Table of Contents
Highlights
Activities
Landing Page Content
Teachers can now add Course Links in their Landing Page Content. This allows the teacher to quickly link to an existing activity and allow students to discover it in one-click.
Objectives
When viewing an activity with objectives, the user can now select the Objectives button from the toolbar to view the aligned objectives. Understanding that activities align to objectives can help students perform better and better understand the purpose of a given activity.
Performance
Activity Grader
Graders can now Batch Update multiple student grades for an activity at once. Depending upon the activity settings, the grader can:
- Auto-fill Scores
- Allow Retry
- Excuse
These actions can target students that meet various conditions. For example, you may Auto-fill Scores for students that have unscored, unsubmitted, unsubmitted and unscored, or all entries. Each action has different conditions to meet various use-cases. This feature replaces the previous Autofill tool, which was used for only updating scores.
Learn more
Other Updates
Activities
Assessment
Custom questions now load in their own iframe, allowing for better security and preventing the custom question from interfering with the rest of the application.
Custom Activity
When a student selects "Save and Close" when working on a SCO activity, the activity now shows as ended. Once the student continues the activity, it loads the SCO where the student was when it was saved.
Admins
Apple touch icons
Admins can now specify a touch icon to be used when a user saves their Buzz website to their homescreen. This only applies to Apple iOS devices.
Learn more
Prohibited file types
Admins can now specify file types that cannot be uploaded to a student dropbox, discussion board, and teacher feedback.
Clipboard
Style
The style of the Clipboard has been updated to match some other tools and to use more screen space.
General
Main Menu
When the Main Menu is expanded, the user can select the logo to collapse the menu.
People
Add Students
If multiple student roles exist when adding a student to a course, the teacher is now able to choose which role to assign to the student.
Learn more
Performance
Activity
A description was added to better explain how time spent totals are calculated. Total times displayed next to a date indicate the amount of time spent on activities that were started on the said date but not necessarily ended on the date.
Grade Details
When viewing Grade Details, if the activity's category is set to display points, students are now able to see the points possible for the activity.
Grade Editor
We have improved how teachers grade assessments and essay questions. The grader can now tab from an essay score input to the next without having to tab through each essay response. Fewer tabs, quicker grading.
Also, graders can now click on the "points possible" value for an individual question to grant full credit for the response.
These features were suggested in the Agilix Help Center.
Gradebook
Teachers can now select to display the enrollment's Start and/or End date in the Visible Columns.
This feature was suggested in the Agilix Help Center.
Grades
The Grades page for displaying a student's scores has been improved to load much faster for both teachers and students. This improvement is most noticeable with Grades pages displaying large amounts of data. In some test cases, a Grades page that took 10-15 seconds to load now loads in less than 1 second.
Reports
Date format
To improve usability, all downloaded dates from any report are now formated more in a more user-friendly way (e.g., 1/7/16 12:48 PM). This new format can be easily sorted, filtered, and included in formulas in popular spreadsheet software. Additionally, the downloaded date is adjusted to the user's timezone according to their computer.
Page title
In the Reports tool for teachers, the heading of the tool now has a page title. We have also removed the word "Reports" from each individual section to reduce redundancy.
User Activity
Admins can now download logout data for a user. Previously, they could only download login data. This enhancement allows for better analysis of how much time a user has spent logged into the Buzz application.
Also, the User Activity reports now has a "Learn more" link pointing to additional documentation about the tool.
Learn more
Fixed Issues
Activities
- Administrators with student enrollments were not blocked from viewing activities that have a restriction for their student enrollment.
- Assessments with an ordering question could have caused the assessment to not submit properly.
- Students could submit a blank response to a math questions where the answer was equivalent to 0 and receive full credit for the question.
- Teachers could copy activities through the student-option "Choose an activity," causing empty folders or duplicate activities to be created.
- The "Mark this Activity Complete" button would display for SCO activities.
- When a teacher clicks save when taking an assessment, an error would be displayed. Note: Even though the error does not display, teacher submissions to activities are not recorded.
Admins
- Replacement variables (e.g., token) for menu entries in the Main Menu that open in a new tab would not work.
Clipboard
- The "To:" field would not update properly when the user would change the selected course.
- The available students in the Student List were not refreshed when the user changed the selected course.
- The search results dropdown could be partially covered by the action (e.g., Activities, Badges) window.
Communication
- When a teacher would edit an announcement, the new version would not display until refreshed.
Curriculum Map
- Buttons in the settings panel on the right would sometimes need to be clicked multiple times before they would function properly.
Digital Library
- Users could not search or browser for content from the Khan Academy if the user was using the 'https' protocol.
General
- Menu entries in the Main Menu that open in a new tab could have the external link icon covered by scrollbars.
- The Main Menu would overlap a Domain Notification.
- Users could not create hyperlinks for selected text in the rich text editor.
People
- The Score and Progress filters would not work on touch devices.
Performance
- Under some conditions, multiple scrollbars would appear in the Activity Grader's student list.
Comments (3)
Do you recommend that Admins prohibit the uploading of filetypes of .exe ????
The feature was described under this text..."Admins can now specify file types that cannot be uploaded to a student dropbox, discussion board, and teacher feedback."
Hey Aileen, it totally depends upon your needs and implementation. If your school has multiple programming courses then it may very well be needed to attach .exe files. If you see abuse with the feature, you may very well want to add it as a prohibited file.