching time (lunch, errands) appears as hold blocks with a title. When an admin assigns them as a substitute for another teacher’s lesson on a particular date, that lesson shows up in their day.