Changes in Schoolbox from v16 to v16.5: An Overview for Teachers

Version 16.5 of Schoolbox includes many new features and improvements, many of which we have based on feedback and suggestions from our Schoolbox Community. So, shout out to all the contributors to the Schoolbox Help ideas forums!

This doc will outline the major changes for teachers who are transitioning from using v16 to v16.5 of Schoolbox. We've identified the following major areas of change and have outlined them below:

• Changes in workflow.
• ​Changes in the look and feel of the system.
• New features and improvements.

The purpose of this page is to provide teachers with an overview of the major changes and improvements. For Schoolbox Administrators, or other curious users, we recommend you checkout the Release Notes, which provide an overview of the changes in the back end of the system as well.

In v16 we introduced the ability to import a course to multiple class pages due to popular demand. In the workflow of v16, you first needed to navigate to a class page to import a course to multiple class pages. Now, this can be done from the course modify screen, making it easier for faculty or team leaders to push to multiple class pages at once.

NOTE: You can no longer import a course to multiple class pages if you start the import process on a class page. Learn more here.

Pending Assessments

In v16.5 we have made some huge improvements to workflows for marking submissions. Firstly, you’ll probably notice that ‘Submissions’ has become ‘Assessments’ in your top navigation menu.

NOTE: Keep in mind that this terminology can now be localised, so it may be different again at your school.

Your submissions list, or now ‘pending assessments’, has changed from being a list of all assessments per class to two lists of things you need to mark, listed under ‘requires assessment’ and thing you need to follow up on, listed under the heading ‘not submitted’.

We found that in the versions prior to v16.5 that it was difficult to quickly see the progress of your marking and work out when work had been resubmitted. It required a lot of manual checking of whether the numbers in the ‘submitted’ column matched the numbers in the ‘graded’ columns. The new pending assessments screen in v16.5 provides a visual way of seeing how many students have submitted versus how much marking you need to do.

Once you’ve finished marking all assessments, they will no longer appear in your ‘pending assessments’. If you get through everything, you may even see this message:

#teachergoals

Watch our video to learn more about the assessments area in Schoolbox.

​Drafting & Publishing Feedback & Results

In v16.5 we have also introduced the concept of drafting and publishing feedback. When giving feedback on a submission, it is now automatically saved as a draft. Drafting allows you to save progress without making the feedback immediately available to students. Draft submissions will not appear in a student’s submission history when either students or teachers view it. You will be reminded that your feedback is in draft form by the handy pop-up that appears at the bottom of the screen.

There are now several different ways to publish feedback and results to students. On an individual level, you can click ‘publish’ once you have finished giving feedback to an individual student.

To publish to the whole class you can click the three dots in the top right corner and select ‘publish drafts’.

Publishing feedback will make it visible to the audience specified in the assessment’s visibility setting (this is what you set when you create the due work). Pre-v16.5 this is how teachers would control the release of feedback and results to students.

Now, when creating due work, you don’t need to set it to ‘Staff Only’ to prevent results being released prematurely. Instead, you can set it to your desired audience and use the new publishing functionality to control when results are released and whether they become visible to individuals or your whole class at once.

Watch our video to learn more about marking due work in v16.5 or read this article to learn more about the quick mark screen and publishing and drafting in v16.5

Reviewing Quizzes

The workflows for reviewing quizzes are similar. You can review quizzes individually, horizontally or en-masse with the ‘mark attempts as reviewed’ action.

Assigning a grade from a rubric

Prior to v16.5 when you marked a rubric, it would automatically populate the grade for the assessment with the rubric mark. Now, in v16.5, when marking with a rubric, you can choose whether or not you will use the mark derived from the rubric as the final assessment mark. If you do want to use the mark from the rubric, you will need to select ‘assign grade from rubric’.

Student Submissions

For v16.5 the entire submissions system has undergone a huge rewrite to help make things cleaner and simpler, most of this is under the hood and won’t have an impact on teacher workflows.

A notable change in v16.5 is that a student’s submission can now contain multiple files. In the past, each file submitted created a different submission with its own time and date stamp. From a teacher or student’s perspective this will be evident in the submission history screen:

V16 - Each file appears as a separate submission with its own date/time stamp, even though the three files were submitted at the same time.

V16.5 - Multiple files submitted at the same time are counted as one submission with the same date/time stamp.

When marking in the inline grader, teachers will also be able to select which submission to mark. Just keep in mind that a submission can contain multiple files now.

NOTE: The inline grader will automatically display the most recent submission, to view earlier submissions click the drop down menu and select the submission you would like to view.

The improvements to Pending Assessment has meant a slight change to how you access your markbook and learning analytics for classes in previous terms. Instead of accessing from the submissions list, you will now need to navigate to ‘Classes’, change the term date to a previous term and then use the three dot menu for the class to view the markbook or learning analytics.

In our Schoolbox Help community, there has been discussion about enhancing the functionality of tasks. So, that’s exactly what we’ve done in v16.5! Now when you add a task, you have the ability to also add due dates and use the text editor to post videos, images, tables, mathematical formulas and more!

You can continue to use the simple features of the task and just attach a single file or a link. Or, you can add content to the text editor AND attach a file or link. It’s up to you how you use tasks! Watch our video on creating a task in v16.5.

For students, when they click on the task, they will be taken to another page where they can view the content of the text editor, the link, video or document and then mark the task as complete.

NOTE: If you have only given the task a title and added a link or attachment, students will be taken directly to the attachment or link, they will not go to another page like the one above.

We’ve simplified the look of component buttons, so your content appears more prominent.

Around the system, we’ve added prompts to action to help you work out what to do next.

For some components, like the course builder, we’ve also added notes that explain why you can’t add certain components to certain pages. For example, adding a course builder to a class page.

We've realised that many users are unaware that they have the ability to drag and drop files (yes, multiple files, if you please) onto image components. So, we've added call-to-action text to make this a little more obvious.

We’ve also made some minor improvements in the resource browser to make things a bit more obvious. Prior to v16.5 you could drop multiple files onto the page modify field at the bottom of the resource browser. However, this functionality was not immediately obvious. So, to make this functionality clearer we’ve added the drop zone.

We’ve also added image icons for different file types. These will help you to identify, at a glance, what types of files have been uploaded. Both students and teachers will see these icons.

To help you work out what step you are upto in a form or set up process, we’ve added a visual guide that we like to call the ‘railroad’. The railroad will help you track your progress through a process such as importing a course to a class page.

TIP: You can also use the railroad to navigate back to previous steps. Simply click on the step you’d like to return to. ​

You’ve probably already realised that the markbook (or marksheet) and progress report pretty much displayed the same data. The progress report was missing due work results and the markbook was missing the ability to check off tasks. So, we thought - why not combine them? The result:

You may also notice some colourful additions to the display which have been added to help you visualise the achievement of students. From the new markbook, you will be able to see the results of all assessments and tick off and monitor the completion of tasks.

There have also been improvements to the functionality of PlagScan including the ability to check the following file types in addition to the usual ones:

• PowerPoint

• Excel

• Open Office Formats

PlagScan can also now check any content in the text editor (this is the box where students can write their submission).

In v16.5 we have introduced an additional type of assessment that can be added to courses and class pages. Projects have been built to offer another level of assessment which we previously didn’t have in the system, and support the implementation of project-based learning.

Projects are basically a container that can contain quizzes, due work and tasks. So, if you want to package certain tasks, quizzes or due work within a unit, you can add a project instead of creating a new unit or creating a long list of items.

Here are some ideas about how you can use projects:

Project-based learning

Projects in v16.5 are a versatile tool that teachers can use to set up a sequence of tasks, quizzes and due work that can relate to any topic. Whether students are exploring a teacher-specified, real-world problem or designing their own topic/project, as a teacher you can use projects to create a series of core activities that students should complete as part of their project. They could be as specific as ‘read X article’ or generic as ‘locate three primary resources that you can use as supporting evidence in your chosen project’. When it comes to assessment, you can set up multiple due work options that students can complete allowing students to individualise their learning in the project.

Sub-topics within units

When teaching a unit, you may wish to add an additional layer for a sub-topic. Previously, we didn’t have the flexibility to allow activities within sub-topics. But, now you can use projects to package tasks, quizzes and due work that sit within a sub-topic. You just need to create a project within your unit and give it the name of the sub-topic, then start adding your activities.

Individualisation of activities

Projects can help you design student-centred learning. With projects you can set up multiple options for activities or assessments that allow students to choose, learn and demonstrate their understanding in a way that suits them. As an example, you could create multiple options for assessments by setting up multiple pieces of due work. You can then set the project's ‘mark summation’ method to ‘maximum’ which will use the highest mark from the due work/quiz completed within the project. This way students won’t be penalised for not completing other options. It also means your course outline won’t become cluttered with lots of different options.

Week-by-week planning

If you like to map out your activities, homework etc… on a week-by-week or even lesson-by-lesson basis, then you can use projects as your container to do this. Simply title your project within the unit with the week or lesson and then start adding tasks, due work and quizzes. This could be great for those lessons when you’re away. It also helps your learners see what is planned for the week.

Flipped Learning

Flipped classrooms and instruction are a great way to help build student-centred learning environments. However, adding a long list of tasks to a course outline can result in a lot of scrolling on the class page. It also means that it’s difficult for students to differentiate different stages or sub-topics within a topic or unit. Now, with projects, you can design a flipped learning environment and ‘package’ topics or stages into project containers. This means a clearer design for your students and less scrolling!

Learn more about projects here.

Since our first release of pastoral care in v16, we’ve had a few requests for improvements in our ideas forums on Schoolbox Help. Based on some of this feedback, we have improved the filtering capabilities of the pastoral care report generator and added the ability to customise what information the report will display and in what order.

A bugbear of some of our statistic-loving users has been the restricted views of homepage statistics, e.g: you could only view 5 ‘top visitors’. In v16.5 we have added a ‘view all’ button for you to drill down and get statistics for the whole class. This will help you to see who has/has not visited a page and how many times a user has visited.

To improve navigation and access to the features of your group and class pages, we have added two new landing pages for ‘my classes’ and ‘my groups’. Links to these can be added to the top or side menu by Schoolbox Superusers. There are also two new dashboard components, 'my classes' and 'my groups' which can be added to relevant dashboards. Depending on whether you’re a teacher or student, the three dot menu will offer quick actions to view things such as the class list, manage group interface, homepage statistics, markbook, analytics and grades (for students).

As part of the upgraded views of my classes and my groups, we have added the ability to add cover images to folders and homepages. Cover images will display on the my classes and my groups screens and dashboard components, and the folders component. To view the cover images on folder components, click the cog (settings) icon in the component header and switch the view from ‘list’ to ‘grid’. The new grid view on the folder component is a great way to create quick buttons that link to sub-pages. For example, if you add the folders component to a course page and switch to grid view, you’ll quickly have button links to your unit pages. Yay!