Technology at Sycamore School
Hello and congratulations on joining Sycamore School. We are excited to have you join our vibrant community!
As you may have guessed, we utilize a fair amount of technology to make sure our school runs as smoothly as possible. We understand that joining a new school is stressful and can feel like a huge amount of information is being thrown at you at once and it can be difficult to know what to do first and keep all the different technological tools straight.
That is why we have developed this page to help get you up to speed and give you step-by-step guidance on how to access and use this information.
Below you will see a series of tabs that will get you up and running.
There are times that technology doesn't want to cooperate. If this happens to you, please reach out to the Technology Department at technology@sycamoreschool.org and we will be happy to assist.
How to get up and running
Your Google account is what Sycamore will use to send you important and relevant information going forward. This can include updates from our Head of School John Huber, from your child's teacher or Division Head, and more!
However, before you can start using your Sycamore Gmail account, you must first log in and set the password. You should have received an email (to your personal email account) with steps on how to do that from the Technology Department. Going forward all communication from the school will go to your Sycamore Gmail account and not your personal account.
You will also be added to a number of email groups. Those groups are listed below:
- New parent group
- Your child's classroom email group
- Your child's graduation year email group
- Divisional email group
- All parent email group
There is also a way for you to forward your Sycamore Gmail account to a personal email account if you so choose. To find out more about that, please click the button below.
If you have any questions or issues concerning your Sycamore Google account, please email the Technology Department at technology@sycamoreschool.org. We are always happy to help!
The Sycamore Portal is an important part of technology. This is where you will find your child's report cards, specific class information and more.
To log into the portal you will need to head to the Sycamore School website (www.sycamoreschool.org) and click the Login button. When you do, you should land on this login page.
Before, you probably logged in with a personal email account. Now that you child has been accepted, your username will be your full Sycamore Gmail address (lastname.firstname@sycamoreparents.org) and your password will be what you set it in Step 1.
The Portal has a bunch of helpful information on it. Please check out the video below to get a quick tour of what it has to offer.
A great way to stay up-to-date about what is happening in your child's classroom is to set up Portal notifications. These notifications can be sent to your Sycamore Gmail account and/or texted directly to your smartphone. Setting up these notifications is an easy process and can be done in just a couple of minutes to get to those instrutctions, just click the button below.
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At Sycamore, we use Verkada to help control who has access to the building and when. As a parent, you will certainly have access, but to help make the process smoother we offer the option of using a smartphone app to unlock certain doors at certain times.
Here are the doors that parents have access to during the school year:
- Main Entrance (Door #1): 7:00am-6:00pm
- EC Entrance(Door #16): 3:00pm-6:00pm
- MS Entrance(Door #6): 7:30am to 8:15am and then 3:00pm to 6:00pm
- Outdoor lab (Door #10) by the Jones Conference Room work from 3:00pm to 6:00pm
To open these doors you will need to download the Verkada Pass app from your smartphone's app store.
Once it is download, you will need to sign in and change some settings on your phone. To find out more on how to do that, please read the instructinos by clicking the button below.
VisitU is a system that can allow parents to report attendance changes for their chlidren. For example, if your child is sick and will be missing school for that day, you can open the VisitU app on your phone and report it to the school. This helps keep everyone on the same page and saves you from calling or emailing a group of people.
The app is pretty easy to use and the good news is your account is already created and ready to access it. To read more about how to use it please click the button below.
Have you ever wanted to see photos of what happens during the school day and on school events or fieldtrips? You are not alone - which is why Sycamore uses Vidigami. This is a system where photos are shared throughout the year. Every year we upload thousands of photos that parents can access and curate their own collections and even download them.
Vidigami syncs with our Portal and that means your account will be created automatically. One thing to keep in mind is that Vidigami is usually set up sometime in early August and being a new parent that may affect if you have access or not. Regardless, the Technology Department will send out an email when Vidigami is set up for the school year.
To read about all that Vidigami can do please click the button below.
This site provides information using PDF, visit this link to download the Adobe Acrobat Reader DC software.