PCSchool - Technical Setup Guide

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Last updated: May 21, 2019 by Stephanie Lane (Unlicensed)

WELCOME
LAST UPDATED: 28 SEPTEMBER 2018


This guide is designed for school IT administrators to be able to setup Career Central
within their school. It provides an overview of Career Central, and the key decisions
to make about the implementation of Career Central.


Overview of Career Central
Career Central is a digital platform that supports Careers Advisors to develop and manage student career plans.
Career Central is integrated with CareersNZ to keep the database of occupational information always up to date. The program is web based for anywhere, anytime access. Careers staff can customise pages to suit your school and tailored to suit different year levels. Career Central can be used school wide for both career counselling and academic conferencing.

Requirements to run Career Central
Before we get started, you must ensure that your school meets the following requirements:
• Your school has a fast, reliable internet connection.
• Students are able to access the internet in some manner (i.e. from their own
device, or from a school based computer).
• Students have access to Google Chrome (preferred), or Safari.
• Your school has some way for third parties to authenticate users.
• Your school is able to provide IT support to ensure that students and staff are able
to access the internet.
• You use KAMAR, Edge Learning, PCSchool, and/or your school uses Google or Microsoft SSO for Authentication.

Career Central & Your School’s Data
Career Central requires student and staff information to run. This includes basic student information, such as Name, User ID, Username, & School Email. It also requires staff information such as Names, Titles, Emails, Usernames, Group-classes and more. Additional features of Career Central, such as timetabling and NZQA result analysis require relevant information.

We are able to get this information directly from your school's PCSchool system, with some easy steps in order to grant us access.


Key Part 1: Data
As outlined above, Career Central needs data from your school to work. In the following pages, we outline how to grant us the access we need in order to be able to get this data.


Key Part 2: Authentication
Students and Staff need to be able to login to Career Central using their existing school credentials. PCSchool does not send any passwords through to Career Central, so students will need to be authenticated using Google or Microsoft SSO. We will need to know the ‘domain’
(i.e mc.school.nz) so that we can link it to the student authentication portal, allowing students who sign in with their studentid @ matchingdomain to be authenticated into the system.
If you have a different setup, where the username is not the student ID number, then
please contact us to discuss options about this.
If your school uses a domain forwarder, and students think their Google Account is
say 9072@wc.nz instead of 9072@schoolfullname.school.nz then this may cause
confusion when students go to login to Google. Please let us know if this is the case.


Step 1:

You are going to need PCSchool Credentials (API Key, Private Key, Username, Password) from Career Central support.
If you don’t already have them, get them now by emailing support@cc.school.nz
Be sure to include your name and phone number as we may need to call you. Once you have this, continue with setup.

Step 2:

Log into your PCSchool Home page and navigate to the Administration page:

and then from that page, go to configuration:

Step 3:

On the configuration screen, select "Configure the secure webservices" from the drop down list, and find the rows related to Career Central:

Here you can enter the credentials we provided for you into the appropriate boxes and then click "Save"

Step 4:

Once you have completed these steps, send us an email letting us know, and let us know whether your school uses Google or Microsoft authentication, so that we can get everything set up! Once you have sent us this information, your job is done!


What's next?

We will customise your Career Central setup so that it is ready to go as soon as possible. We will wait 24 hours after getting access to your PCSchool system to ensure that we are receiving the data correctly, and then we will notify the Careers Advisor when they are good to go and begin the onboarding process.

Note - out of the box - IT administrators will not be able to login to Career Central.  This is an intentional security feature, as very rarely would an IT administrator need to login to Career Central.





Please read Additional notes

Additional Notes

PASSWORD SECURITY
Career Central recommends that you develop a strong password policy for your
school. This includes enforcing a minimum length and a password change policy.

NSN
Career Central will NEVER ask for these numbers, and will not have access to these through your School Management System.

CAREER CENTRAL STATUS PAGE
You can view the status of Career Central at help.cc.school.nz .

DATA INTEGRITY WITH PCSCHOOL
We encourage you to check that the correct data is loaded into PCSchool for key users.
For example, ensure that the ‘email’ field in a staff user contains the work email of the
staff user, if this is what they use at school.

 

Creating Links to Career Central

We encourage you to create a link in one or more of the following places:
• Learning Management System (e.g. Moodle)
• Desktop Shortcut
• Homepage of Student Landing Page
• Start Menu Icon
• School Website
• Parent Landing Page (for Parent Portal)


USING OUR LOGO
https://careersstudio.s3.amazonaws.com/brand/Normal.png
We ask that you always reference this image. This way, if we wish to update our brand
assets in the future, you will not have to reupdate the logo.

You should link the logo to https://cc.school.nz/
Please consider our branding guidelines. Do not alter, modify or stretch the logo.
For brand usage questions please contact Tim (tim@careercentral.school.nz).