Release 16.5

Overview

School sports, activities and events are a major part of holistically developing each individual student’s skills and knowledge.. These dynamic and changing events often present communication challenges. With this in mind, we have designed a system that can push relevant information to team members and their parents about where and when they are involved in an activity. This system is fully integrated into the calendar, team home pages and notification system.

Fixture Management

Every week changes to teams, venues and times need to be communicated to the right people at the right time. Schoolbox has streamlined this process by providing an easy-to-use, drag- and-drop interface to manage the composition of the teams and any changes to the time or location of the venue. You can import your fixtures, teams and venues and then manage the day to day organisation in the web interface.

Match Pages

Each match or event scheduled in the fixture has a page. This contains a map of the venue, coaches, team members with positions and, of course, the match result. If anything changes before the match, such as a washout, everyone involved is notified.

Components

A new dashboard component will be provided to allow a user to see their upcoming game or event when they first log into the system.

You can also add the fixtures component to your existing sports’ pages. The fixtures component can be linked to any team and will display the team’s past results and upcoming games for the current season. You can add multiple fixtures components to a page to display many fixtures for an entire cohort or sport.

Learn more about fixtures here.

Overview

As the requirements for assessment and online teaching have increased, so have the demands on the learning management tools inside Schoolbox. In this release, we have completed a major re-engineer of the underlying system to ensure it can scale to meet these challenges in the future. While redeveloping, we have taken on board much of the feedback and built a system that can support the ever increasing requirements of modern online assessment practices.

Projects

Whether you are developing project-based learning or attempting to differentiate or individualise your student activities, another layer is required. The new project container adds an additional layer of assessment into your courses and classroom. Projects can contain tasks, due work or quizzes and the marks of these are summated into a single grade for the project. Learn more about projects here.

Pending Assessments

Our new pending assessments screen for teachers speeds up marking and will display only those assessments that require action. You can now quickly identify assessments that require marking or if you need to chase up a student for a submission. The screen shows a quick progress bar for each assessment, showing how close you are to completion so that you can track exactly how much work you have left.  

Submission Workflow

​Student submission workflows have several improvements including drafting and publishing controls for both students and teachers. We have also improved the handling of multiple files being submitted in a single submission. Feedback can also be addressed to specific student submissions over time, providing in-line feedback with a particular submission.​

Watch our video to learn more about marking due work in v16.5

To bring more flexibility to your Schoolbox instance, you can now configure the layout of both the top and side navigation areas. The side navigation can be relabeled and resequenced allowing you to prioritise the sections in the sidebar.

The top navigation area is now completely customisable allowing you to remove, add and customise the links available to your users. In addition, you can now show and hide icons based on campus and role, allowing you to only show the key features to the users that need them.

We have also introduced new class (/learning/classes) and group (/resource/mygroups) tile-based navigation features. We have added both standalone pages and dashboard components that will show all your classes and groups with image-based tiles. This will help to simplify your navigation with easy to use tiles for each class.

All across the internet there are many specialised education tools that can provide experiences beyond the standard tools provided within Schoolbox. With LTI you can provide seamless access for students to utilise 3rd party tools without the need for extra setup or configuration. Learn more about setting up and using LTI here.

• New flat file type mime icons to fit with the current theme. These are now also SVG for improved speed and scalability

• Several improvements to javascript compression and loading to help improve page loading speeds.

• Prettier and more informative error screens.

• New component action buttons are simpler and reduce clutter on the page.

• Empty states on components now indicate they can be populated by either clicking a link or dragging files onto them.

• New boarder leave dashboard component containing all the important information.

• New ePortfolio Deployment tool in the Schoolbox Administration area — great for duplicating a user's ePortfolio pages to groups of users in bulk.

• Now you can “view all” statistics from the homepage statistics page.

• Users can have a customised position/title that will override their role and be displayed anywhere we show the user details.

• Tasks can have dates and a description now, allowing them to be used for more purposes. Watch our creating tasks video to learn more.

• We have also added a dedicated task component for really simple to-do lists or checklists for your groups.

• Resource booking events for individual resources or categories can now be exported via VCAL to 3rd party systems

• Calendar events can be exported to VCAL and filtered by event type

• Empty states for the text box component can be configured in homepage templates, so that you can provide more direction on homepage templates.

• Some navigation customisations may have been lost; you can now re-implement these with the new admin system.

• The learning management schema has changed significantly, if you have custom development dependent on this area of the platform they may need to be updated. Fortunately, the new schema should be clearer and easier to understand.

• Due to the update of the file mime type icons, please check that your allowed file types all have icons, if you have customised mime types they may be missing icons.

• For Google Maps to work in fixtures these API services must be enabled in your developer console; Geocode and maps embed.