Welcome to King's Way! With a PreK-12 school of over 1,000 students and their families under one digital roof, there are a lot of different systems and technology to manage. Some of it affects everyone, and some of it only affects certain grades or schools. This article is my attempt to give you an overview of the systems we use as well as help in setting them up and using them. I'm sure it will constantly be edited, added to, and refined. - Corby Stephens, IT Director, KWCS

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Getting Help
• Login Links Page
• Student Email and Passwords, K-12
• Alma - Student Information System (SIS), K-12
• more to come

Getting Help

This is the place! You're already here. What can you do here? From the home page you can...

• Search for Knowledge Base articles for common problems and solutions. We want to equip you to help yourself.
• If the Knowledge Base doesn't help, you can Submit A Ticket by clicking the button and filling out a form. Or, from any email program, any time, anywhere, you can send a detailed email to support@kwcs.org and that does the same thing as submitting a ticket on this site.
• Start a support chat using the light-blue chat bubble icon. This is new for us so we are trying it out. There are currently two people in the IT department so we will do our best to respond. Starting a chat also starts a new ticket.

Our goal is to start providing you with help with the systems referred to in this article within one hour of receiving a ticket during the school day (Monday - Friday, 7:30am - 3:30pm). Outside of those days and hours we can't guarantee a specific response time.

Login Links Page

A page we highly recommend you bookmark or add to your home screen is our Login Central page. It's a list of links to commonly used pages and systems and their login screens.

https://www.kwcs.org/login 

Student Email and Passwords, K-12

We use Google Workplace for Education. All student emails are gmail accounts but with our own domain name: students.kwcs.org. This means that they can access their email from virtually any device, anywhere, at any time.

By default, a student email address is created automatically with this format - firstnamelastname@students.kwcs.org. There is no space or punctuation between first and last names or anywhere in the name (true for new accounts, might not be true for past accounts). 

Our system creates this account for a student after they have been successfully enrolled. The first and last names come from whatever was entered in SchoolAdmin, our school application and enrollment platform.

We also create a default password that is unique to each student. They will need this in order to log in. As a parent, you will need an active Alma account (see next) to get the default password for them. Here is a link the steps to find the information you need for the default password. Finding Your Student's School ID After Default Password Reset

"Why does a Kindergarten-aged student need an email address?" While they may not be sending or receiving many emails, most of our systems are keyed and linked to each other by means of their email address. This is especially true for the Clever platform (see below).

Alma - Student Information System (SIS), K-12

Alma manages grades, class schedules, report cards, required form submissions, emergency contact information, things along those lines. 

After a student is successfully enrolled through SchoolAdmin, an account is automatically created for each parent that was a part of that process, as well as each student enrolled. There are no steps you need to take to create the account, but you do need to activate your account. The student also needs to activate their account (this is mostly relevant for students in grades 6-12).

Here is a link to a Knowledge Base folder with articles about Alma. You will need to start with Activating Your Alma Account. The same steps apply to parents and students. After you, as a parent, successfully get logged in, you will need to get your student's default Gmail password. 

Please note: Do not tap/click on Alma Start or the green Go to Alma Start button. That is not being used yet and it will take you to screens that are not helpful.

Some helpful hints when getting started with Alma:

• Your username is formatted like this: firstname.lastname Notice the period between first and last name. There may also be other punctuation such as apostrophes and hyphens. It is based on however a name was entered in SchoolAdmin. Your username is not your email address.
• The initial steps say to click a "forgot password" link and you will receive an email. Sometimes this email ends up in a spam/junk folder. It can take up to 15 minutes for it to arrive. If it never arrives, please submit a ticket (or send an email to support@kwcs.org) with your name and the email address to which you are expecting the email, and IT can manually trigger the password reset email.
• More to come as we get the hang of things.

Clever - Online Resource Management, K-12

GoGuardian - Content Filter and Classroom Management, K-12

Chromebooks - K-4 Classrooms Carts, 5-12 1:1 Program

SeeSaw - Learning Management System (LMS), K-3

Google Classroom - LMS, 4-8

Canvas - LMS, 9-12