Welcome back to SmartPass! We’re so excited to share with you the new features we launched over the summer that are available right now.
Buckle-up, because we’ll be covering: the refreshed teacher home screen, overtime passes turning red, calendar tab, notification sounds, closest rooms, emergency mode, building active pass limits, ID cards stickers, ID Card grade-specific colors, ID Card enhanced security, pass cooldown time, and more.
Check out these articles for information about our new products: Flex and Attendance.
🌅Plus, here’s the list of features that are on the horizon.
Updates for Teachers
🏫 Refreshed Teacher Home Screen
From feedback from, literally, thousands of teachers using SmartPass, we’re refreshing the home screen to put the most important information at their fingertips.
Passes to and from their room(s) will now show on their home screen. No more switching to the old “Rooms” tab.
We’ve moved the Create Pass buttons to the top right, so teachers can create a pass from any tab. We’ve made this change for students, too.
❤️🔥 Overtime Passes Turn Red
When the time runs out on a pass, the screen will turn bright red, so the teacher can see that the student should have returned by now. It shows bright red on Hall Monitor and Kiosk Mode, too.
🗓️ Calendar Tab
We’ve made scheduling passes 10x easier. A new Calendar View will show a teacher’s weekly schedule, including any existing scheduled passes they have.
Students will have access to this new tab as well.
Teachers will get audible alerts for certain notifications so they never miss a thing. Sounds are enabled by default for all teachers, but notifications can be turned off in the Settings menu.
💬 Will I need to re-train my staff?
No! When teachers who used SmartPass last year sign in for the first time, they’ll see a popup that gives an overview of the new features. We put a lot of care into making sure that the refreshed home screen felt familiar, yet matched how teachers needed SmartPass to work. We think they’ll love it.
Updates for Admins
You can set it so only the closest bathrooms, water fountains, etc. will show up for students! That way, you ensure that students aren’t going to the bathroom across the building when one of them is full, or accidentally pick the wrong one.
🛟 Emergency Mode — Available on the Pro Plan
If there’s any kind of school emergency, in one click, administrators can place their building into Emergency Mode. They can send messages out to teachers and see live-updating check-ins for student locations.
While an emergency is ongoing, the teacher’s device is transformed into Emergency Mode. Teachers will get an audible notification, and are instructed to check in any students who had active passes and are now in their rooms.
Set a max capacity of students with active passes in your hallways so that no matter what, they can make sure there aren’t more than a certain number of students in the hallways.
💳 ID Cards — Free for All Schools
SmartPass Digital ID Cards are now FREE for all schools. It takes less than 5 minutes to set up. Learn more.
🟡 ID Cards Stickers — Available on ID Cards Pro
Add stickers to ID cards — great for things like bus numbers, cafeteria privileges, and anything else you can imagine. Admins can easily set up stickers to show for all students, just certain students, upload a CSV, and more.
🎨 ID Cards Grade-Specific Colors — Available on ID Cards Pro
For even more customization, you’ll now be able to change the color of the ID Cards per-grade level. For example, you can set it up so that all of the students have Blue ID Cards, but the seniors who have special permission for something have a Green ID Card.
🛡️ ID Cards Enhanced Security — Available on ID Cards Pro
To make the cards as secure as possible, you can prevent pass sharing with blocked screenshot/ video-recording and a moving element shows so passes are noticeably live.
If students try to “extend” time on their passes by just creating another pass, you’ll be able to prevent this by setting a “cooldown-time” so students can’t create consecutive passes.
🚀 Brand-New Onboarding, Built from the Ground-Up
We overhauled our entire onboarding process to make it easy for new schools to get started with SmartPass.
More Updates
All admins will now have access to the teacher-view by default.
Pass Buffer Time renamed to Overtime Passes End After…
Room Active Pass Limits renamed to Room Max Capacity.
Expired Passes renamed to Ended Passes. Passes that count up past the time limit are called Overtime.
Wait in Line is enabled by default.
Creating passes is a lot snappier — and in Kiosk mode, we've saved students a click⚡️
Students and staff will stay signed in as long as possible — we promise.
FAQ
Are there plans to release more features soon?
Yes! Here’s the list of features on the horizon, that are rolling out to schools soon.