Release v20.2

Important Notes

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  • Changes to the way the year levels are applied to users may require manual updates to UPS rules. Please check year level mappings in the UPS are set up correctly.
  • The position tokens on staff UPS rules have been changed.  Please update your rules to use either meta.position.description or meta.position.code.  This change was made to clearly distinguish between position codes and full title strings.
  • Enabling cohort level comparison on the grades page will exclude ‘class’ based assessments from the assessment graph. Only course assessments will be visible.
  • This release requires PHP 7.4 to run. The upgrade to your server will occur during your scheduled release upgrade. This should improve overall performance by around 5-10%.

We are replacing FreeTDS driver with the Microsoft SQL driver for all MSSQL server connections (Synergetic, TASS). This will unlock more modern connection capabilities, including encrypted connections.

To book your upgrade, please schedule in your time on our upgrade calendar.

Links

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Webinar

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Click HERE to access a summary of the walkthrough via timecode.

Goals and Achievements

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Schoolbox has long recognised student achievement via assessment results, but when looking more closely at achievement across the entire school and in particular primary years, we found that assessments alone were not delivering the types of recognition that we know students deserve.  

We wanted to build a system that allowed students to develop their own unique learning journey, engaging in a growth mindset. By setting goals, students can be engaged with their own learning and let teachers know where they think they need support. We’ve obviously also given the facility for teachers to set these goals!

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As a student demonstrates their abilities in class or via assessments, goals can be converted into achievements. You can track the skills, knowledge and approaches to learning that students display throughout the year. To ensure we can report and identify these achievements, you can link them to the curriculum. This will enable Schoolbox to provide alternative methods to report on a student's learning outcomes beyond traditional assessment reporting.

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Of course, achievements in any school goes well beyond academics.  Many schools have award programs including colours, pastoral behaviours, leadership positions, community engagement and sporting achievements. The platform has been designed to showcase all of your student achievements and share them with staff and parents alike.

Learning Moments

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As a student undertakes their journey through school, there are key moments where they will demonstrate their learning, through work samples or participation in an activity.  Each student will have their own journey, and keeping this evidence collated will create a richer picture of the student's school experience.  Beginning with the early years, and continuing until they complete their learning journey, Schoolbox now offers the ability to capture, publish and share learning with students, parents and teachers. 

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To help capture learning moments, teachers can capture a single piece of evidence and share it across multiple students in the class, offering an easy way to showcase class activities or projects. Students can obviously be empowered to capture their own moments using the new ‘Student Toolkit’ dashboard component.

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The entire experience has been optimised to work on mobile devices, making capturing of learning moments simple and fast.

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Ultimately, these moments will be woven together with badges, and current Schoolbox assessment features, to create a rich report on a student's journey. To aid this, we also allow learning moments to be tagged against the curriculum. In the future, this will allow us to better filter and report the student's learning journey.

For more information, please see our full guide.

Blind Assessment Mode

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When conducting assessments, you often want to minimise any form of bias during the process. The new blind assessment mode allows you to view and grade assessments without the identity of the student being revealed.  You can do this with any assessment, with all the usual assessment feedback tools available.

Transition Terms

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Although it has now almost become standard practice for students to commence their final years a term early, it has remained a struggle for systems to manage. Schoolbox now allows for certain classes to be assigned a specialised ‘transition’ term.  This will alter the markbook, grades page and other term based views so that assessments are collated together, even if they don’t fit into the standard academic period that schools work within. These specialised transition terms will only be available to classes that have been assigned to the term, so it will have no impact on the classes following the traditional academic periods.

TASS API

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We are pleased to announce we are now Beta testing the TASS api. The API is fully cloud compatible, enabling both Schoolbox and TASS to run in the cloud. With all the features of the existing connector, there are many more features planned for the future.

Minor Features

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  • Added visibility control to project assessment grades
  • Display custom participation flag to teachers on the students' grades page
  • Linked users to the system year levels, rather than using a text string
  • Year levels can now be manually sorted to ensure the proper sequence
  • Allowed multiple files to be attached to tasks via drag and drop
  • Added a ‘Select all’ option when modifying individual student participation
  • Increased precision of grade normalised and lower bound values to two decimal places
  • Added a default due time configuration 
  • Added an ‘Email parents’ button to student profile screen
  • Added cohort level box and whiskers graph to allow for cohort grade comparison
  • Added ability to create image galleries and attach files to news posts
  • Updated pastoral comments to the rich text editor, allowing embedding and linking of documents
  • Permitted pastoral confidential comments to be added, without confidential notes being present

Last Minute Changes

  • Added pie chart to news statistics to indicate percentage of audience who has read the article
  • Placed position titles into meta.postion.description and added meta.position.code to provide position codes in UPS
  • Added custom UPS tokens for use when using custom UPS queries
  • Kamar API connector updated to latest version
  • New GeoSnapShot component for integrating event photo galleries into dashboards
  • Class / Folder Import CSV feature now supports colours and images to be attached to folders
  • New feature flags for ePortfolio, Staff Directory and Parent Directory

Schema Changes

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  • Added foreign key to ‘year’ field on ‘user’ table to ‘lu_year_level’
  • Added new table ‘task_file’ links tasks to storage table
  • Added new table ‘term_year_level’ to link ‘term’ to ‘lu_year_level’
  • Altered table ‘submission_grade’ fields ‘lower_bound’ and ‘raw_grade’ from integer to decimal