How to use VegPlotter's Garden Planner as part of your lessons

VegPlotter provides tools for use as part of your lessons. These let pupils use the Garden Planner in a completely anonymous way. This guide shows you how.

The Schools part of VegPlotter lets teachers and other educators create and manage classes of Pupil accounts. These Pupil accounts are anonymous. This allows you to use VegPlotter's garden planner as part of your lessons with out contravening data protection regulations.

Each Pupil gets their own unique account and password and can plan out their own school garden.

Whether your school/pupils use computers, laptops, macbooks, windows, ipads, kindles, tablets or chromebooks. If it has a browser then VegPlotter works with them all.

This guide is broken down in to sections, showing you how to:

How to Register for a Teacher's Account

To use the Schools/Teacher's part of VegPlotter you first need to register for a Teacher's account.

Just enter your email address on the Schools Registration page. VegPlotter for schools is completely free to use.

VegPlotter will then send you an email, asking you to click the link it contains, to confirm your are the owner of the email address entered. It will also ask you to:

  • Choose a username - this will be used as the basis for pupil usernames too. eg. if you choose “teacher1” as your username, pupil usernames will be “teacher1-a1”, “teacher1-a2”, “teacher1-a3”, ... etc
  • Choose a unique password
  • Enter a name for your school/organisation
  • Confirm or update your location - This is used to predict planting, sowing and harvest date for your school's crops. This doesn't have to be exact. Just enter the name of a local town and select it from the drop down that appears. You could also pick a remote location the other side of the world if you're lessons are on other climates.

Note: If you already have a Standard VegPlotter acccount

If you already have a standard VegPlotter account and would like us to convert it to a Teacher's account, please Contact Us and we will transfer it over. Or you can set up a separate Teacher's account using your school email address.

How to Create a Class of Pupil Accounts

To create a class you first need to open the classes page by tapping on Classes from the main VegPlotter menu.

Note:

You need to be logged in to your Teacher's account for the Classes button to appear in the menu.

On the Classes page, hit Create new Class.

This will open up the new class form where you will be asked enter the:

  • Name the class - i.e. "3b" or "Snowy Owls"
  • Number of Pupils - Enter the number of Pupils in the class (max 50)
  • Use Template for Pupil Plots - This lets you select whether VegPlotter should use a garden plan you've previously created as a template or a blank plot for pupils' plots.

Once you hit Create the class with all the pupil accounts and pupil garden plans will be generated.

You can then find the class listed on the Classes page.

How to Activate / Deactivate Classes - Let them start planning

When a class is first created it will be inactive, meaning that the pupil accounts will not work and pupils will not be able to login until you activate the class.

The ability to activate and deactivate the class allows you to set a time window for pupils to undertake their garden planning. It also allows you to retire the pupil accounts so that noone can make changes after a deadline.

So you could set your Pupils home work to plan out there school garden for example.

To activate / deactivate a class you need to open the class from the classes page. Then hit Activate or Deactivate at the top of the page.

Once a class is active Pupils will be able to login and plan their garden.

How to Share login information with Pupils

Once you've created a class VegPlotter makes it super easy to share the login information with pupils.

If you open the page for the Class, you will see the list of pupil accounts with their login credentials displayed.

VegPlotter purposefully doesn't include a means to link pupils to their accounts. This is so that we don't hold Pupil personal information. But we do provide a means for you to track who has what pupil account outside of VegPlotter systems.

You can either:

  • Print Out - Pupil Login information. If you hit Print Out on the class page VegPlotter will generate a printout for all pupil accounts for you to cut out and hand to your pupils.
  • Download CSV / Spreadsheet - This option will let you download a spreadsheet of all pupil accounts in the class with their login details. You can update and save this file on your school system as a record of who has which pupil account.

How to View pupils' progress in planning their gardens

VegPlotter lets you view your pupils' progress in planning their gardens. As a teacher you can:

  • See when each pupil last logged in. VegPlotter will show [No Activity] if they have never logged in
  • View each Pupil's garden plan and see what they've created.

To view this information, open the class page and you can see the activity in the pupil table. You can also open each pupil's garden plans here too.

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