Castle Rock High School Portico - Getting Started Guide Portico is a web-based system that allows Castle Rock students to download and upload files to and from the school ICT network. It is an extremely useful tool that students can use to transfer their work files between home and school, without having to worry about carrying USB memory devices with them. Portico supports most popular browsers, and is verified for use on Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Safari. Students can login to the Portico system from the following website address https://portico.castlerock.leics.sch.uk This address can either be typed into your browser manually, or you can use the Portico button on the Castle Rock website (www.castlerock.leics.sch.uk) as a shortcut (see Figure 1, marked in red). Figure 1 the Portico shortcut button on the Castle Rock website. It is a good idea to save the address of the Portico login website to your browser Favourites list! 1
Logging into Portico You will be required to supply a username and password to access the Portico system this information should have been provided to you shortly after joining Castle Rock High School. If you do not have this information, or you encounter difficulties logging in, you should speak to a member of the Castle Rock ICT Department for help. Figure 2 The Portico login screen. After typing in your username and password, click the Log In button to continue. Portico Basics There are two available folders in the default Portico student view. They are the N: drive, which represents your personal My Documents folder and the D: drive, which represents the RM Shared drive. You can navigate downwards through the folder structure by clicking on the folder icons. 2
Figure 3 The student view in Portico click a folder to open it. Figure 4 The N: drive in Portico is connected to your school My Documents folder. 3
Downloading a File Files are usually represented by a different icon than the one used for folders. A file will typically have an icon which represents the type of file that it is e.g. a DOCX icon for a Microsoft Word file, or a JPEG icon for an image file. To download a file from Portico to your home computer, simply click on the file name and your web browser should start the download process (see Figure 5). As with any normal file download, you can choose where you want to save the file on your computer/device at this point. Figure 5 Downloading a file from Portico with Internet Explorer. 4
Uploading a File to Portico Let s say you have downloaded an unfinished piece of school work from Portico, and edited it on your home computer you now want to upload the new version of the file back to your My Documents folder in school. There are two ways to achieve this. The simplest way is to use the new Drag & Drop feature. Drag your file into the grey box labelled Click or drop files here to upload to automatically send your file (Figure 6, marked in red). Or, click your mouse cursor somewhere in the grey box if you want to browse for a file to upload. The other way is to use the Browse to a file option (Figure 6, marked in green). If you want to overwrite the old version of the file with your new version, make sure you tick the Overwrite existing option before clicking on Upload. Figure 6 Different ways to upload files to Portico. Creating Folders You can perform folder management tasks with Portico, like creating new folders in your N: drive (the N: drive is connected to your My Documents folder at school). Simply click on Create Folder in the tools section (Figure 7, marked in red). The new folder will be created inside the folder you currently have open in Portico. 5
Figure 7 Creating a new folder in Portico. Changing the view By default Portico displays files and folders in the Standard view. This means that when you click on a folder, the folder contents is displayed in its own window. The folder layout can be changed to Tree view mode, where folders and sub-folders are displayed in a hierarchical format. Switch between Standard and Tree view modes with the selector at the topright of the screen (see Figure 8, marked in red). 6
Figure 8 Changing the folder view in Portico (Tree mode shown in this example). We hope that you find this guide useful for getting you up and running with Portico. If you have any questions or problems with the Portico service, please contact a member of the Castle Rock ICT Department. Relevant to Portico Version 1.6. Updated 10 th March 2014. 7