Audience: Administrators
School Settings for Messages allows School Administrators to decide who at their school can engage in private messaging and who with! Admins can customize their school’s messaging experience based on the communication needs of their school community.
Please note: District Administrators can manage messaging settings for all schools in their district. If a District Administrator chooses anything other than “Let Schools Decide”, School Administrators cannot change that setting. District settings will override school settings. If your school had no prior setting, it will acquire the district setting.
School Admins can update settings for individual schools from each school dashboard. Settings do not impact a teacher or administrator’s ability to send class announcements.
- Navigate to your School Dashboard.
- Tap the gear icon (top right) to access School Settings.
- Select Messages Settings.
Messages Settings control which roles can start conversations in the school, and with whom. The below image shows the default settings for Messages:
If your District Admin has configured settings, this will be reflected in Messages Settings as shown below.
Please note: ‘Create conversations’ means searching for and initiating a 1:1 or group conversation or privately replying to announcements.
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Families can create conversations with class teachers or Families can create conversations with any teacher or administratorOnly allow families to create conversations (and reply to class announcements) with class teachers.
Note: families can add a co-family member (connected to the same student) in conversations with the teacher or teacher/admin (but not if the teacher isn’t in the conversation). -
Class-limited, teacher-initiated conversationsTeachers can start conversations with families and students in their classes only.Students and families cannot start conversations or respond to announcements.
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No staff-student messagingTurn off all staff-student 1:1 and small group messaging.
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No private messagingTurn off all 1:1 and small group messaging.
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Students and family members cannot reply to announcementsWhen sending out a message to everyone in your class or school, be sure you're choosing 'Announcement' instead of 'Group Chat' for your conversation type (in addition to updating the above settings).
To see who has viewed a Conversation, tap on Seen By.
Yes. Archiving a class will "close" all message threads associated with that class so no one can post to them in the future.
When admins change messaging settings that control who can message whom in their school, these changes are retroactively applied to message threads that were previously created.
For more information about school settings for Messages, check out our Messages Quick Start Guide for Administrators!