🛠️ Automating SLS: Adding Teachers-as-Students with Playwright need personal PC
SSOE is possible but need to ask IT dept to install node.js and playwright
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The Challenge
In SLS, adding a colleague (teacher) as a student in a Class Group requires multiple manual steps:
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Navigate to Class Groups → Admin → View & Edit → Students tab
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Click Add Student, choose “Teacher as Student”
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Search and select colleagues (potentially from different schools)
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Click Save
Each teacher takes 30–60 seconds to add—and scales poorly when onboarding for workshops, pilots, or department-wide tests.
🤖 The Playwright Hack
To reduce this pain, I built a Playwright RPA script that:
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Reads
data.csv
(list of teacher IDs/emails) -
Launches a browser and prompts for manual login
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Navigates to the Admin → Students tab
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Automates clicks on “Add Student → Teacher as Student”
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Searches, checks, and confirms each teacher
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Saves the group automatically
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Logs any missing or duplicate entries
This stripped hours of repetitive work into a single click.
💡 Why It Matters
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Mass Onboarding: Add teachers in under a minute, Save you the pain of doing it manually
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Accuracy: Reduces manual error—no typos or missed checkboxes
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Feedback for SLS Team: Demonstrates clear demand for a bulk-add feature
Reference:
- https://www.learning.moe.edu.sg/teacher-user-guide/organise/add-teachers-as-students-to-a-class-group/
- https://playwright.dev/docs/intro
- https://github.com/lookang/playWright/tree/main/SLS-classAddTeachersasStudents-Playwright-Automation
🧠 Strategic Alignment with ETD’s EdTech Masterplan
🎯 1. Removing Pain Points Through Prototyping
This Playwright automation is not just a clever hack—it’s a low-code, rapid prototype to explore a real workflow challenge teachers face: manually adding colleagues as students for lesson previews, team teaching, or PD purposes.
By automating this, we are:
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Testing real-world friction in the SLS ecosystem.
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Gathering evidence to prioritize native feature development in SLS.
🔗 ETD Alignment:
Supports Goal 2 of the EdTech Plan — “Ensure an intuitive, seamless experience for teachers” through user-driven enhancements.
🧪 2. Evidence-Informed Innovation
Rather than waiting for long dev cycles, this experiment provides:
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Data from actual use cases
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Insights from school clusters trying out SLS module previews or collaborative authoring
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A testbed for validating if it's worth building as a full SLS feature
🔗 ETD Alignment:
Reflects the spirit of “Agile Piloting” and “Fail Fast, Learn Fast” in EdTech R&D.
💡 3. Empowering Teacher-Innovators
This effort is a grassroots-led innovation where teacher-developers and HQ EdTech officers co-create tools that solve daily classroom challenges.
This:
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Demonstrates ownership of digital solutions
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Cultivates a culture of “Educator as Designer”
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Encourages experimentation with safe automation tools like Playwright, Puppeteer, and TagUI.
🔗 ETD Alignment:
Supports Goal 3 — “Equip teachers with advanced EdTech skills and mindsets.”
🌐 4. Contributing to SLS Ecosystem Enhancements
This automation could inform:
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Future UI/UX changes in class group management
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Role-switching flexibility for co-teaching, SLS lesson design, and onboarding
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A possible API endpoint or shortcut for teachers in SLS-Next
🔗 ETD Alignment:
Contributes toward “Smart Platform Features” under SLS 2.0 roadmap.
✅ Conclusion
This hack proves that teachers need a bulk “Teacher as Student” feature in SLS—saving time, reducing errors, and supporting meaningful testing and collaboration. With product guidance, this could be a valuable native tool in future SLS releases.