October 2012
Schoolbox brought to you by Alaress
Introduction
This document contains the detail regarding the latest release of Schoolbox in October 2012. The focus of this release has been to improve the visual appearance with a particular focus on the learning management area of Schoolbox.
Apart from improved visuals we have also added the following major features;
- The due work grading system has been extended to include rubrics, not submitted, absent and not graded
- All homepages now have inbuilt statistics to display traffic information
- Teachers can now mark Synergetic attendance directly from Schoolbox
- All due work is now archived across multiple years
Major Features
Grading students via a rubric
Teachers can now create criteria based assessment for each class. The criteria are defined at a class level and when creating new due work you may utilise the new grade type rubric and then select the criteria you wish to grade against. Each criteria will need to have an appropriate scale defined. This can be either a predefined scale or a custom scale created by the teacher. For more information read the guide how to use rubrics.
Homepage Statistics
A popular request from our users has been more information on who is visiting their pages and when. Now you can find out your recent visitors, how much traffic you have received and the most popular files and links.
Synergetic Attendances
As of 12.5 all customers that have Synergetic and are utilising their attendance system can mark their roll directly in Schoolbox. You can currently only mark the current days attendance. This feature must be enabled before it is accessible.
Due Work Archive
From this point forward staff submission boxes, grades and student due work will no longer be cleared out at the end of the year. All this information will be stored and archived within the system. This will allow students, parents and teachers to review past work and grades across a student's entire life at the school.
Minor Updates
Core System
- Improved embedding support for iframes, you can now embed the following features;
- Google Docs / Spreadsheets / Forms / Presentations
- Youtube
- Vimeo
- Slideshare
- Glogster
- Wikieducator
- Google Maps
- Tiki-Toki Timelines
- Improved embedding of video should insure better compatibility and the ability to control autoplay.
- My Links are now editable inline
- New user portrait handling system with improved caching
- Improved news layout to include a listing page, tabbed navigation and images
- News posts can now have an image optionally attached, image is visible on dashboard
- Added colour palette to timetable so subjects are linked by colour
- My Files and WebDav client are now separate tabs. WebDav feature is now called Network Drives. You can now maintain both areas, My Files is aligned for ePortfolio storage space. Network Drives allows users to access their network storage spaces via WebDav.
- Added support for Mathematical Formulas to entire system. To create formulas enclose latex in double $ signs. For example $$
Admin System
- Dashboard components can now have individual configurations per component instance
- Homepage templates can now be created, removed and edited
- Username added to user report
- Activity reports now sorted by date descending
- Added filter by date range to reports
- Assuming another user is now logged
- Added new config option to control password reveal (must be set by Alaress)
- Added new config option to control display of subjects on student profiles. Option to allow hiding subjects that are not in Schoolbox
Welcome Dashboard
- New textbox component, can include content from any homepage (useful for buttons or important school notices
- Renamed Activity to What’s New
- Greeting string can be now configured
- Limit the number of news items displayed
- Limit the amount of items in the homepage activity feed
- RSS component can have different feed locations for each user group
- Due Work and Timetable links added to Child Subjects
- Activity feed now contains icons and portraits to indicate the activity and person involved
Calendar
- Calendar system rewritten to allow connection to external live data sources like iCal, Outlook Web Services or Sharepoint
- Recurring and publish date have been moved into advanced options
- End date is now required when entering a recurring event
- Improved rendering of calendar and detail box
- Filter settings are remembered when moving around Schoolbox, setting filters on the week view will also be shown on the month view
- Calendar bulk add now supports recurring events via vCal import
- New page to list events you are attending and events you have created and who is attending
- Can now export event attendance list in CSV format
Homepages
- New component ‘Class List’ shows all students in class on homepage
- New component ‘Countdown’ creates a countdown timer to a specified date and time
- Twitter component now renders links as clickable
- The Image Carousel, Image gallery, Wiki, Blog, Forum and News can now all be link to other pages.
- You can now alter the heading text for Blog, News, Forum, Image Carousel, Image Gallery
- A publish date has been added to subject news (under advanced options)
- Portraits added to blog posts and comments, forum posts and news posts
- Email all parents from class list
- Select option to select which students to send emails to from class list
- Added new grid layout to Members, Managers, Class List and Teachers to show portraits in a grid layout
- Improved formatting of blog, removed javascript hiding of comments and limit on comments
- Wiki component now has a compact mode
Online Assessments / Surveys
- Added name of submitter when reviewing responses
- You can now set the number of resits allowed on an assessment
- Time field for online test is now freely enterable, rather than a drop down
- Surveys can now be conducted anonymously
- Added ability to be notified by email when survey is completed
Submissions
- The staff due work detail page can now be used to mark, comment and return work directly from the one page. Work can be returned to all students in one batch upload
- Comment field has been increased to 64,000 characters
- Grade average has been added to class mark sheet
- Grade average has been added to student due work page
- New layout for student due work. Upcoming work shows both assessments and submission in one feed with the most recent (over)due at the top
- New options when marking include ‘Absent’, ‘Not submitted’, ‘Not applicable’, these are available on all mark types.
- Due work can now send email notifications reminder to students. These are optionally controlled by the teacher when creating the due work. The emails are sent 1 day before and 1 hour after the due date.
Eportfolio
- Added ability to upload files from WSYWIG editor, files will automatically be published
- Added ability to see and control published status when modifying files
Update 12.5.1
New Features
- SB-1641 - Add switch site control between desktop site and mobile site
Bug Fixes
- SB-1652 - Timetable page shows template errors in some school's skins
- SB-1679 - API key config added twice to database
- SB-1659 - Unable to view images of type pjpeg
- SB-1675 - Schoolbox class lists errors because get parents function not implemented for all interfaces
- SB-1687 - Returned work to students was showing template errors
- SB-1699 - After upgrade some news topics no longer contain news items
- SB-1700 - Certain homepages were showing SQL errors if content was remotely included
- SB-1691 - Files component can not sort by date
- SB-1692 - Dashboard parent module, child photos do not display
- SB-1678 - Class lists component not correctly deployed on any live versions
- SB-1690 - Broken feature image shows up when adding news
- SB-1636 - Remove the placeholder text 'No events' on calendar
- SB-1601 - Mobile - Failed login is silent and provides no feedback
- SB-1640 - Cannot authenticate to mobile via ldap
- SB-1654 - Shore News has template errors
- SB-1668 - Backup-cifs script not reporting gzip or permission denied errors
- SB-1647 - Mobile Calendar - Events are not shown in time order
- SB-1646 - Mobile Calendar - event dots fill date box when there are too many events
- SB-1394 - The drop-down menu under the Folders on mobile, does not reset to show the correct symbol for expansion after first use
- SB-1655 - Dashboard limit news option not working
- SB-1610 - Settings tab doesn't correctly align
- SB-1645 - Pressing calendar back and next too rapidly ends in a blank screen on mobile
- SB-1682 - Tarball based upgrades of 12.5.0 failed to set the correct config tab for 3rd Party Services
- SB-1297 - Selecting recent grades on mobile from a subject in the nav renders a blank page
- SB-1671 - Homepage file component alternate source browser has a font-height of 1px
- SB-1683 - Some school directory pages have template errors
- SB-1651 - Blog archive broken when alternative source selected
- SB-1689 - Homepage feed links not working for news items
- SB-1638 - Link when selecting child in due work as parent results in broken page
- SB-1711 - When adding a user via admin system the admin tab bar fails to display
- SB-1681 - Students are unable to view rubrics for assessment.
Update 12.5.2
Admin
- SB-1723 - Hidden homepage components in admin list not working
- SB-1778 - SQL slow query for Group Statistics
- SB-1774 - Activity Log SQL queries running very slowly
- SB-1777 - Add support for portfolio images to TASS connector
- SB-1677 - Rename 'Category' tab to 'Folders' in admin system
Core
- SB-1773 - School news SQL queries have been optimised to increase speed
- SB-1765 - ReCaptcha not showing under HTTPS as reporting as insecure content
- SB-1707 - My Files tab showing for parents
- SB-1759 - Schoolbox error when connecting to TASS for class list
- SB-1775 - WebDav requires no permissions
- SB-1758 - Attendance 'Save All' button alignment
- SB-1726 - Some tables do not accept UTF8 characters
- SB-1710 - LDAP search based on objectClass=user is not used on all LDAP servers
- SB-1368 - Webmail tab to appear only when local email ticked
- SB-1752 - Calendar live link with Outlook
- SB-1779 - Publish date defaults to 1970 if not specified in bulk upload
CMS
- SB-1744 - File description does not respect non-latin encoding when using the multi-file upload tool (Hebrew named files)
- SB-1743 - Template block code shows instead of resource block Upload link to Multiple Locations
Homepages
- SB-1715 - Embedded images appear smaller than specified due to max-height css issue
- SB-1422 - Feature Suggestion: Add ability to embed Thinglink images
- SB-1792 - Homepage Folder component does not respect the limit option
- SB-1653 - Text overlapping image on homepage
- SB-1783 - Descending order not functional on Files Module
- SB-1760 - Class Teachers Homepage Component comes up initially empty when added to a page
- SB-1727 - TinyMCE strips classes from anchor tags
- SB-1697 - Textbox does not display content by default when included from template
- SB-1605 - Clickview video embed not working for new clickview web version (TSK17128)
- SB-1742 - Image Gallery component "Full Gallery" button link not updated to reflect Alternate Source
- SB-1648 - Issue selecting alternative source from blog component
Mobile
- SB-1724 - Webmail link on Mobile version for schools with mobile webmail
- SB-1717 - Mobile incorrectly attempts to connect to Synergetic
- SB-1781 - Create a logs cache directory with config option
- SB-1738 - Mobile edition to show schoolbox version number in settings->about
- SB-1730 - Template Error: subst: unable to load mobile_switch. appearing in Asset Manager
- SB-1729 - Wenona Skin login page has mobile_switch template error
- SB-1721 - Allow 'Switch to desktop version' before log-in
- SB-1739 - Mobile Error page needs to be user friendly
Assessment
- SB-1780 - Unable to Import Online Assessment
- SB-1696 - Teachers unable to download returned submissions they returned
- SB-1761 - Grade average in submission is incorrect due to historical data
- SB-1751 - If no DueWork exists in the current semester, the template tokens are displayed
- SB-1725 - Notify fields in submission box are not saved and do not work
- SB-1694 - When non teacher posts work, student submission history shows teacher posted, not actual person
- SB-1769 - Due Work date field will accept date numbers beyond possible limit
Custom
- SB-1763 - JPC - WebMail tabs appearing for a parent login
- SB-1762 - MGGS - Sync Script not running correctly causing mismatched data
- SB-1716 - Change all references of "House" to "Clan" for Seymour's Skin
- SB-1768 - Cathedral - General skin tidy up
- SB-1782 - STK - Add parents forgotten password templates and links
- SB-1787 - Balcombe Mobile - logo is askew
- SB-1788 - Change My Learning to My BGS in Balcombe skin
Update 12.5.3
Build System
- SB-1805 - Not all schools use SSO and as such do not require the kerberos dependencies
Core
- SB-1822 - Image resize function is not handling images of type image/x-png (unique to IE8)
- SB-1803 - Parent email sync on login is broken and is no longer relevant
- SB-1838 - User table has field portrait_updated_at which is not required
- SB-1839 - When a new portrait is available in synergetic, it is downloaded but the resized versions are not removed
- SB-1850 - CategoryBulkAdd template doesn't link up due to inconsistent names
Admin
- SB-1823 - Dashboard components that are not relevant showing up on all installs
External DB
- SB-1808 - Synergetic password API sync not functioning
- SB-1794 - Update parent report to have search functions
Calendar
- SB-1829 - Calendar export fails with unknown object error
Submissions
- SB-1847 - Submissions showing multiple times across students in submission box
Mobile
- SB-1811 - Error when timetable does not exist
- SB-1820 - Error when timetable definition does not exist
- SB-1841 - Error when user does not have external db id
- SB-1819 - Error displaying calendar in some cases
- SB-1818 - Error switching between desktop and mobile and pressing the back button
- SB-1830 - Error unroutable request
- SB-1844 - Error bad URLs
- SB-1834 - Mobile showing different timetable day to desktop edition
Boarder Leave
- SB-1831 - PDO Error when Creating Leave Requests
Custom
- SB-1722 - STK News Tab on dashboard simplified
- SB-1840 - BGS Logo missing a pixel at bottom
- SB-1826 - BGS Remove colours tab from homepages customisation
- SB-1825 - BGS Webmail tab not showing
- SB-1836 - MGS Student Birthdays showing for all users
- SB-1802 - MGS Campus Calendar not showing Dates
- SB-1817 - MGGS My ePortfolio tab is cutoff under IE9
- SB-1853 - MGGS Cannot Search by clicking magnifying glass
- SB-1813 - Wenona added back attendance link on homepage class
Update 12.5.4
Core
- SB-1905 - Parent Report - Ensure Parents can only access search results in their childrens years
- SB-1904 - Parent Report does not show unicode characters correctly
- SB-1900 - Staff Report does not display clearly
- SB-1902 - Staff Report made only accessible to staff
- SB-1879 - Show All Subjects on Profile blocking parents from viewing Students Subjects on students profile page
- SB-1907 - BCC email headers are being passed on by Exchange
- SB-1880 - Parents are unable to see their student photos
- SB-1816 - Cannot edit My Links menu in IE8
- SB-1924 - Edumate connector added
Admin
- SB-1887 - Hide Teacher Photo description is incorrect
- SB-1848 - Calendar Bulk Upload Description has incorrect date format
- SB-1791 - Calendar Bulk Upload allows events without a type
- SB-1936 - Show Modify User button in Search Directory Listing
- SB-1892 - Add LDAP Filter Config to enable LDAP search restriction (Kings)
Submissions
- SB-1868 - Exporting student results to spreadsheet failing
- SB-1891 - Remove students appears to have issues deleting submissionHistory
- SB-1909 - Online Assessments - Marks displayed and marked incorrectly during review
- SB-1866 - After teacher deletes submission box, student can still see submission box
- SB-1884 - Online Assessments markbox options unreadable in IE8
- SB-1877 - Placeholder appears when viewing Due Work results with no students
- SB-1867 - Updating semester on submission page reverts back to current semester every time
- SB-1872 - Due work component is showing last years work
- SB-1843 - Cannot mark rubrics in IE8
- SB-1852 - Unable to download student submissions in Firefox
Homepages
- SB-1871 - Unable to select uploaded image using image component
- SB-1893 - Unable to choose specific homepage colour in IE8
- SB-1896 - Groups sometimes do not appear in side navigation
- SB-1873 - Blog/News component does not display bullet points
- SB-1883 - Countdowns not working for students
- SB-1810 - Homepages sometimes do not show category code, even though multiple codes exist
Calendar
- SB-1828 - In IE the repeat option does not show when clicking advanced options on the event form
- SB-1827 - Repeat until option on calendar form is not consistent colour
CMS
- SB-1903 - Unable to select a document from My Files to load into Files Module
- SB-1793 - PNG transparencies are not maintained when resizing images with new image library
Mobile
- SB-1834 - Mobile showing different timetable day to desktop edition
ePortfolio
- SB-1864 - Downloading ePortfolios downloads a corrupted zip file on certain sites
Boarder Leave
- SB-1922 - Show Boarder Leave History button on student search results
Custom
- SB-1890 - Cathedral - Update Dashboard news to reflect name changes
- SB-1899 - Cathedral - Changes to Tuckshop SSO
- SB-1869 - Moriah - Sync removing groups from staff members who are parents
- SB-1910 - Moriah - Preschool group not being add in parent sync
- SB-1882 - STM - Sync Script updating Staff account instead of Parent account
- SB-1865 - STM - Parent sync does not add all parents
- SB-1894 - STK - Password policy Change
- SB-1895 - STK - Change the title for News Component
- SB-1933 - JPC - Top navigation wraps poorly covering search box on iPad
- SB-1881 - MGGS - Morris Hall Library Page not showing headers
- SB-1821 - Donvale - Layout of select alternative source is broken
- SB-1914 - Bialik - Remove "Email All Parents" from class pages
Update 12.5.5
Core
- SB-1749 - Update Twitter API to use v1.1
- SB-1904 - Parent Directory does not show unicode characters correctly
- SB-1915 - Parent Directory does not have consistant column widths
- SB-1985 - Links to remote sites do not work when starting with same domain as the server
- SB-1950 - Parents cannot view individual childs timetables
Admin
- SB-2023 - Add config option to disable medical and special information on class lists
- SB-2057 - Add site specific twitter api keys
- SB-2025 - Add disable email all parents config option
- SB-1656 - Add config option to disable display of parent emails to students
External DB
- SB-2022 - Add new Synergetic student status codes to allowed list
- SB-2035 - Fix Denbigh import for non-ASCII characters in names
Submissions
- SB-1911 - Online Assessments shows initial start date of 1970
- SB-1912 - Class mark sheet not showing correctly on small screens
- SB-2012 - IE8 - Viewing rubrics results on Submission History page does not show results or graph
- SB-2060 - Marks no longer show after returning work
Homepages
- SB-1703 - Unable to select all student in classlist using Firefox
- SB-1925 - Error shown when Class Management component first added
- SB-1934 - Bullet points from TinyMCE entries do not appear in page components
- SB-2055 - Twitter component is incorrectly restricted to 1 per homepage
- SB-1966 - News should expire the next day if today is selected
Calendar
- SB-1801 - Calendar import encoding characters incorrectly
- SB-2045 - Calendar upload reaching max memory before upload completes
CMS
- SB-1987 - Ensure search page and student directory buttons are the same
- SB-1942 - Webdav Network Drives not working with Novell Netstorage
Mobile
- SB-1842 - Mobile not showing login page correctly on session expiry
- SB-2018 - Timetable in mobile does not match desktop information
- SB-1952 - Switch to mobile link shows login page even if already logged in
Boarder Leave
- SB-1995 - House report columns not all sorting correctly
- SB-1845 - House report print button does not bring up print dialog box
Custom
- SB-1990 - BGS - Add support for multi-campus class codes
- SB-2008 - BGS - Enable parent forgotten passwords
- SB-1948 - BGS - Fix javascript errors caused by disabling homepage colours
- SB-2021 - BGS - Update sync to match email policy
- SB-2031 - BGS - Uploaded files hidden by default
- SB-1835 - Bialik - Fix sync of Students to the correct groups
- SB-1899 - Cathedral - Tuckshop SSO
- SB-1967 - JPC - Show user profile image in top menu
- SB-1999 - Kings - New logo
- SB-2013 - MGS - Remove all student medical notes
- SB-2014 - MGS - Update duties categories
- SB-1955 - Moriah - Sync does not allow students to move groups
- SB-1957 - Seymour - Enable network drive menu tab
- SB-1916 - SMGS - Sync not to change existing user campus settings
- SB-1956 - TIGS - Authenticate parents against Edumate
- SB-1988 - TIGS - Unable to vertical scroll in IE8
- SB-2037 - Winifred - Allow all top menu items to show on small screens
- SB-2036 - Winifred - Top menu does not correctly align right
Update 12.5.6
Core
- SB-2096 - Add support foreign language characters into emails
- SB-2071 - My Groups list showing incorrect groups when combined with other permissions
- SB-2152 - Not all backup system notifications are being sent to the logfile
- SB-2140 - Backup System susceptible to network error with large backups
- SB-2108 - Timetable should be restricted to timetableGroup in Synergetic connector
- SB-2070 - Link to users awaiting authorisation on modify group is incorrect
- SB-2015 - Network Drive incorrectly wrapping on page resize
- SB-1943 - News expiry date doesn't show correct day
- SB-2185 - Incorrect current day highlighting on timetables
Admin
- SB-2113 - Edumate connection indicator on admin dashboard does not work
- SB-2061 - Unable to scroll to see entire side menu when minimal body content in IE8
Submissions
- SB-2059 - Recent activity links were pointing to the wrong location in some cases
- SB-1992 - Submission box notifications not being sent to all students
- SB-2001 - Class mark sheet incorrectly aligning assessment titles with marks
Online Assessments
- SB-2160 - Template Error appearing on Assessment Results for cloze exercises
Homepages
- SB-2011 - Homepage files component incorrectly sets and shows the default sort order
- SB-1997 - Files component does not display files with invalid mime types
- SB-2112 - Unable to download items from Dropbox in IE8
- SB-1706 - Youtube videos only display after refresh when embedded
Survey
- SB-2115 - Add External ID back into survey export
- SB-2117 - Error when exporting survey, empty sections cause export to die
Modules
- SB-1885 - Change parent report to show home address or postal address
Mobile
- SB-2111 - Mobile calendar does not have the month April, but has May twice
Custom
- SB-2114 - Kings - Denbigh class lists not sorted in alphabetical order by surname
- SB-2102 - Kings - Denbigh connector updated to display emergency information from correct fields and hide separated parents information
- SB-2107 - Bialik - Update forgotten password email template and login Page wording
- SB-2103 - Seymour - Removed homepage colours
- SB-2101 - Moriah - Altered default campus for staff in sync process
- SB-2062 - TIGS - Changes to heading colours and height
- SB-2118 - TIGS - Added portrait photo into header
- SB-2159 - Toorak - Initial Toorak skin
- SB-2162 - MGS - sync script not updating parents accounts