Directions - Skyward - Message Center

Skyward Message Center sends emails to students and guardians and post messages to Family/Student Access. Most people in the district do not have access to Message Center. For those that do, your access may be a little different than explained below.

Step 1

Select Advanced Features

Open Educator Access, start in the 'Student Management' module and select 'Advanced Features'.

Step 2

Select Message Center

Open the 'Advanced Features' sub-menu , and select 'Message Center - MC'

Step 3

Select an Entity, Filter Messages, and Add/Clone

Selecting a specific entity (if your Skyward permissions allow it) will result in only being able to send messages to families with students in that entity. It will also limit the list of previous messages that have been sent.
You may want to change 'All Message's or select the 'Filters' link to limit the list of letters if you are looking for one to copy. One option is to only view letters you have written in the past.
Select the 'Add button to start with a blank template for your letter. Alternatively, you can select a previous message and the 'Clone' button to start with a copy of that letter you can edit.

Step 4

Compose Message

1. Message Summary becomes the subject line in the email.

2. Type in the body of your message.

3. Priority is usually left as 'Normal'.

4. Select down arrow to reveal optional formatting (explained in next two steps)

Step 5

Formatting Options

Select the down arrow next to 'View Style Toolbar' to reveal menu. Holding cursor over each icon will reveal the icon's function.

A. Change font style and size

B. Undo or redo

C. Bold, Italicize, Underline, and Strikethrough.

D. Create hyperlink (explained in Step 6)

E. Color text or background

F. Bulleting

G. Indenting

Step 6

Hyperlinks

Select the hyperlink icon (Step 5, Line D) to insert a hyperlink into your email. Select a portion of text in your message before selecting the hyperlink icon if you would like those words to become the hyperlink.

A. Link Type is preselected to create a hyperlink to a URL. Select the dropdown menu to change if you want to link to an anchor in your text your text or if you would like the link to create an editable email for your recipient that is prefilled with an address, subject, and body. This can help standardize the emails recipients send as a response to your prompt.

B. Select the down arrow and select 'https://' to make this link more secure, but this is not a necessary change.

C. Type or paste the URL of your link.

D. Select OK. If you selected text at the start of this process the word you selected should change color and link to your URL. If you did not select a word at the start of this process your URL will be pasted into the body of your message.

Step 7

Post to Educator Access

You can either post your message to Skyward, email the message (explained in Step 8) or both.

5. Select 'Post to Family Access' for parents to see when they go onto Skyward. Select 'Post to Student Access' for students to see the message. There are a lot of guardians and students who do not check messages in Skyward but it stays present until they view the message.

6. Select an appropriate date for your message to post. Tip: In Skyward date fields you can type in letters to auto populate specific dates; Y=Yesterday's date, T=Today's date, and R=Tomorrow's date.

7. Check and fill in dates and the text you want to be a link within the calendar in Family Access.

Step 8

Email (Send Information)

You can either post your message to Skyward (explainedd in Step 7), email the message, or both.

8. Check the box and fill in a date if you would like to send the message as an email.

9. Type in a time and select am or pm to designate a time to send your email. Whenever possible select a time later in the evening or middle of the night so your message does not send during times we have high internet use.

10. Input an address you want to show as the sender of the email. Tip: Use the email address; do.non.reply@bwsd.k12.wi.us so that recipients cannot automatically reply to your message. This prevents you from receiving dozens of automated responses to your message. If you choose this option you may want to consider typing your email address or creating an email link (Step 6, Line D) as part of your message.

Step 9

Email (Recipient Groups)

11. Check boxes to send your email to students, guardians, or both

12. If no boxes in this row are checked it will send to all of them. If you check one or more boxes it will send only to the choices you selected.

'Primary Guardians' are parents listed in Skyward as having legal access to student records.

'First Family' is designated by the parents of students with multiple families.

Each parent can designate weather or not they want to be considered 'Head of Household'.

'Report Card Recipients' are guardians we have designated to receive report cards.

13. Check this box if it is appropriate that parents get a seperate email for each of their students. This is likely only needed if your message contains specific information about the student such as a report card.

14. By default your email contains extra information such as a notice that the 'message pertains to [Student Name Inserted]. Select this box if you do not want that to show.

Step 10

Email (Additional Recipients)

15. To send teachers a copy of the message, check the box and select 'current classes'.

16. Check this off to turn on the default setting which is to begin the letter identifying the student that the letter is regarding.

17. To send a copy of the message to additional people, check this box and list their email address. Separate multiple email addresses with a comma.

Step 11

Email (Recipients)

18. Our district does not currently list Activities in Skyward in a way that makes this button functional.

19. Select this button and fill out the details to limit your message to students in specific classes.

20. Setting up a processing list is a seperate function in Skyward. One could be created for any students you want. You would select this button and then select the processing list to limit your message to only send to those student's families.

Step 12

Email (Limiting Recipients)

21. Select Ranges to send to all students or to limit the recipients. Note Leave the range blank will have the result of not limiting the message for that range at all. Keep in mind that setting ranges is cumulative. Each range you set has the potential to further limit your list of recipients. So, setting the Grade to seniors and date of birth to include 17 year olds would result in sending to only 17 year old seniors. It would not send to seniors and 17 year olds that may be juniors.

22. If you are a staff member who has access to multiple entities (schools) you will be able to limit your message to only send to specific ones.

23. On the left type in the lowest grad year (oldest students) you would like to receive your message. On the right type in the highest grad year (youngest students) you would like to receive your message. Typing in 0000 and 9999 as the years would send to all students since all students graduate between those two extremes

24. On the left type in the lowest birthdate (oldest students) you would like to receive your message and on the right type the highest birthdate (youngest students) you would like to receive the message. Leave blank if you do not want this to limit your message.

25. This option allows you to limit your messages based on the alphabetical order of Homeroom Teacher's alpha key (last name). Some schools do not identify a Homeroom teacher so this feature will not be effective. On the left type in the lowest (first) letter of the alphabet and on the right type in the highest (last) letter of the alphabet to send to students (and their families) who have teachers whose Skyward alpha key falls between those letters.

26. This option allows you to limit your messages based on the alphabetical order of Advisor's alpha key (last name). Some schools may not identify an Advisor so this feature would not be effective. On the left type in the lowest (first) letter of the alphabet and on the right type in the highest (last) letter of the alphabet to send to students (and their families) who have advisors whose Skyward alpha key falls between those letters.

27. This option allows you to limit your messages based on the alphabetical order of Counselor's alpha key (last name). Some schools may not identify a counselor so this feature would not be effective. On the left type in the lowest (first) letter of the alphabet and on the right type in the highest (last) letter of the alphabet to send to students (and their families) who have counselors whose Skyward alpha key falls between those letters.

28. This will allow you to send to specific schools including Virtual Schools and the ALC. Use those lists with caution as they may not be up to date.

29. For each group of students you have the option to select to send or not send to those students. Use these options with caution as they may not be up to date.

Step 13

Save

30. Please do not Attach any documents to your message. Doing so can cause our district to get flagged as sending junk mail which ends up blocking our messages and is a long process to fix. If you want to share a document it is better to save it to your Google Drive, share it with everyone, and include its share link in your message.

31. Select the 'Save' button. If your message is set to send or post prior to the current time then it will send start sending as soon as you select 'Save', otherwise it will wait until the time you designated. Please try to send messages after school when there is less demand on our system.

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