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The primary focus of the version 17 major release has been improving and enhancing existing features and functionality of the system. Many improvements have been based on feedback from our community; so thank you for your continued contributions to the Schoolbox Help ideas forums!
This doc will outline the major changes for teachers who are transitioning from using v16.5 to v17 of Schoolbox.
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Version 16.5 saw a vast array of improvements and changes in the LMS functionality of Schoolbox. We’ve further improved on these in v17 by adding the ability to filter assessment data on key LMS pages to help teachers target and view the information that they actually want to see! Filters have been added to the pending assessments, markbook and grades pages. At first glance, you’ll notice a new filter field at the top of the page:
Expanding this field will open a world of possibilities to cater for all your data needs! You will be able to filter the data by things like assessment type, terms, weighted assessments, work types and more! Schools can customise the options available, so you may not have all the options below available to you.
These filters could be handy for viewing:
Only weighted assessments within a given term.
Activities in a specific unit.
Overdue activities.
Work from a specific term.
And much, much more!
To make these filters more powerful, we’ve added the ‘work type’ field to tasks and quizzes, so that they can be filtered on the markbook, pending assessments and grades pages. This just means, when you’re creating quizzes and tasks, you’ll now have the option to select a work type.
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In version 17, we’ve also introduced a vastly improved Date Picker that will help you make informed decisions about dates for assessments and events. Prior to version 17, the Date Picker was pretty stock standard, only allowing you to select a date from a calendar view. The new Date Picker, available across the system, will also allow you to select the date of an event based on your timetable.
When you select a date for an event, you’ll also be able to see other events that are occurring on the same day. When setting assessment dates for your class, you will have the ability to see the workloads of your students for a particular day, so you can make informed decisions about their current load.
To use the new Date Picker, instead of clicking into the date field as you would in v16.5, you can just click on ‘select date’.
In the date field, you can now manually type the date/time you wish to set without the Date Picker opening. If you’d like to have a bit of fun, you can even try typing ‘tomorrow’, or ‘next tuesday’ into the field and marvel as the date is automatically generated!
Watch this video to learn more:
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Working with different schools in different states, regions and countries has highlighted that teacher jargon is very rarely consistent across schools. Where one school may say X, another may say Y. So, v17 introduces the ability for schools to customise some key terms around their system to suit the internal lingo of your school. You may notice the ‘capability’ section of rubrics changing to ‘criteria’ or ‘grades’ changing to ‘feedback’.
If you are completing the teacher course or accessing any of our guides in Schoolbox Help, be aware that your school may have customised some language or terms in your system, so it may not align directly with the language of our guides.
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In v16 we introduced the Pastoral Care module for customers on the Elite plan as a way to help record, monitor and report on student wellbeing at schools. Since this initial release, we’ve had many suggestions from our community posted in the Pastoral Care Ideas forums on how we can further improve this module.
There were a few key themes that arose from these suggestions that we decided to focus on for this release; more granular permissions, an easier way to determine what records require action, and a centralised landing space to help manage information and records. With this, we have introduced a few new features and improvements including:
In our first iteration of Pastoral Care, you first needed to navigate to a student’s profile page to create a new pastoral record, or to generate Pastoral Care reports. In v17, we’ve introduced the pastoral care dashboard which has a customised display of records you have recently viewed, your pastoral group membership, and important pastoral records. From your pastoral dashboard, you will also now be able to search for students and generate reports. So, there is no longer a need to navigate to a student to create a record, as your pastoral dashboard is now your hub for all pastoral-related information and actions.
Feedback from our schools using the Pastoral Care module highlighted that it was difficult to determine what records required action. To help make this easier, we’ve added an ‘important records’ list to your Pastoral Care dashboard. This will display records that have been marked with a specified severity set by your school. For example, the list may display all records marked as ‘critical’ and ‘high’. Keep in mind these severity types are customised by your school, so they may have different names. This should help you determine what records require follow up or action.
A popular improvement request for the Pastoral Care system has been the ability to target Pastoral Care records to specific groups of people, such as the welfare team, house leader or year level coordinator. To help address this, we’ve introduced the idea of pastoral groups. Pastoral groups can be set up by pastoral moderators and can be things such as ‘Year 9 Welfare Team’, ‘Principals’, ‘House Coordinator’ etc… Now, when you create a Pastoral Care record, you will have the added options of being able to make the record visible to specific pastoral groups. This will trigger a notification to be sent to members of that specific pastoral group.
Prior to v17, when creating a Pastoral Care record, the process for setting record visibility was a bit confusing. In particular, the ‘hide content from selected roles’ toggle involved some complex doublethink that confused even us! So, we’ve simplified things and removed the ‘hide content from selected roles’ toggle.
Now, to set record visibility you simply need to choose who you want to see the record (roles, groups or individuals). Any user who is not specified, or is not part of the roles or groups selected, will have no visibility of the record at all.
We have also introduced the ability to save pastoral reports for future use. This is particularly handy for people who have found themselves recreating reports on a regular basis with the same set of filters.
The way in which you create a report, by selecting the relevant filters, has remained the same. The only difference is that you can now give your specific set of filters a name and save this set of filters for easy generation of future reports.
Your saved pastoral care reports can be accessed from your pastoral care dashboard under the heading ‘Quick Report Links’.
More than this, you can share your reports with pastoral groups! This means you can collaborate over the same data and save other people's time in setting up reports. It’s a win, win!
When you access a specific pastoral record, you may have also noticed a few visual changes. Firstly, at the top of the page, important record details such as the severity, categories, author of the record etc… are more prominent. Making it easier, at a quick glance, to view these important details.
We’ve also made it clearer about who exactly can view the record, with a list of users and groups added under the heading ‘Record Visibility’.
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In v17 we have made some changes under the hood to integrate with the new PlagScan API. If your school has the plagiarism checker enabled, you will notice a new, improved report interface that’ll make it easier for you to see what has been plagiarised.
The barcode-looking feature at the top of the report is the PlagBar, which displays one red stroke for each instance of plagiarism within the document, providing you, at a quick glance, with an overview of what has been plagiarised, and to what extent, in the submitted document.
More exciting than the new report, is the added ability for students to be able to view their own plagiarism reports; rejoice Schoolbox Help community, another idea has been delivered! This can be turned on/off by your Schoolbox administrators, so it may not be enabled at your school.
Students will be able to view the results of the plagiarism check in their submission history feed after they have created the submission, see the percentage of work plagiarised, and click on the percentage score to view the report. The report students see will be the same as teachers, and will have the same functionality.
Lastly, there is also the added functionality to be able to print or export the plagiarism report to a PDF or Word doc for later reference.
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In this latest version, we've added the ability to access learning analytics from the courses area. Simply navigate to the course list, search your course and then click the three dot menu and select 'Learning Analytics'. Accessing learning analytics in this way will automatically take you to the cohort comparison data.
You can continue to access learning analytics for any courses imported on to class or course pages from the 'My Classes' or 'My Groups' landing pages.
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Teachers, rejoice! We have added the ability to easily mark off submissions as received without having to publish feedback or results. This will be super handy for hard copy submissions, or in junior school contexts. This will stop overdue work notifications triggering and help you keep track of who has submitted, even if they haven't submitted online.
The 'mark as submitted' option is available from the quickmark screen and in the 'Not Submitted' list on the pending assessments screen. They will be visible for any students that have not already submitted, and where feedback or results have not been published. You can mark per individual:
Or, in bulk, from the quickmark screen, by clicking the three dot menu and selecting 'submissions received...' then checking off who has submitted.
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You can now edit and delete capabilities and indicators in units even when they are in use by an assessment and on a class page. You can now also see where each indicator is in use.
This will not remove capabilities and indicators from classes and any existing results, but will remove them from the course and units.
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There is now a continue button when you are writing draft feedback for students which takes you to the next student!!! This means no more scrolling back to the top of the page to move to the next student.
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You heard it! Homepage news now has the option to add times to your publish and expiry dates.