For teachers, on a browser

The teacher web portal

Teachers are the only people at a school who use both Bellmeir surfaces. This is the browser half: the same account as your phone app, with the screens that are easier with a keyboard and a wide monitor.

One account, two surfaces. The email and password that open the teacher app also open the portal in any browser. There is nothing extra to install, no second password, and no separate sign-up. If you are looking for the phone guide instead, it is here.

Signing in on a browser

Open your school's Bellmeir address

Your admin will give you the link. It opens the same portal the office uses, and it works on any modern browser on a laptop, a desk computer or a tablet.

Enter your school email and password

Not your phone number. Teachers are staff, so you sign in with the email address the school registered for you.

Set your own password the first time

On your very first sign-in the portal asks you to replace the password the office issued. Nothing else opens until you do, on purpose: the office should not know your password.

Press ⌘K or Ctrl+K to jump anywhere

The command palette searches every screen you are allowed to open and every quick action you can take. It is the fastest way around the portal once you know it.

What a teacher's portal contains

A teacher's sidebar is a genuine subset of the admin's, not a greyed-out copy of it. Screens you do not hold are not listed at all, so nothing you can see is a dead end.

Overview

Dashboard, Calendar, My Day, My timetable and My HR. Your day, your week, and your own employment record.

Academics

Attendance, Exams, Syllabus, Assignments, Class diary, Lesson plans, Observations and Discipline.

Communication

Parent meetings and Reports and exports. Broadcasting to the whole school stays with the office.

School life

Clubs, Houses and Alumni, plus Security under school admin, where you can see and end your own sessions.

My Day

My Day is the teacher home of the portal, and it is the same screen as the app's home, just wider.

  • Check in for the day with one click. Your check-in is a real timestamp, and it feeds the staff register and the principal's live view
  • Your homeroom prompt, if you are a class teacher, sitting at the top until the register is marked, then clearing for the day
  • Today's periods in order, with the current one highlighted and the next one called out
  • Leaving early or running late? File a day notice from here. It is acknowledged by the office, never approved, and it is not leave
A day notice is not a leave application. Nothing is deducted, nothing reaches payroll and nobody signs it off. It tells the office you will be in by 9:30 or away by 1, so a cover can be arranged and so the live board shows an informed absence rather than an unexplained one. Refiling for the same day replaces the old notice and asks the office to acknowledge it again.

Attendance

Attendance in Bellmeir is taken once each morning, by the class teacher. The web register is the same register as the app's, so it does not matter which one you mark it on.

Open Attendance

You will see only the section you are class teacher of. A teacher without a homeroom assignment has no register to mark, and that is deliberate: every section has exactly one owner.

Mark the class

Start from Mark all present and change the few who are not, or set each student individually to present, absent, late or excused. A running count shows how far you are.

Save

Once saved, the register is done for the day and the section stops showing as unmarked on the school's attendance screen.

Correcting a mistake

Raise a correction on the record. Corrections are reviewed by the principal or admin rather than applied silently, because an attendance record that can be quietly rewritten is not a record.

Unmarked is never counted as zero. A register nobody has marked yet shows as unmarked, not as 0% attendance. Your class does not appear at the top of anybody's worst-attendance list simply because it is 9:15 and you have not opened the app yet.
Class attendance and van boarding are separate records. A child marked as boarded by the driver is not thereby marked present in your class, and never will be.

Exams and marks entry

The portal is the comfortable place to enter a full class's marks, because you have a keyboard.

  • Open Exams to see the exams that are open to you and the subjects within them you are responsible for
  • You can enter marks only for the subjects you actually teach. This is enforced on the server, not merely hidden in the screen
  • Type down the list; a grade appears automatically from your school's grade scale, and an out-of-range score is caught as you type
  • Report cards are built from these marks, so what you save here is what a family eventually reads
Publishing results is not yours by default. Entering marks and publishing them to families are two different acts. Publishing reaches every family in the school, so it belongs to the principal or admin, or to a teacher who has been given the exam coordinator duty.

Syllabus, assignments and the class diary

  • Syllabus, work down the chapter and topic tree for your subject and class, ticking off what you have taught. A coverage figure shows how far through you are, and the principal sees the same figure
  • Assignments, set homework with a subject, a task and a due date. Students submit from their app; you open the assignment on the web to read submissions, grade them and return them with a comment. This is much easier on a big screen than on a phone
  • Class diary, the daily note home. If you are a class teacher, what you write here reaches your class's parents in their app

Lesson plans and observations

Two screens that exist only on the web, because both are writing tasks.

  • Lesson plans, write and keep your plans in one place. The principal can review them and leave feedback, so a plan is a conversation rather than a file you email
  • Observations, the record of classroom observations. You can see the observations that concern you

Filing a discipline incident

Any teacher may file an incident about any student, not only their own, because playground duty is real and the child who needs recording is often not from your class.

  • Look the student up by name, roll number or class from the incident form
  • Record what happened, the action taken, and any witnesses
  • Share with parent is on by default. Turning it off keeps the incident inside the school. Turning it on later sends the family notification then
  • An internal note and the witness list never leave the building. Families never see either
  • Several students in one event become one record each, so each family gets only their own child's account of it

You can correct your own incident while it is open. Resolving it is an office act, and deleting one is limited to the admin or principal.

What you can read is narrower than what you can file: the incidents you filed, plus incidents about students in your own sections.

Parent meetings

The PTM screen shows the meetings you are part of and the slots parents have booked with you. Setting up the PTM itself, the dates, the slot lengths and which classes it covers, is done by the office.

Reports and exports

Teachers hold the download permission, so the Reports and exports screen is on your sidebar. Pull an attendance sheet, a marks sheet or a class list as PDF, Excel, Word or CSV when you need something on paper or in a spreadsheet.

My HR: your own employment record

Your record, not anybody else's. The same screen exists for every member of staff, from the principal to the accountant.

  • Apply for leave, including a half day, where you pick which session you will be away for. The session matters: "half day" alone tells the timetable nothing about which periods need a substitute
  • File a day notice for a late arrival or an early departure
  • Payslips, once payroll has been run for the month
  • Your own attendance, the days you were in, and at what time

Extra duties a principal can give you

Rather than issuing a second login, your principal can add a duty to your existing teacher account. New screens simply appear in your sidebar.

  • Exam coordinator, set up exams and publish marks across the school
  • Timetable builder, build the school timetable, which puts the Timetable screen on your sidebar
  • Sports rep, run clubs and competitions school wide

What you will not find, and where it lives instead

A teacher's portal deliberately stops at the edge of teaching. If you cannot find one of these, it is not hidden from you by accident.

You are looking forWho holds it
The full student list for the schoolAdmin, principal and the front desk. You see the students in your own sections.
Publishing an announcement or a circularAdmin and principal. You receive them; you do not broadcast.
Fees, payroll and anybody else's HR recordAdmin, principal and the accounts office.
Approving leave or an attendance correctionAdmin and principal. You raise; they approve.
Approving an early pickupThe office. A class teacher is informed that a child is leaving early, never asked to approve it.
Transport, vans and the live mapAdmin and principal.
Building the timetableAdmin and principal, or you with the timetable builder duty.

Web or app: which to reach for

Both are yours, and neither is a cut-down version of the other. As a rule of thumb, use the phone for anything you do standing up, between periods or in the corridor: checking in, marking the register, ticking off a topic, glancing at your next period. Use the browser for anything that takes a keyboard and a wide screen: a whole class's marks, grading submitted assignments, writing a lesson plan, pulling a report.

Whatever you save on one appears on the other. There is nothing to sync by hand. A comparison of the two, screen by screen, is in Which app do I use?