Release v20.0

Important Notes

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  • SAML entity ID can be configured and should be configured if required.
  • Review the Grades Page and select which Grades Reports that you want to be visible. These can be configured in Admin > Settings > LMS Policy.
  • Before you remove any list items (Keeping Schoolbox Clean), ensure you have reviewed your UPS rules to check nothing is mapping to the items you wish to remove.

Links

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v20.0 Release Webinar

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Grades Reports

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With all the great feedback being captured in Schoolbox, we want to make sure it looks its best when presented to students and parents.  We’ve aimed to make information about a student’s attainment and how they are progressing as clear and easy to understand as possible.

With this release we have redesigned the Grades Page to better support the modern feedback that Schoolbox allows teachers to provide. The Grades Page now includes 3 new visualisations, providing insights into rubric data.


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The ‘Learning Levels’ tab, will highlight the achievements the student has for each assessment as they are completed.

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The ‘Capability Mark’ tab will show the grade for each capability awarded within each assessment. 

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The ‘Progression’ tab will show how a student has improved across the capabilities throughout the semester or year.

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In addition to this, we have enhanced the ‘Activities’ list to provide more contextual information about units and projects.  This will allow all users to clearly see when an assessment is part of a larger project or unit of work.

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Microsoft Teams Integration

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We have just completed the Microsoft Teams integration, and you can now create a Teams meeting in the CKEditor. First, you will need to head to Admin > Settings > 3rd Party Services, and toggle the 'Enable Microsoft Teams Meeting Integration' to 'ON'.

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Then, you can simply highlight text in the CKEditor in News, or a homepage component that uses the CKEditor, and browse to find 'Microsoft Teams Meetings'. Log in and you will be able to create a Teams Meeting!

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Pastoral Enhancements for NCCD

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Last year we started working with many schools on how to improve their information collection for NCCD reporting requirements. The tagging feature was identified as a useful tool for cataloguing information within the pastoral system, however it was not formal enough to meet this purpose.  With this release, tags can now be maintained by Superusers.

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The ability for teachers to create tags can be disabled, effectively locking them down to only the options provided by the school.

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We also now suggest possible tags to utilise to help guide teachers in the use of the best tags when they are creating a pastoral record.

We also recognised that reporting on a fixed date was not very helpful when you wanted to use a Pastoral Report over a period of time.  As a result, it is now possible to set relative date ranges on your Pastoral Reports, such as this year, this term or this week. This means that when reusing a report, it will always have the current information on it. 

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In the case of an NCCD report, there may be a need to submit your report to show adjustments and the ILP for your student. To address this, we now have a simple export feature that allows you to download a CSV of a Pastoral Report and the related pastoral records.

Priority News

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We have had several requests recently from schools asking for a News article to be pinned to the top of the News Feed, and for notifications to be sent, regardless of the notification settings of active users. To achieve this, we have created 'Priority News'. If you are a Superuser or have News Moderation permissions, you will be able to toggle a News Item to be 'Priority News'. This toggle will only appear if you are a Superuser or a News Moderator.

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Once published, this news will be set to the top of the News Feed for the selected audience and will show who the article was pinned by. It will remain at the top of the feed, unless another priority news item is created. Other news items will nest below the 'Priority News'.

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It is important to note, that if your dashboard feed is set to show a topic by default, and not to ALL, the pinned item will only show on the topic you have selected.

Resubmit Work

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With this update, we have added to the flexibility of due work. Schoolbox can now effectively handle student resubmissions through an improved workflow. If you would like a student to resubmit their work, either to develop an early draft or to resolve some issues, a teacher now just has to tick a box whilst they are grading. Ticking this box will change the state of the assessment to ‘Resubmit required’. The student will be notified, and they will now see a red exclamation mark next to the assessment. This will allow them to resubmit, regardless of the number of submissions set by the teacher when creating the due work.  If it is past the assessment late date, the teacher can grant an extension for the student.

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The resubmission will also show in the markbook, making it clear when a student has been asked to resubmit. 

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When a teacher requests a resubmission, a custom participation plan is automatically created, so that the student can resubmit, regardless of the status of the assessment for the remainder of the class. This resubmission window can be set by Superusers, in Admin > Settings > LMS Policy.

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Admin Area Settings Reconfiguration

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As the number of configurable options have grown within Schoolbox, so has the Administration Area and its complexity. We have undertaken work to:

  • Improve the titling of the settings to make their purpose as clear as possible.
  • Modify the wording of the tooltips to make their effects more understandable.
  • Reorganise the location of some config settings, so that they are in a tab that relates more to their purpose. Within a tab,  we have attempted to group configs with similar settings.

We appreciate it may be a little harder to find some settings at first, but we believe the usability will drastically improve in time. In the meantime, please do reach out if you can't find something that you need!

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CSV Exports

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At our recent user group forums, we had some great feedback about how we can assist schools to deliver continuous feedback and help reduce the burden of summative reporting.  To that end, in this release we have delivered two new CSV exports from both the Course and Rubric Markbooks. Using these teachers can now do the further analysis and calculations required to assist with their summative reporting. When coupled with the recent ‘Bulk Grade Import’ feature, you can now take grades, manipulate them and easily bring them back into your instance for sharing with parents and students.

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Along with the ability to download the Course Markbook, several of our schools have been asking for the ability to download the rubric markbook. As of this version, you will be able to download the Rubric Points or the Rubric Descriptors!

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Improved Markbook

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There have been many new markbooks added to Schoolbox over the last year, but we haven’t forgotten the importance of the Class Markbook. In this release, we now include the ability to see even more information about the state of assessments within the Class Markbook.  Teachers can easily switch to draft mode, to see marks. To save time, weightings and grade visibility can also be adjusted directly from the markbook.

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This all means a class teacher can now easily control exactly what students will see on their grades page via the markbook.

Keeping Schoolbox Clean

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Schoolbox contains many different lists to help classify and organise information.  These lists have been editable via the Admin -> Lists interface for quite some time.  With the latest release you will now be able to delete, resequence and modify some of these lists. The lists that you now have full control over include ‘Work Types’; ‘Campus’; ‘News Topics’; ‘School House’; ‘Residential House’; ‘Event Types’; and ‘Submission States’. For your piece of mind, we will store an audit history to identify who made changes and when the changes were made.

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Connecting With More Systems

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Last release, we introduced a new way of handling SIS connections via cloud APIs, and this opened the door to connecting with even more SIS products.  With this release, we are introducing our Kamar connector. This is connected via batch APIs that work across the internet, enabling the transfer of information on a regular basis to populate our data store with timetables, user details and class enrolment data.

Minor Changes

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  • Added comments, weightings and raw mark to assessment CSV export.
  • Added quizzes to assessment CSV export.
  • Can now limit the number of fixtures being displayed in fixture components.
  • Pastoral type mappings for Synergetic are now selected via a lookup to reduce errors.
  • Added a count of the total number of assessments requiring action on the pending assessments page.
  • Will automatically deregister notifications for a mobile device, if a different user logs in on the same device.
  • Added feature flags to allow for disabling Class and Rubric Markbooks if required.
  • Added option to export email addresses using a semicolon for Outlook users.
  • Added option to disable colours when rendering student grades.
  • TASS attendance links will now open in a new tab.
  • The My Classes and My Groups text in the side menu now links to a tile based page of these aspects.
  • Improved performance of the news archive.
  • Renamed the ESL flag to EAL.
  • Added new configuration variables to control the length of time that images and portrait photos are cached on the client browser.
  • Updated the video player to the latest version with a new look skin.
  • Updated "Course Criteria" component to "Rubric Capabilities and Indicators".
  • Prevented My Classes from showing teachers classes that they only interacted with in the current term. 

Schema Changes

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  • Renamed event_category to event_folder
    • Renamed event_category.category_id to event_folder.folder_id
  • Added resubmission_required to submission_return
  • Renamed SIS tables;
    • class -> sis_class
    • class_period -> sis_class_period
    • class_user -> sis_class_user
    • timetable_campus -> sis_timetable_campus
    • timetable_cycle -> sis_timetable_cycle
    • timetable_period -> ss_timetable_period
  • Added CRUD fields to; groups, house, lu_work_type, luCampus, luEventType, luResidentialHouse, newsTopic, submission_errors
    • sequence
    • created_at
    • updated_at
    • deleted_at
    • updated_by
  • Added field pastoral_report ‘uses_relative_date’ and ‘relative_date_string’