Guidance notes help track important information about student interactions. Creating custom categories for these notes helps ensure that tracking needs are met for your school or district.

Keep guidance note categories up-to-date to ensure the notes educators keep are current, well-organized, and optimized for tracking. Managing guidance notes is done under the Features menu in Xello. You can have up to 10 active categories at one time (including Xello's default categories), with category names up to 50 characters long.

Categories created at the region level are shared with all schools in the region. If categories are created at the school level, they are only used by that school.

Note: Only those with administrator access can create or make these changes. To learn more about educator access and permissions, read the article on Educator permissions.

Create a new category

Creating a new category lets you customise how your school or region tracks student guidance. This helps you group student interactions in ways that align with your specific school or region needs.

To create a new category:

1. From your educator account, click Features and select Guidance notes.
   

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2. Click Add category.
   

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3. Enter the category name.
   FYI: A banner will indicate if you're nearing or have exceeded the limit of 10 active categories. To add a new one, archive an existing category.
4. Click Add.
   • The category will immediately be available for educators to apply to their notes.

Edit a custom category

If your school or region's requirements or standards have changed, renaming a custom category lets you update guidance notes instantly to match those changes.

Note: If you edit a custom category, the new name will automatically update on all student notes that used the original name.

To edit a custom category:

1. From your educator account, click Features and select Guidance notes.
   

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2. Next to the custom category you want to update, click the three-dot menu and select Edit.
   

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3. Enter the new name.
   Note: A banner will let you know that the category name will be updated everywhere, including on existing notes that use that category.
4. To save your changes, click Confirm.
   

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Archive a category

Archiving keeps your list clean and up-to-date by removing unused categories without losing any historical data. Once a category has been archived, all existing notes that used the archived category will stay protected and searchable. This means you can still look up and read notes in the archived category.

To archive a category: 

1. From your educator account, click Features and select Guidance notes.
   

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2. Next to the custom category you want to archive, click the three-dot menu and select Archive.
   

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3. In the window that pops up, click Archive.
   

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   • The category will now be listed in the Archive tab.

Additional resources