Release v23.1

Important Notes

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  • As part of the upgrade to 23.1, all quizzes will be migrated to the new system. As this may take up to 4 hours to complete, quizzes may not be accessible during this time. We recommend you consider quizzes offline (following your upgrade) until the following day. 
  • All quizzes except the student attempts will be migrated with the quiz migration. You can see the results of a quiz completed before the upgrade, but not the actual individual question responses. It is important to note that you must "complete all quizzes" before you schedule the upgrade, as there will be data loss if there are incomplete quizzes left outstanding. Again, "only complete quizzes will be migrated". Ideally schedule your upgrade over the Christmas break to ensure there are no active quizzes. 
  • You can now configure the start of the school year in the Admin system. It will default to January 1st, but if you are in the northern hemisphere, you can adjust it.
  • You can also filter the Staff Directory by role for all SIS, and you can review settings in the Admin system to ensure the correct staff appears in the list.
  • You can now set a sequence when you import classes at the beginning of the year. This impacts how classes appear on the summative report. So you can update your class import process accordingly to be able to control class sequencing on the summative report.
  • For on-premise customers, the virus scanner will only be available if your server has more than 20GB of RAM available. 

Links

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Related Documentation

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Minor Improvements to Schoolbox Features

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Admin

You can now:

  • add pronouns to users if they opt to share their preferred pronouns.
  • authenticate via the OpenID Connect protocol.
  • control the feedback displayed on each specific work type on the summative report builder.
  • control the summative report class sequence via the class import CSV.
  • configure the start of the school year. It will default to January 1st, which is the existing assumption.
  • see the NSW curriculum updated for English, Language, Maths, and Computing Technology.
  • configure staff that appear in the staff directory.
  • run virus scanning on all file uploads, It will prevent any file containing a virus from being uploaded.

 

Learning

You can now:

  • display student work and rubric side-by-side on large screens.
  • see draft feedback on the rubric markbook and the rubric report.
  • see the capability mark on the rubric report.
  • export to CSV draft feedback from the rubric markbook and rubric report.
  • filter the course outline component and show only certain types of activities.
  • import a new unit into multiple classes that have already imported the course.
  • see the ‘Due Work’ dashboard component updated to ‘Upcoming Learning Activities’ component.

 

Pastoral

  • You can now control pastoral visibility by ensuring the staff and students are in the same campus.
  • Split pastoral notifications into notifications for students you teach, and notifications for records you’ve been directly added into via a pastoral group.

 

Community

  • You now have student tabs added to the timetable calendar view for parents to quickly switch between students' timetables.
  • Rebuilt staff directory with an improved layout and quick search.
  • Improved support for copying and pasting content from Microsoft Word and Excel into the editor.
  • Added a full colour picker to the editor that allows you select any colour. 

Technical Upgrades

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  • Upgraded to PHP 8.2.
  • Added support for read-replica databases and load balancing.
  • Redirected all logging to centralised location.
  • Removed the scheduling daemon and updated the WebSocket daemon to support multiple instances.

Schema Changes

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  • Added column ‘created_at’, ‘updated_at’, ‘created_by’, ‘updated_by’, ‘deleted_by’ to ‘textBox’ table
  • Renamed column ‘deleted’ to ‘deleted_at’ on ‘textBox’ table
  • Created ‘courseTemplates’ table
  • Added column ‘deleted_at’ to ‘homepageTemplate’ table
  • Added column ‘template_id’ to ‘course_specification’ table
  • Added column ‘uuid’ to ‘curriculum_node’ table
  • Added column ‘learnosity_reference’, ‘learnosity_job_reference’, ‘learnosity_job_status’, ‘reading_time_duration’, ‘shuffle_items’, ‘prompts_mode’, ‘mark_type_id’, ‘grade_group_id’, ‘learnosity_source_assessment_id’, ‘learnosity_job_attempt_count’ to ‘assess’ table
  • Added column ‘learnosity_reference’, ‘norm_mark’, ‘comment’ to ‘assess_attempt’ table (the data is now structured in a different way in the 'mark' column) 
  • Deprecated table ‘curriculum_source’
  • Created table ‘quiz_feedback’
  • Added column ‘uuid’ to ‘course_specification’ table
  • Added column ‘uuid’ to ‘course_unit_specification’ table
  • Added column ‘match_campus’ to ‘pastoral_access’ table
  • Added column ‘match_campus’ to ‘pastoral_audience’ table
  • Created table ‘v_most_recent_rubric_mark’
  • Added column ‘identifier’ to ‘login_log’ table
  • Updated content structure of ‘options’ on ‘summative_report’ table
  • Added column ‘sequence’ to ‘folder’ table
  • Created table ‘search_index’
  • Added column ‘metadata’ to ‘sis_event’ table

Deprecated

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Removed Australian Curriculum Importer and replaced with the curriculum packages which are more reliable than the machine-readable endpoint.

Modernised Student Quizzes

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We’ve now rebuilt the quiz system on an all-new platform to ensure you can deliver the best online assessment in all areas of the curriculum.  

We bring to you all new question types including rich interactive images, maths and scientific formulas, graphing, and drawing. 
We’ve also simplified the student experience and they can now have reading time if required.

When marking a quiz, there’s an all-new horizontal marking experience that lets you output the final mark in any scheme.
 
As part of the quiz system upgrade for all schools that use Schoolbox’s LMS component, all your existing quizzes will be automatically migrated. 

Please note that this release doesn't allow you to export quizzes as XML. 

Improved Curriculum Documentation

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The Schoolbox course system is the ideal place to plan, review, and communicate what you intend to achieve from your subject curriculum.

We’ve ensured that you meet the range of different pedagogical approaches within your school, and can build multiple course templates. The templates will then form the blueprint to ensure teachers know what documentation is required when building the perfect course.  

Alongside this enhancement, we bring to you the new ‘Unit Planner’ view that gives a bird's eye view of each unit within the course. This will help teachers identify areas of the course that still need to be completed.

Advanced Search Options

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Our new advanced search interface introduces a range of new search filters to help you reduce the quantity of results and find more specific results for you.  
The new search filters include; date ranges, author, and type.  

In addition to the new search filters, we’ve added the ability for you to search new objects including learning activities and badges.

Lesson Plan Activities

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We’ve enhanced Lesson Plans with the ability to link one or more learning activities to a lesson plan. This allows teachers to identify tasks, quizzes and due work to be completed as part of the lesson.

You can establish these in the course and import them with the activities into the class. This guides your students to all the relevant activities as they progress through the lessons.

You can link activities to multiple lessons; so if you have a major assessment task, you can link multiple lessons to the same outcome.

To help teachers better present lessons to students, we’ve now included both a dashboard and class page component for displaying upcoming lessons. This ensures that students can view only the most recent lessons. You can also filter your course outline to only include the activities that you wish to display.

AI Assistant

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We’ve introduced the latest in generative AI technology from OpenAI to boost your productivity and creativity. You can now access an AI assistant while editing content using the rich text editor in Schoolbox.

You can use prompts to generate content or use our prebuilt commands to quickly improve your writing, simplify your language, or completely translate it into another language.

OLC '24 Release

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To align staff professional development with the latest version of Schoolbox, we have launched OLC ‘24 - the 2024 version of the Online Learning Course. This release includes updates to a number of projects, videos, and quizzes, as well as some brand new tasks that align with our new and exciting 23.0 and 23.1 Schoolbox features.


Visit the OLC '24 release notes, or contact your School Engagement Manager for more information.