We've released Buzz's new Activity player today! It provides easier navigation, improved engagement, and greater visibility into progress and mastery.
This article covers the following:
Brand, personalize, and delight students with more course home page options
Give students easier, more engaging, and organic navigation
Provide a clean, useful activity workspace with autosave!
Let students search for any activity in the course by name
Give greater visibility into badges, mastery, and performance
The new player is enabled by default. Admins can disable the new player (which enables the old player) using a feature switch.
Activity Player highlights!
Brand, personalize, and delight students with more course home page options
When students land on a Course Home page, they should feel engaged and at ease. The page should be distinct from other Course Home pages, and give them a clear sense of everything they can do.
Our new Course Home and Activity Player does just this. Course authors set course theme colors and a large hero image to create course atmosphere. Students immediately see a daily agenda, their progress and badges, and upcoming activities in a workspace where everything serves a purpose.
Give students easier, more engaging, and organic navigation
The Course Home serves as an anchor for students, and they can return to it from any folder or activity with one click
Folders and activities expand to fill the screen. At the bottom of each are Previous activity and Next activity buttons. When students use these navigations, slide animations show students which way they're moving in the course. A breadcrumb path is also provided at the top of the page to keep students oriented.
Provide a clean, useful activity workspace with autosave!
Completing activities in the new Activity Player is a vastly improved experience for students. The fullscreen view gives them an easy workspace to use. Every button is placed intuitively, with rollover descriptions. Perhaps most exciting of all, is the autosave feature! No more losing work to accidental navigation or letting the app timeout.
This is a clean, organic experience that stays out of the student's way while helping them complete their work.
Let students search for any activity in the course by name
Students can now search for any activity in the course by name! This can save lots of time scrolling through activities and opening and closing folders. To return to the unfiltered Activity list, simply clear the search field.
Give greater visibility into badges, mastery, and performance
Right at the top of the Course Home, students get an at-a-glance progress check, class grade/percentage, a quick link to the Grades tool, and the ability to hide progress data quickly for privacy. All earned badges are posted right below, so mastery tracking is front-and-center to the student experience.
Activity Player overview
Here's a quick rundown of what students get with the new player:
- More visually appealing and approachable fullscreen user experience. Not only have we updated the overall look and feel, but teachers can choose theme colors, course card avatar, and a course hero image to further customize their course experience.
- At-a-glance progress check, a quick link to the Grades tool, and the ability to hide progress data quickly for privacy.
- Agenda information front-and-center with easy navigation to other days.
- Current projects overview, including progress data.
- The Activities, To-do list, and Course links selectors are easier to find and use.
On the Activities tab, students can:
- See an overview of the course.
- Open activities and folders, complete activities, and return to the Course Home. These navigations include transition animations that give students additional indicators about where they've navigated to, and how to get back.
- Search for activities and folders by title!
When students open an activity, they can:
- See which folder(s) the activity is in, and navigate to those folders; use the arrows to the left to navigate to the previous and next activity.
- Jump to any of the cards included in the activity.
- Complete and submit the activity using the new workspace with autosave and View grade details.
- Navigate to the previous or next activity in the course.
- Close the activity to return to the Activity player.
Impacts of new Activity Player for teachers
The Activities tool will be replaced by the new Activity Player where teachers can:
- Review, create, and edit daily Agendas.
- Filter the results by Group.
- Review Current projects.
- Review and visit Course Links.
- Filter the results by period.
- Review and edit activities and folders.
