Changes in Schoolbox from v18 to v18.1: An Overview for Teachers

This release is going to revolutionise the way your instance works in two areas. First, we’ve introduced plenty of updates to our news system based on feedback received in our Schoolbox Help forums. Second, we’ve improved our LMS by delivering an integration with Atlas Rubicon, creating a Course Markbook, and improving our rubrics.

Read on to find out more about each of these amazing new features.

Our news update takes into account the considerable feedback we received in Schoolbox Help forums, regarding how to improve communication in schools. 

Moderation

One piece of feedback we heard loud and clear was the need to facilitate moderation. So, our improved news module now includes the ability to moderate articles before they are published.

If moderation is enabled, your school will be able to appoint dedicated news moderators who can review articles prior to publication. Moderators will be able to see which news items are awaiting moderation and modify, publish, or reject an article back to its author with feedback. This means news articles get that second set of eyes needed to ensure high quality written communication.  

One News Feed

In this new release, all of your news will be displayed together in one feed, so you don’t need to visit a group or class page to see news associated with it. 

Centralised News Page

We’ve improved your centralised news page, so now you can do everything from one location. Using the new quick links on this page, you can see all current and archived news, as well as your news articles that are awaiting moderation. You can also create a news item from this page, for any of your audiences. Again, you don’t have to visit a class or group page to create an article for those users. Now that you can both view and create all news from this page, there’s no longer any need to differentiate between “global” news and homepage news. We have really streamlined the workflow for all news producers!

Improved Audience Selection

To support the creation of news from a centralised location, we’ve designed an innovative audiencing function so you can ensure the right people are reading your article. We have also improved the audience selection for each article, allowing you to further refine your audience by class, group, or year level — even if there’s no group or class page. If you have a good idea of who you want to select as your audience, you can search for the audiences available to you, which may include classes, groups, year levels, roles, campuses and so on.

If you need to have a look at which audiences are available first, you can browse instead and select from the options provided. Your audience may be comprised of people who are a subset of a couple of audiences, so with the new complex audience selection you can combine audience types to create the perfect selection.

Save For Later

Our last, but not least, great new feature is the option to save an article for later. By clicking the star next to a news item, you can save it to your own curated list of articles. Going to your saved list gives you easy access to those few news items you are watching more closely. 

Curriculum mapping is essential for ensuring a robust and effective teaching program, so we have leveraged our partnership with Rubicon to create an automatic importer that connects to their Atlas curriculum mapping software. All of our Pro and Elite schools, who are also using Atlas, can now import whole courses, units, and assessment tasks with the specified capabilities, indicators, and curriculum codes attached.

The import will create the necessary course and unit pages in your instance. If you have imported any assessment tasks, those will appear on the unit page but, of course, this is just the bare bones of the LMS in Schoolbox. The great news is that you will still be able to add any supporting resources, extra learning activities, images, videos and anything else you need to make a Course and Unit page come alive. 

The assessments that you have created in Atlas will appear in the Course Builder, ready to assign to students. Even capabilities and indicators can be imported, meaning they will be ready for you to use in a rubric with just a tick of a checkbox.

The new Course Markbook is a great way for teachers to get a visual representation of the progress of an entire cohort. Educators will be able to see assessment results in one place. The Course Markbook reveals which students are yet to submit, which teacher feedback drafts are waiting to be published, and where feedback has already been published.

As this module is available for schools that are on the Pro or Elite plans only, it must first be enabled in the Administration system. Once enabled, teachers will be able to 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. The flags are coloured to make it easy for teachers to distinguish between students with no published marks, published marks, and pending drafts. Clicking on the links at the top of the markbook will take you to that specific assessment. 

Please note you are not able to give marks or feedback from this screen; it’s a quick snapshot to see the progress of multiple classes using the same course. 

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 useful. We identified two options we could add to improve the flexibility and the power of rubrics; including a mark for each capability, and allowing teachers to choose from a range of marks for a single rubric descriptor. These two new options can be used individually, or together so you can combine them in any way you choose.

Combining these new options with the self-reflection and self-assessment feature we introduced in the last release, will facilitate a deeper level of reflection for your students.

Mark per capability

If you choose to mark per capability, you will be creating a maximum set of points for each capability you are assessing. When you are grading, this will appear on the finished rubric as a number, percentage, or letter grade, depending on which mark type you selected above and can be specified independently from the descriptors you select. This means you can use teacher discretion to modify the mark for the capability, just as you can for a Due Work’s overall mark.

To use the mark per capability function, simply switch on the toggle, then select one or more indicators you are planning to assess within a capability. You can also mark rubrics per capability, even if the overall assessment mark is none.

By default, the maximum points for the capability are the sum of the highest descriptor values available in each indicator within that capability. You can change the maximum points for the capability before, after, or while entering the points for the descriptors. If you choose to change the maximum points available for the capability, the system will automatically scale the summation of the indicator marks as you grade.

Mark Range

If you choose to use a mark range, you will be able to choose from a range of points for each written descriptor when you are assessing the Due Work. To use the mark range, switch on the toggle, then enter the maximum points available for each descriptor that needs points.  

When you use this rubric to grade a student’s work, you will be able to use a drop-down box to choose any number between the upper limit of that descriptor, and the upper limit of the previous descriptor that has points attached. In this example, you can see that you can choose 3-6 in the 'High' range for the 'Coherence' indicator, and 5-6 in the 'High' range for the 'Development of Ideas' indicator.

The single page grade summary can now reveal selected assessment types, based on a chosen Work Type, which will be chosen by Superusers at your school. Keep this in mind when you're creating a Due Work.

We have also made it possible to hide certain work types from students and parents, meaning that you 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.