Educator Quick Start

This is the most important thing to understand about Prism's architecture.

Families own their learner's portfolio. As an educator, your Pod gets access to contribute to it. When a family leaves your program, you remove them from the Pod and they retain all of their content. Their portfolio stays intact. They can continue using Prism, join another Pod, or keep documenting on their own.

This means portfolios can follow a learner for years, across multiple programs and contexts. Learning that happens at your microschool, at home, on weekends, over summer, and at the next program the child attends can all live in one place.

This design comes from over 15 years of experience in the alternative education ecosystem, where learners frequently move between programs, homeschool co-ops, and independent learning contexts. A portfolio should never be locked inside a single institution.

Navigate to My Stuff → Pod Management. Here you'll find your Pod's basic info, stats, members, and settings.

Name, Description, and Logo

You can edit your Pod name and description at any time. Adding a logo is optional but recommended. Your logo appears at the top of the Moments feed, which brands the experience for parents in your program.

• Use PNG format with a transparent background for the cleanest look.
• The logo blends with Prism's background color, so transparency matters.

Portfolio Categories

Categories are unique to Pods. You create them in Pod Management, and each portfolio entry can be assigned one category. You can have up to 10.

Categories are meant for things specific to your program. For example, ALC Mosaic uses categories to organize entries by context: field trips, offerings, playyard time, connection circle, specialty week events. This makes it easy to filter entries later for specific purposes — we use ours to organize photos for our yearbook at the end of each year.

Categories are optional. You can skip them entirely or add them later as your documentation practice develops.

Add a Family to Your Pod

Go to Pod Management → Add Family to Pod. You'll enter the parent's email address, learner's name and birth date, siblings (if applicable), and consent confirmation.

Once added, you can immediately start creating portfolio entries for that learner. The parent will receive an email inviting them to join Prism and claim guardianship of their child's portfolio.

Parents don't need to sign up before you start documenting. You can begin right away. When a parent claims their account, they become the primary owner and can add their own entries, capturing learning at home and beyond your program.

Inviting Educators

From Pod Management, you can also invite other educators to your Pod. Enter their name and email, and they'll receive an invitation.

You can promote any educator to Pod Admin, which gives them access to Pod settings, member management, and billing. By default, new educators are standard members who can create and edit their own portfolio entries for Pod learners.

Managing Members

Use the search bar on the members page to quickly find any educator, parent, or learner. Type a few letters and the results filter dynamically.

Click Manage on any parent to see their associated learners, remove a learner from the Pod, and view linked family accounts. When you remove the last learner associated with a parent, the parent is also removed and loses access to Pod content.

Linked Family Accounts

Parents can invite co-parents, grandparents, and other family members to their learner's portfolio. From the Manage view, you can see which family members a parent has invited and whether those family members can see public Pod content.

Family roles include co-owner (full access), co-author (can add entries), and view-only. This is helpful context when a family member reaches out with a question about what they can see.

When you create a portfolio entry, you'll see a Private Entry toggle on the Reflect tab.

Public Entries (Default)

Public entries appear on the Moments feed for all parents in your Pod. This is how Prism helps you showcase the breadth of learning happening across your program. Parents of younger children can see what the older kids are working on. Parents in one part of your program can discover what's happening in another.

Think of it as a window into your community's learning culture, visible to everyone inside your Pod.

Private Entries

Toggle an entry to private when the content is meant only for the families of the learners tagged in that entry. Private entries still appear on those families' Moments feeds, but not for anyone else in the Pod.

Use private entries when the observation is personal, sensitive, or simply more relevant to specific families than to the whole community.

Who Can See This?

Every portfolio entry has a "Who can see this?" info button. It shows exactly who has access to that entry, and the information changes depending on whose account you're viewing from. If a parent ever asks about visibility, point them to this feature.

Go to My Stuff → Settings to create Learner Groups.

If you run a class, offering, or activity with the same group of kids repeatedly, tagging each of their names individually every time you document gets tedious. Learner Groups solve this.

Create a group (for example, "Morning Circle" or "Playyard Stock"), add learners to it, and then on the portfolio entry form, you can tag the entire group with one click.

For small programs with 5–10 learners, you might create an "Everyone" group and use it for entries that involve the whole community.

The Assistant is where Prism's generated resources live: transcripts, learning stories, goal analyses, portfolio exports, suggested resources, and more.

How the Budget Works

Your Pod shares a resource budget across all educators. The size of the budget is based on how many learners are in your Pod; more learners means a larger budget. It resets every quarter (January 1, April 1, July 1, October 1).

Different resources use different amounts of the budget:

• Resources that search the web use more.
• Analyzing a larger number of portfolio entries (for example, a 2-year portfolio export covering 300 entries) uses significantly more than a goal analysis covering 20 entries from a few months.

The budget is designed to be generous for normal usage. If you're running low, especially at the end of a term when you might be generating exports for everyone, reach out via My Stuff → Feedback. You can share screenshots directly from the app and we'll work with you.

Prism has mobile apps for both iOS and Android. The mobile apps are ideal for quick-capture documentation — snap a photo, write a description, tag learners, and post. Many educators find that having the app on their phone is what makes consistent documentation sustainable.

We actively want to hear from you. Feature requests, bug reports, questions about how to use a feature, or ideas about how Prism could better serve your program are all welcome.

Go to My Stuff → Feedback anytime. You can type a message, attach screenshots, and send it directly to the Prism team.

If you're an educator considering Prism for your program, reach out. These are conversations we genuinely enjoy having, and we want to make sure you get the most out of the tool.