We’re really excited to announce that the test release of Schoolbox v17.5 is now available!
This update includes new enhanced abilities to provide feedback to students and includes many nice-to-have features. As always, we would like to thank our active Schoolbox community for their ideas, which continually inspire our future product direction.
Release Candidate Walkthrough
To get an understanding of everything that’s included in this new release, please join our Webinar Walkthrough of v17.5, hosted by Director James Leckie, on October 12th, from 2:30 PM - 3:30 PM AEDT.
The full release notes are also available on Schoolbox Help.
The standout v17.5 features include:
Inline Annotations
Due to the upcoming retirement of the Crocodoc inline annotation system, we’ve worked with Kami to provide new enhanced abilities to give feedback to your students.
Along with the features you’ve come to love, such as the ability to annotate a student’s work and return it along with grades and comments, there are some additional new functionalities worth mentioning, including:
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The ability to insert images into student submissions
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The option to add audio comments inline
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A formula builder
LTI Embed Extension
The Learning Tool Interoperability (LTI) feature was introduced in the last update, but didn’t support the ability to embed third party content...until now that is!
This extension to the LTI standard allows you to use the ‘Embed Learning Tool’ component to browse a third party resource and embed it in your Schoolbox instance. We’ve included Khan, Quizlet, TEDEd, Vimeo and YouTube as standard resources in all installs.
Other changes and features
There are a lot more updates to get excited about with this new release, such as improvements to the ePortfolio blog and Resource Booking features, as well as a new Markbook column freeze, which maintains visibility of all the key information you need.
To find out more, make sure you read the full release notes, now available on Schoolbox Help!
Important things to know
Crocodoc Retirement
As part of this update and due to the pending retirement of Crocodoc, Schoolbox will be migrating all documents out of Crocodoc. This will increase disk usage as all files are migrated from the cloud and into your Schoolbox instance.
As Crocodoc will be shutting down on the 15th of December, we need to make sure that all of our schools upgrade to v17.5 before the end of the year, so that we can quickly (and painlessly) move you to our new system, Kami.
Usage Tracking
Schoolbox is committed to continually improve, which is why we want to ensure we’re making the right product improvements to the features you want to use. In order for our team to build our future roadmap and maximise your investment, we would like to start collecting data of your day-to-day usage.
As this is an opt-in feature, we would like to strongly encourage you to participate and help us build a better product. Don’t worry - your privacy will be completely protected as all data collected is anonymous, and no data will be shared outside of our company.
For further information, please check the Privacy Policy on our website.
Next Steps
Make sure you’ve registered for our v17.5 Release Candidate Walkthrough to get a better understanding of the new features and improvements.
To receive the v17.5 Release Candidate update
If you are currently running a version prior to v17, please open a ticket via our Support desk to get your dev server upgraded immediately - this will ensure that you're ready for the upgrade before the end of the year. Please also note that deploying this update to your dev server will require a reset of all data and content on your dev server to match the current data on your live server.
For all customers that are already running v17 in their live environment, we will automatically update dev environments to the v17.5 RC. This will not include a data sync unless specifically requested. As this is a smaller update, we do not require any data synchronisations.