As summer winds down and the new school year approaches, we want to make sure you have everything you need to hit the ground running with Flint. We've made significant improvements to streamline the entire school process, and this guide will walk you through the key updates and essential setup steps.
IMPORTANT! Term Creation
Flint is built on terms. This structure is designed to mirror the natural rhythm of your school year while keeping your workspace organized and efficient. Instead of manually removing graduated students at the end of each year, you'll create a new term and build out your users for the new school year within this fresh space. Once you're satisfied with the term and its members, you'll move it to active status.
This approach ensures a clean slate for each academic year while preserving historical data and work from previous terms.
You will navigate to "School Settings" and then click on terms. From there you will add a term. It will be set to invisible - this means no one will see any of the edits you have made. Once you have your term set and ready to go, you will turn it on as active. The previous term will move to visible.
Overview of Term Creation & Adding People! Must Watch
Teachers' work from the previous term will not be lost - it will remain in the previous term. They can not only see the previous activities and student work, but they can also move the work or duplicate it over into the new term by using the import tool (hyperlink). This gives educators the flexibility to bring forward the materials and resources they want to reuse while leaving behind what's no longer relevant.
The work of your users from the previous term will NOT be lost. Admins, Teachers, and Students will be able to access all of the work they created or completed from the last term. Additionally, they are able to either duplicate their activities or move their activities with the students completed work from one term to the next. The gif below walks you through the process.
Overview of moving activities - PASS ALONG TO YOUR TEACHERS
Over the past several months, we've been hard at work enhancing your experience with Flint. Here are the three major updates we're leading with:
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Curriculum + data insights
- Better visibility into student progress and curriculum alignment, giving you the tools to make informed instructional decisions
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Flexible moderators
- More control over who can manage different aspects of your workspace, allowing you to delegate responsibilities effectively
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MAJOR CALLOUT: Name changes (terminology refactor)
- Groups are now Classes
- This is an important terminology change that will affect how you navigate and organize your workspace going forward. What you previously knew as "Groups" are now called "Classes" throughout the platform.
- Workspace is now School
- Members are now People
- Groups are now Classes
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Class Enhancements
- Classes (which were groups, don't worry were still adjusting to the name change too) now have teacher and student facing chats within them. Sparky has context of the classes activities, curriculum, learning goals, and students of that class before you even send the first message! Students will be able to engage in questions with Sparky about the class - and the teacher will be able to see the questions the student have! This will further add to the insights of where students are at.
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More Coming!!!
- We are STILL building new features for the start of the school year and will be communicating updates throughout August and September
- Create your new term
- Run the onboarding walkthrough
- Add school website (auto-builds Mission & Background + moderation)
- Confirm Mission & Background and grade levels
- Set up curriculum
- Confirm admins & moderation
- Add/adjust moderators
- Run the onboarding walkthrough
- Add Teachers/Students
- via SIS/LMS - SUGGESTED PROCESS (Class Rostering)
- Integrate your LMS or SIS if you haven't yet
- Establish sharing rules in Edlink
- Confirm and add
- via .csv - Faster but no class rostering
- via SIS/LMS - SUGGESTED PROCESS (Class Rostering)
- Set the 26-27 Term to "Active"
- Email your Faculty/Staff the following…
As part of this update, we've reorganized where information lives. Curriculum-specific information has moved out of the Mission & Background and into our new Curriculum section, giving every piece of information a clear place and making your workspace easier to manage.
Our new onboarding process will guide you through:
- School Website
- Add your school's website, and Sparky will review it to better understand your school's mission, programs, and structure. It then uses this information to help build a workspace tailored to your school's needs.
- Mission & Background
- Sparky reviews the information from your previous term along with insights gathered from your website to create an updated Mission & Background. Administrators can review, edit, and refine every suggestion before publishing. This context is applied across the entire workspace so teachers don't have to repeat the same instructions every time they create an activity.
- Grade Levels
- Last year, we introduced grade-level prompting into Flint. This allows Sparky to adjust how it interacts with students based on their grade level and age. For example, if you do not want 5th grade students creating PowerPoints, images, or other advanced content, you can configure those restrictions at the grade level. Sparky will make recommendations based on your school website, but you are always able to customize them.
- Example Prompt for 5th Grade: "You are talking with a 5th grade student. Use simple, clear, and friendly language that is easy for a 10-11 year old to understand. Avoid complex vocabulary or academic jargon. If you need to use a more advanced word, explain it in simple terms. Keep sentences short and easy to follow. Do not generate images, videos, or slide presentations for this student. If the student repeatedly asks for these tools, politely let them know they are unavailable and encourage them to ask a different academic question."
- Last year, we introduced grade-level prompting into Flint. This allows Sparky to adjust how it interacts with students based on their grade level and age. For example, if you do not want 5th grade students creating PowerPoints, images, or other advanced content, you can configure those restrictions at the grade level. Sparky will make recommendations based on your school website, but you are always able to customize them.
- Curriculum
- At the end of last year, we introduced student profiles to give Sparky more context about the work students are doing across all of their classes. That foundation has allowed us to take the next step by bringing curriculum directly into Flint. By aligning your curriculum with your workspace, Sparky can now evaluate student work against your school's standards and expectations, giving teachers more accurate insights while also incorporating Bloom's Taxonomy to better understand the level of thinking students are demonstrating.
- Choose from built-in curriculum frameworks such as AP, IB, Common Core, and more, or upload your own curriculum documents if your framework is not currently listed. Once configured, teachers can align their classes to those standards, and Sparky will automatically identify the standards being used in each activity, evaluate student progress, and surface meaningful insights.
- Moderation
- One of the biggest changes this year is that moderators no longer need to be administrators! If you want a counselor monitoring student wellbeing flags, simply add them as a teacher and assign them as a moderator without giving them full admin access.
- SIS/LMS
- With all the new enhancements we've made to classes, integrating your SIS/LMS has never been more important! The integration is facilitated through EdLink at no additional charge and seamlessly brings in your teachers and student emails, the grade-level of your students, and rosters all within the classes exactly as they are listed within your SIS/LMS. This means less manual set-up for your teachers, ensuring they have everything set for the year.
Overview Video of Onboarding
Hi Team,
We hope you've had a wonderful summer and are excited to kick off the new school year!
As we get ready for the year ahead, Flint has made some impressive enhancements to help improve your day-to-day experience. There's a lot to be excited about, and we wanted to share what's new—and just as importantly, reassure you that everything you've built stays exactly where you left it.
What's New: Classes
Flint has rebranded their Groups to now be called Classes. With classes, they have been made more powerful, with curriculum integration, chats with pre-built understanding of your class, syllabus uploads, richer analytics, and clearer alignment to what your students are actually learning.
- You'll get insights we couldn't surface before: Bloom's alignment, mastery by standard, and a clear view of where students are thriving or need support.
- Setup is faster, and Sparky helps tailor everything to your school so your activities feel right out of the box.
- Watch the video overview
Last Year's Work is Safe - and Easy to Move to This Year
- Everything you built last year is still there in your previous term—nothing has been deleted.
- When you're ready, use the import tool to move your activities and materials into the new term in just a few clicks.
Here's a quick walkthrough tutorial of how to move your activities from last year into the new term.
Looking forward to a great year ahead!
-Your Name
- Flint 101 - An hour long asynchronous training on Flint complete with activities teachers can test out.
- Guide for Teachers - One stop document with pictures, videos, and context on how to use Flint. Includes links to the following
- Overview of Flint - 13 Minute overview of Flint
- Bite size youtube videos - All videos are 5 minutes or less.