Release 17.5

With the pending retirement of the Crocodoc inline annotation system, we’ve worked with Kami to provide you with new enhanced abilities to give feedback to your students. The new system will work in much the same way, providing the ability to annotate a student's work and quickly return it, along with your grades and comments.

There are also some additional new functionalities you should be aware of, including:

• The ability to insert images into student submissions
• The option to add audio comments inline
• A formula builder

In the past, if you were viewing a large markbook in Schoolbox, it could be hard to follow what you were actually looking at.

In this release, we’ve added a column freeze feature that locks assessment titles and student names on the screen, so that you can scroll horizontally and vertically, while still maintaining visibility of all key information.

The Learning Tool Interoperability (LTI) feature was introduced in the last update, but didn’t support the ability to embed third party content...until now that is!
This new extension to the LTI standard allows you to use the “Embed Learning Tool” component to browse a third party resource and select the resource to embed in Schoolbox.

With this functionality now available, we have included Khan, Quizlet, TEDEd, Vimeo and YouTube as standard resources in all installs.  

To provide more support to junior schools that have been using our ePortfolio blog feature, we have made several improvements to this feature. Now, when teachers post to a student’s blog, it will be labelled that it was posted by the teacher, not the student.

In addition, we have added several new notifications for blogs and blog comments, which will allow teachers, students, and parents to be informed when new content is posted to the ePortfolio.

We’ve introduced an improved private area in our Pastoral Care module. This includes a confidential content box that is separate from the general content area, which can be seen by anyone who accesses that pastoral record.

We’ve also added the ability to control visibility over who can view confidential content, based on audience roles. Now, when you set your permissions in Pastoral Care, you will be able to set whether a user has general access, or general and confidential access. Nice!

For schools utilising the third party tool Parent Teacher Online, (PTO) we now provide single sign-on (SSO) for this system. When set up, PTO will be embedded within an iFrame inside Schoolbox, providing a consistent experience for parents booking parent teacher interviews, without having to login to a separate system.

To utilise this feature, you need to get a School ID and SSO Key from PTO, then enter them in: Admin->Settings->3rd Party Services. This will then automatically log parents and staff into PTO when they visit the URL /modules/pto on the Schoolbox server.  

When booking resources, our validation system can ensure they’re not double booked and remain within certain constraints. But when resource bookings come through an external source, such as the timetable, it can often be hard to ensure they’re not doubled up.

To prevent this from happening, we’ve now given you the option to restrict resources to be booked during the current term only. This will ensure that bookings cannot be made into future terms that may or may not have a correct timetable loaded yet. Easy!

In order to get the best picture of how you navigate your Schoolbox instance, we’re working on improving our tracking of your day-to-day usage. This data will be used to help focus our future development efforts and build our upcoming roadmap.

By understanding what features you use and how you use them, we hope to improve our focus and ensure we maximise your investment and value. Due to the sensitive nature of usage data, this is an opt-in feature, however, we strongly encourage you to do so, as your participation will help us build a better product.

Don’t worry - your privacy will be completely protected as all data collected is anonymous, and no data will be shared outside of our company. If you want to find out more, please check the Privacy Policy on our website. 

As part of this upgrade, all documents will be migrated out of Crocodoc and stored as PDF files, alongside student submission and feedback in Schoolbox. This will increase your disk usage, as files are migrated from the cloud and into your Schoolbox instance.

We will also be moving all old plagiarism reports from the database on to files on the disk. This will decrease your database size, but means you will also have more files on disk. All in all, it should be a fairly nominal change for most of our schools.