by Urs Cunningham

Moving to LINC-ED Hero

From the start of 2021, we will be moving over to LINC-ED Hero for all of our learning and administration across the school.

Hero will replace ALF - our learning system that we used for learning progress, reporting and goal setting. It will be used to mark attendance, store all emergency contact information, communicate with parents and students, and show and report on learning evidence and progress.

It is a new system for everybody, and I am sure it will take us all a little while to use it efficiently and effectively. All teachers will be using it from the very start of the year, and the admin staff will be using it for all communications from here on in. It will be useful for all parents to have the Hero site bookmarked on your main device at home, along with downloading the free app from your app store on your phone. You will now no longer need the school app on your phone, as we will not be using it for school communication any more.

Signing up to Hero

To sign up for Hero, this link will show a clear set of steps taking you through the process. Please note that you will need to use the email account you have on record with the school - the account you use to receive communications from school. If you would like to change this email address, you can then do that through your Hero profile once you are signed up.

If you have any issues signing up, or your email address is not accepted by Hero, please contact Urs (urs.cunningham@amesbury.school.nz) or Demelza (demelza@amesbury.school.nz).

What will you see on your Hero account

The main ‘home page’ you will see when you first log on is a feed of community messages. This will include all notices or reminders sent out to parents by the school.

Down the left hand side you see a photo of your child/ren. For each child, you will be able to see their ‘living report’, which is a continually updated progress report of the goals they have achieved or are working on in reading, writing and maths, along with an overview of their continual progress on their Journey of Growth and Development (their social and emotional development). Large green dials will show their progress on a set of indicators at each year level. You will also be able to see a feed of learning posts, which will be any examples of learning posted by your child or their teachers. All learning uploaded is private - it can only be viewed by your child and their parents and teachers.

All invoices from the school can also be viewed under ‘Finance’ on the left hand side, and you can print out any invoices if you would like to do so.

Please note that we have temporarily turned off the learning and finance information, so that parents can not currently view this. This will all be turned on before the start of the school year. However, teachers are still working on transferring over learning information from ALF to Hero, and we would like all basic information transferred over before it can be viewed.

Currently the only content you can view on Hero is the community feed - notices from school. This will allow us to communicate with you all as we get closer to the start of the 2021 school year. We will let you know when the other functions of Hero are turned on.

Parent information sessions

Early on in Term 1 (in the third week of term) we will hold a parent information session to begin to show the different features of Hero, and show how parents can access and use it at home. We will then hold further sessions each term through the year, to go deeper into different uses of Hero. These sessions will also give parents a chance to ask questions and let us know what other information they would like.

We will now use Hero to communicate with our community, and all articles, updates and reminders will be sent out through Hero.

Please be aware that we are all new to Hero, as my mistake in sending out a ‘test post’ yesterday showed! It looks to be a fantastic system, and as a team we are really enjoying using it, and really excited by the possibilities it opens up. However, I am sure there will be teething issues, and we thank you for your patience as we work through the transition to Hero. If you have any issues with the system, please do let us know and we will endeavour to help resolve the problem.

Warm regards,

The Amesbury team