Guide - Personal Statement Builder · User guide: Using the Personal Statement Builder with your students Getting Started 2 Indigo’s Personal Statement Builder tool (a part of the

Teacher Guide:Getting started with the Personal Statement Builder

Getting started ……………………………………………………..…………………………………………………

The student interface ……………………………………………………..…………………………………..

Reviewing your students’ statements ……………………………………………………..….

Creatingacustomstructure …………………………………..………………………………………..

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User guide:Using the Personal Statement Builder with your students

Getting Started

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Indigo’s Personal Statement Builder tool (a part of the Universities module) is designed to be a dynamic tool to better facilitate the process of writing a student’s UCAS personal statement.

The PSB is Indigo’s innovative digital tool that guides students through drafting their personalstatement. It breaks down UCAS’s required 4000-character statement into manageable chunks –ensuring all required points are covered. Each section includes a range of advice and support from careers professionals such as Ian Stannard, author of How to Write A Winning UCAS Personal Statement, and selection panel members, giving students the chance to self-direct their learning.

What’s more, each section includes an innovative chat panel – allowing for unlimited back-and-forth interactions and feedback from their teacher. The Personal Statement Builder can support students in composing a powerful and effective UCAS statement, and help careers professionals to vastly increase the number of 1-2-1 interactions with students.

The first step is to set up your first group of students to draft their personal statement. On your PSB dashboard, click the Schedule Students button to be walked through the process…

1. Select the students you wish to complete their personal statement from the classes and groups you have set up inIndigo. (Note: if you wish to exclude a few students – for example if they are not applying to university - you can do so during this step).

2. Select a teacher to support these students.3. Choose to use Indigo’s structured template or allow students to

draft their statement freeform. (Note: you can also create your own custom structure. For more information see page 4).

4. Set deadlines for first and final drafts.5. If you require a final level of sign-off (for example by the Head

of Sixth or Principal) you can enter this in the final step.6. Click Confirm.

Once you’ve confirmed the group, all students in that group will receive a notification when they next log in to Indigo to begin drafting their personal statement.

1. As the teacher assigned to the group, you can continuallymonitor students’ progress from your Personal StatementDashboard.

2. Clicking an individual group will show the status of all individual students within that group (see screenshot, left)

3. You will be able to see whether the statement is “with student” (who is working on their draft) or “awaiting review” (the student has submitted a draft for feedback).

4. Clicking a student’s name will take you directly to their personal statement to review and comment.

5. You can also send a message to all students – helpful if you want to send a deadline reminder!

STUDENT VIEW: Writing a personal statement

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This is the student view of the Personal Statement Builder interface.

Following the structure recommended by Ian Stannard in his bestselling book How to Write A Winning UCAS Personal Statement, students are given three core sections to complete.

Each section is divided into further sub-sections, with a question to act as a starting point for that text passage.

Collectively addressing all of the questions across the three sections will result in a balanced and well-rounded personal statement that hits all the points university selectors are looking for.

At any point whilst they are drafting their personal statement, students can access the Advice Bank by clicking the purple bar on the right of the screen.

The Advice Bank contains a library of written and multimediaarticles, support and tips from experts on the various stages of the statement-drafting process.

Students can read advice on what to write (and importantly, tips on what not to write), as well as read real-life extracts from successful personal statements. These can also support your own 1-2-1 meetings with students.

Also included is a large range of subject-specific advice for writing a personal statement with exacting requirements –covering applications to Medical, Law and Veterinary schools plus dozens of others.

A hugely valuable element of the Personal Statement Builder is the chat panel - enabling unlimited back and forth communication between student and teacher.

As students work on their drafts, they can send a message to the teacher(s) connected to them, via the chat window. There is one next to each section of their statement, for ease of reference.

Similarly, when reviewing each draft of a student’s statement, teachers can leave feedback, edits and answers to questions.

TOP TIPStudents can track changes between their latest and previous drafts by using the ACTIONS button.

Reviewing your students’ draft personal statements

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You can keep track of all of your students’ progress using your teacher dashboard.

Each of the groups you have set up is displayed (alongside any others set up by colleagues at your school).

You can track the proportion of students who have completed a first draft (and submitted it for review) and those students who have fully completed their personal statement.

You can view all of your notifications and alerts in the Updatestab. This will alert you to any students who have submitted a draft for review, or sent you a message via their chat panel.

Once you have reached final approval of a student’s statement, they can export it for sending to UCAS in the Preview screen by clicking Download.

CUSTOMISE: Use your own personal statement structure

It’s your tool. Use it your way.We know that, sometimes, everyone likes doing things their own way. Whilst the three-part structure used in thePersonal Statement Builder is designed in association with university application experts, you may have your own system or structure for drafting personal statements that you’d rather use with your students.

That’s absolutely no problem – and it’s why we created a simple custom structure tool for you to easily digitise your school’s format for use in Indigo.

From your Personal Statement teacher dashboard, you can view all the template structures available to you in the “Statement Structures” tab (to the left of your “Updates” tab).

1. Click the “Create Structure” button.2. In the first panel you can give your custom structure a name

and a brief description.3. Next you can choose to make your custom structure available

just to colleagues within your school, or make it public and available to other schools within the Indigo community. (Note: you can change this setting at any time).

You’re now ready to build your structure… (see over)

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CUSTOMISE: Use your own personal statement structure (cont…)

Now you can build the sections of your Personal Statement structure. As an example, the default Indigo structure consists of three main parts, with three sub-sections in each. Your structure can have as many, or as few, parts and sub-sections as you wish.

1. Your first part is created for you. Give this section a title for students –for example “Introduce Yourself”.

2. Be sure to include a line or two of “help text” – to help your students understand what they need to focus on in this part of their statement.

3. Next, add titles for this part’s sub-sections. This is youropportunity to break down the main “theme” of your first part. You can add or remove as many sub-sections as you need.

4. Once you have completed the first part of your framework, you can click “Add Another Part”. Alternatively, if you only want one part, you can continue to the final step.

5. Lastly, you can assign a word or character limit to each of your parts, as a guide for students to know how to weight each of the sections you have given them – and keep within UCAS’s 4000 character limit.

Once complete, be sure to hit Confirm and Create to save your structure.

Once you have created you own custom personal statement structure, it is saved and available for all staff in your school to access.

To view (and edit if needed) all available templates from your main Personal Statement Dashboard - click the Statement Structures tab.

IMPORTANT:Be sure to create your custom template beforeyour students begin their drafts. You are not able to change structures once students have begun writing their statements.