Release 17.0

The pastoral care system, which was launched last year, was well received and we wanted to continue to expand upon the system’s general capabilities.

Dedicated Dashboard

To bring the system together we now have a dedicated dashboard that provides access to all the primary functions of Pastoral Care. The dashboard is customised to you and shows students you have recently viewed, as well as your favourite pastoral reports. It also incorporates a new search feature that allows you to find information quickly and efficiently.

Pastoral Care Groups

In order to provide increased control over the visibility of pastoral records, we now enable the creation of pastoral care groups. These groups can be created by any pastoral moderator and contain any number of people. You can use groups to define executives, tutors, heads of house, year level coordinators, or other pastoral teams. Once the groups are defined, you can then share records with its members and, although members can change, group visibility will remain constant.

Saved Reports

The pastoral report system provides the ability to tailor reports that provide information specific to your requirements. You can also set filters for a wide range of attributes, then save these reports for future use. These reports can then be shared with pastoral groups or displayed on your pastoral dashboard, which is great for providing specific views, such as ‘Bullying Reports’, ‘Year 7 ILP’ or ‘Critical Incidents’, for example.

To learn more about the changes to the Pastoral Care module, read our guide for teachers. For Schoolbox Administrators, we also have a pastoral care changes guide that provides an overview of the new settings, and tips on what to consider when introducing the new features to staff.

Picking the correct date for an event or assessment is a critical, everyday task for most teachers. To ensure teachers always pick the right day, we have developed a new and improved Date Picker tool, which shows any possible clashes on that day.  

Timetable Selection

When picking a time for an event or due work, teachers often think in the context of the timetable - Week 2, Day 2, Period 4, for example. With the new Date Picker, we wanted a teacher to be able to pick dates as easily via the timetable as they can via our standard calendar.

Calendar Insight

We know how important it is to make sure there are no other events or interruptions during a chosen event date. Previously, this would have involved checking the calendar and reviewing it to pick the best day and time. Now, the new Date Picker brings the calendar to you and shows you exactly what else is happening on your selected day, so you never book your event during the swimming carnival again.

Due Work Insight

When setting due work for students, it’s important to be mindful of the load you may be placing on them. Often, this is complicated because students are involved in many classes with other teachers, so it’s hard to understand exactly how much work they have. Now, when setting work, the Date Picker shows how much due work students have on each day of the month.

When viewing assessments in Schoolbox, it’s important to be able to find what you are looking for. As increasing quantities of tasks, quizzes and assessments are handled online, we have introduced filter options for all of your favourite pages to enable quick filtering of assessments. You will find the new filter controls are now available on the ‘Pending Assessment’, ‘Markbook’ and ‘Grades’ pages.

The filters can all be controlled from your admin system, which allows you to turn filters on or off, and see other options, as well as the default settings. This means you can set your filters in a way that makes sense for your organisation, tune the default views to display only your required items, and further customise your grades’ page to build the continuous report that works for you.

To make filters more powerful, we have now migrated ‘Work Type’ to all assessments - including quizzes, task and projects - so you can categorise your other assessments and filter across types.

The plagiarism system has been updated to utilise a new, more modern report with enhanced functionality. The new report will now allow for better browsing of matches and removal of non-important matches. Additionally, the new report can be printed or exported to a PDF or Word document for future reference.

In order to give students better insights into their plagiarism score, you can now give them access to the complete report, which means students will be able to see the same report as teachers after they submit their work.

With this release, we have migrated our core code to a new enhanced platform (PHP7). This has provided a performance increase of up to 100% across standard response times.

We have also reengineered the notification system to use drastically less memory, reducing our memory consumption by over 50% on high volume servers.  

We have further improved the database schema, increasing the quality of our indexing, data constraints and row level locking to further increase performance.

All of these investments in our technology platform ensure Schoolbox continues to be responsive, fast and low cost to run.

Media Processing Log

When your media (uploaded audio and video files) won’t process, you can now go and view the media log to understand why. If it just ran out of time, you can ask the system to retry the processing and see if it will work the second time.

Terminology

We always want Schoolbox to be seen as part of your school - not a product you use, but something that truly reflects your DNA. Now you can further customise your terminology throughout the system to utilise your specific school language. Rename things like ‘Due Work’, ‘News’, ‘Calendar’ and ‘Pastoral’ to terms that are specific to your organisation.

Drives

You can now configure and control the WebDAV drive integrations via the admin system. Make changes quickly and easily to decide what files are available via the ‘Drives’ area in Schoolbox.

• Added new user policy that allows the hiding of class grade average data from grade report per student.

• Profile screen layout condensed and improved.

• Social stream layout improved to make replies more obvious.

• Notifications now deliver for inheriting subpages of groups.

• Max image size increased from 1024 to 2048 pixels to better support HiDPI screens.

• Localised EOTC terminology.

• Added support for the full UTF8 character set, from 3 bytes to 4 bytes.

• Private pastoral records have been removed, and visibility can only be used alone now to control visibility as the private flag was confusing when used in conjunction with visibility.

• New permissions are required for Synergetic see the integration guide for more info

• IE9/10 Support has been removed, IE9/10 users will be sent to a page to download a new browser.

• We will need to upgrade your servers to PHP7 with this release - this will be part of the upgrade process.

• Web services will be halted during the upgrade and the upgrade may take up to an hour due to large amounts of database cleanups being undertaken. This will of course depend on your database size.

• The new plagscan API requires an additional attribute, client ID.  This will be added to your config at install time automatically.  If you are having trouble with plagscan this would be the first thing to check.