Changes in Schoolbox from v17 to v17.5: An Overview for Teachers

The primary focus of the version 17.5 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 v17 to v17.5 of Schoolbox.

With the release of v17.5, we've changed the inline grader; the way you annotate student work. 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 as the old one, 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

It's important to be aware that any student work annotated prior to the update of v17.5 will be stored as a PDF file, alongside student submission and feedback in Schoolbox.

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.

A popular feature request has been delivered in this release, the ability to email parents from a group. You can find this option in the "Manage Group" area of the group page. Clicking the three dot menu will now give you the option to "Email Group Parents".

A common workflow for teachers is to create new student activities to courses that have already been imported to class pages. Now, you can add dates to the activity when using the export feature.

We’ve introduced a new, 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 set visibility control over who can view general content and who can view confidential content, based on audience roles. Now, when you set your permissions in Pastoral Care, you will be able to do so either for general access, or general and confidential access. Easy!

When setting a letter grade mark type on a due work item, you can now view the grade scale, which will give teachers more visibility of the scale being used to assess the students.