Getting Started

Welcome to AcademicVoice. This guide gets you from first launch to a student communicating on the board.

Badges show where behavior differs by edition: School · Pro · Clinician · AAC. Where there is no badge, it works the same in every edition.

1. First launch

The first time you open AcademicVoice, it walks you through a short setup:

1. Simple Start — a brief welcome that introduces the board.
2. Choose your state — pick the U.S. state you teach in. This tailors the academic standards shown later. You only do this once.

You can change these choices later in Settings (see chapter 05). The Clinician edition has its own professional setup in place of these steps.

2. Set up your staff PIN

A PIN keeps student-facing communication separate from the adult settings and reports.

School Pro AAC — your PIN is created at first launch: the app requires you to create a 6-digit staff PIN before anything else, so a PIN always exists by the time a student reaches the board. Keep a record of it — you need it to open Settings.

To add more staff accounts (School) or change a PIN later:

1. Open Settings (enter your PIN).
2. Tap Access & PIN.
3. Choose Add (or the staff-account option), enter a 6-digit PIN, and pick a role.
4. Save.

• On School you can add more than one staff account (a staff roster) — useful when several adults share one iPad.
• On Pro and AAC there is a single PIN for the one adult who owns the device.
• After a PIN is set, School Pro AAC ask for it whenever someone opens Settings or edits content — so a student tapping around cannot change their own setup.

Clinician: the Clinician edition asks for its own PIN when the app opens (and locks again after a period of inactivity), and does not ask again to open Settings. Manage its PIN from the Clinician Hub's Security Settings.

Why this matters: starting an assessment always requires a staff PIN, in every edition (see chapter 03). Setting one up now avoids a "can't start" surprise later.

3. Add your students

One iPad can hold up to 5 students, each with their own board, vocabulary, and progress.

1. Tap the student circle — the small colored circle with the student's initial, near the top of the board — and enter your staff PIN.
2. Tap Add Student: enter a name and a grade band.
3. Repeat for each student, up to five. When five students are on the device, the Add button no longer appears — remove a student first.

A student's details (grade band, level, access method) are edited later in Settings → Student Profile, which always shows the currently selected student.

Switching between students

• Tap the student circle and enter the staff PIN. If a staff member is already signed in on this device, the switch opens without asking again. On Clinician, the Hub's student switcher opens without a further PIN (the launch PIN already identified you).
• A student can never open another student's board or records by tapping around. On a Pro family device, your family PIN works; in School and Clinician settings, a Parent/Guardian sign-in can work with their own child but cannot switch the device to a different student.
• What follows the student when you switch: board layout, mastery progress, cell layout and access settings, the student's profile, and eye-gaze calibration.

4. Set a student's grade and level

Two settings shape what a student sees. Both live in Settings → Student Profile and are saved per student.

1. Grade Band — sets the academic level of vocabulary and units offered.
2. Vocabulary Access Mode / CCS Level — how much vocabulary complexity to show. On Pro, AAC, and Clinician you can override the suggested level; on School the level is view-only, set by the student's team.

If a student uses an alternate-standards level (for example, Florida Access Points), you set that here too — see Alternate Academic Standards in chapter 03, because it also changes how assessments are presented.

5. You're ready

At this point a student can open their board and start communicating. Next steps:

• Chapter 01 — Daily communication: the board, the sentence strip, and speaking.
• Chapter 02 — Academic units: turning on a unit and what it puts on the board.
• Chapter 04 — Accessibility setup: switch scanning, eye-gaze, VoiceOver, low vision — set up a student's access method.

Quick reference — what needs a PIN

Everyday communication — tapping the board and speaking — never needs a PIN.