Release v18.1

We’ve added several innovative functions to our News system. First off, if your school wants to ensure consistency in your news creation, you can enable news moderation. If turned on, schools can ensure articles will be reviewed by a designated news moderator, prior to publication. Moderator permissions can be assigned by modifying users. 

In the Administration system, Superusers can now access a tab labelled “News”. This will take you to a News admin page, where the school will be able to set policies around your comms system. From here, Superusers can enable moderation or assign default publish and expiry dates, among other things. 

We’ve also improved our News audience selector by introducing two new ways to add an audience for your article. Our audience selector will now allow you to search for a particular audience by typing it in the relevant field, or use our browse option to search by role, house, campus, and so on. You can select a simple audience (only one type) or a complex audience (for example, teachers only in the senior campus), and choose to send to parents of a target audience too. You will not be able to target teachers of students.

As an added bonus, targeted news audiences will now show when an article is viewed, so you will have a clear understanding of why a particular article is in your news feed. 

News articles have been unified to display in a single feed, which means that homepage news and global school news are no longer separated. For example, your group news will now be displayed in the same feed as your school news, although it can still appear on the dedicated homepage page as well. 

We’ve also delivered a save-for-later feature — something we know our schools have been wanting for a while. You can now star articles and save them for later reading, which is awesome!

Some other nice-to-haves we’ve introduced are:

• The ability to assign multiple topics to an article. It’s important to note that news topic headings will only display if there are news articles within those topics.
• Improved search to now display news article results.
• Several improvements to the performance of news lists. 
• An option to add a “read more” link in the news preview for truncated articles.
• Handy quick links in your News Feed to articles created by you, saved articles, and more.

Phew!

As part of our ongoing partnership with Rubicon, we’ve added the ability to import curriculum data that has been mapped in Atlas into Schoolbox for schools that are on the Pro or Elite plans. Teachers will now be able to use a course straight from Atlas, without having to manually create and associate assessments and folders with curriculum codes. 

The import will create pages for your courses and units with capabilities, indicators, and assessments already in place.

This import can be configured in the Administration system, in Settings, under 3rd Party Services. You will need to attain the API key from Atlas Rubicon and paste it in the “Rubicon Atlas API Token” field. 

The new Course Markbook allows you to see assessment results in one place for an entire cohort. This can reveal which students are yet to submit, which teacher feedback drafts are waiting to be published, and where feedback has already been published. If enabled, you can access the Course Markbook from the three-dot menu in Courses, the Course Outline, or the Course homepage. 

Flags in the corners of the cells indicate the mark status, so you can get a visual representation on the state of feedback and whether it’s published. 

This is available for schools that are on the Pro or Elite plans only. 

We embarked on a significant research project to determine how teachers are using rubrics in Schoolbox and what they need to make them even more powerful. We identified two capabilities we could add; allowing a mark for each capability, and providing a range of marks for a single rubric descriptor. These two new capabilities can be used individually or together, so you can combine them in any way you choose. You can also mark rubrics per capability, even if the overall assessment mark is none.

Additionally, we have introduced a warning when altering rubrics, which clearly states that any rubric alterations will delete already existing marks. This should ensure teachers don’t accidentally delete student marks - very handy!
 

To find out more about the rubric enhancements we’ve introduced, head over to our Changes for Teachers guide. 

Due to popular demand, we have now added the ability to lock homepage components so that they aren’t accidentally dragged on the page, which is particularly handy if you’re browsing a page on a tablet. This was a popular forum request that we’re happy to be able to deliver!

Every homepage now includes a lock functionality, which is turned on by default, ensuring that components can’t be moved inadvertently. You will find this in the right-hand corner of the page.

When unlocked, a grip handle will display on the left of the component heading, which will allow you to reposition the component. 

We’ve brought back feature tours! To help you along your Schoolbox learning journey, we’ve added a homepage feature tour that will explain how to set up the page and walk you through some of the different functions. This tour will pop up the first time you open a page in your Schoolbox instance.

We’ve added the ability to easily provision users from your Schoolbox instance into our community Help Centre. 

Superusers will now be able to see which users are provisioned or not provisioned in our community Help Centre, without leaving your instance. They can then easily provision users from your Administration system, under the “Schoolbox Help Provisioning” tab.

The single page grade summary can now reveal selected assessment types, based on a chosen Work Type. Superusers can choose which work types will appear on the grades summary page (in the Administration system, in the Work Types tab under Lists), whether that’s assessment tasks, essays, and so on. Teachers are then able to select the work type when creating a Due Work. 

This work type will then show on a student’s grades page, along with a grade or feedback, under the class.

Since the 18.1 beta release, we have also made it possible to hide certain work types from students and parents, meaning that teachers will be able to mark and assess students for items they can’t see. These marks will, however, still be included in the overall aggregate mark.

Multiple Group Admins

We have now added the ability to appoint multiple admins to a group page. 

Service Permissions

We’ve created a Service Permissions area under the Users tab in the Administration system, which shows you how many and which users have additional permissions.

Pop-ups

The overall look and feel of pop-up notifications has been updated to be less intrusive.

Image Slideshow Updates

Image slideshows can now lazy load images, speeding up page load times and reducing server load. 

Google Team Drives

The Google Drive picker will now display Team Drive items.

Pastoral Care Filters

We’ve added House and sub-type filters to the pastoral report builder.

UPS Updates

We’ve added the ability to run a live UPS sync from the admin interface.

No More Blank Emails!

We’ve introduced a confirm dialog box that will be prompted if you’re about to send a blank email. 

Improved User Dates

‘Created’ and ‘last updated’ dates have been added to users.

Icon Improvement

Notifications, digest, and emails have been made consistent with a new and improved icon set.

RSS Link Improvements

RSS links will now automatically open in a new window. 

Other Updates

• We’ve enforced HTTPS, which means that cookies are secure only, and links in emails are all HTTPS. 

• Synergetic attendance now writes back to the ‘CreatedById’ and ‘ModifiedById’. 

• Added a “View more feedback” link on the grades page, to help parents dive-deep into the rubrics when they are available in assessment feedback.

• Added medical information to the SchoolEdge connector. 

• New tables
  • Comms_news_article
  • Comms_news_article_statistics
  • Comms_news_article_statistics_cumlative
  • Comms_news_article_topic
  • Comms_news_audience
  • Comms_news_policy
  • Comms_news_saveforlater
  • Curriculum_node_for_rubric_criterion
  • Rubric_group
  • Curriculum_node_for_rubric_group
  • Rubric_group_usage
  • rubric_group_mark
• Renamed
  • Rubric_usage to rubric_criterion_usage
  • Rubric_mark to rubric_descriptor_mark
• New fields
  • Rubric_criterion.rubric_group_id
  • Submission_box.rubric_mark_range
  • Rubric_descriptor_mark.value
  • User.created_at
  • User.updated_at
  • Pastoral_report.sub_types
  • pastoral_report.houses
• Deprecated fields
  • Rubric_criterion.grouping
  • Rubric_criterion.parent_id
  • rubric_criterion.parent_type
• Deprecated table
  • rubric_mark