On August 6, 2020, the following changes to Buzz will occur. Please note that we previously announced that some of these changes would occur on June 25, 2020, but to help schools that were still in session, we have postponed this date to August 6. We strongly encourage any school to enable these features during a session break prior to August 6.
New Activity Player in, old Activity Player out
As announced a year ago, the old Activity Player is being retired and will no longer be available on August 6. The new Activity Player has been used by more than half of all Buzz teachers and students over the last year and these users have provided positive feedback and suggestions. We’ve made over a dozen enhancements to better help students be immersed in their learning and assessment.
Some highlights of the new Activity Player include:
- Students
- Fullscreen learning experience, reducing distractions, and increasing student engagement
- The ability to search for an activity across all visible curriculum
- Autosaving for assessments and dropbox activities to avoid loss of work
- Greater visibility of badges, mastery, and performance
- Teachers and authors
- Brand the course home page with a hero image
- View an activity as a group or a specific student
- Maximum screen size for your rich content, including the use of content and assessment templates
Course authors can further improve their student’s learning journey by using links for activities that may not be presented linearly in their course work.
New course Editor launched for everyone
First introduced in November 2019, the new course Editor will be enabled for everyone on June 18 and will be the only course Editor available as of August 6. While there are only some subtle changes, we encourage you to check it out.
Notes and Student Blackout Dates enabled by default
The features Notes and Student Blackout Dates will be enabled by default for all users on August 6. Admins will continue to be able to enable or disable these features for their domains, but they will be enabled for every domain that has not already explicitly disabled them.
Have a question?
If you have a question that is not addressed by this announcement or the linked articles, please contact your account manager or Agilix Support.