A new software release is now available in the Edsby Sandbox. It is expected that this release will be going into production across all customer sites in the March 1 to March 6 timeframe.
New features in this release
Evidence Enhancements
The All Evidence and Organize pages have enhanced functionality with an improved feed experience, new filters, and a new student selector.
The All Evidence feed has an updated look with improved visibility of parent and student replies. This streamlines communication and enables the teacher to view and respond to student and parent feedback without leaving the feed.
The All Evidence page also boasts enhanced functionality with the addition of filters, empowering teachers to refine the feed to display only the items that match their specific criteria. The Shared to Learning Story filter simplifies the task of distinguishing between shared items and items that have not been shared.
The addition of the student selector enables the teacher to filter the All Evidence feed to a single student or a subset of the students.
For items that are shared, the teacher can choose to post a reply that is only visible to other co-teachers. Alternatively, they can share the reply with co-teachers, parents, and students by checking the Share to Learning Story box.
The Organize page has been enhanced with the new student selector to enable teachers to view more than a single student. The filters reflect the data contained in the evidence items and include the options of filtering by performance levels, standards/outcomes/expectations, and tags. The Shared to Learning Story filter is also available on the Organize page.
Evidence portability
The evidence items are now linked to the student rather than the class segment. When a student is transferred to another segment of the same subject, the evidence will follow the student. For example, when homerooms are balanced at the beginning of the school, the evidence collected before the student is transferred will be visible to the new teacher.
New Gradebook Progress Report option
A new version of the Gradebook’s Progress Report is available. This new Progress Report provides a greater range of flexibility for the printed report. The new report has the following options:
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The ability to include all students or a subset of students. Dropped students can also be included.
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The choice to include all assessments, only those within a reporting period, or only those within a date range.
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Any combination of incomplete, shared, ungraded, and unshared assessments. If shared assessments are included, a graph can also be included in the report.
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Attendance history can be included, and if a reporting period or date range is specified the attendance history is also limited to dates specified.
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The report can include summaries of general learning outcomes, specific learning outcomes, or an overall average. The summaries can be pre-calculated based on data from the Gradebook and Evidence or the teacher can use professional judgement to enter the grades. The calculations can be based on mean, median, mode, latest, highest, or count.
The report is created by navigating to the gradebook. Click the gear icon and select Progress Report (new).
Complete the form and click save.
A new column will appear in the Gradebook. Click open to view, edit, and print the report.
Examples
In this example of a printed report, the teacher has included the General Learning Outcomes summaries without including any individual assessment results and has entered a class comment.
When the report is opened in the gradebook, all the outcomes are listed. The teacher can add additional grades or adjust any of precalculated grades.
The printed report will list only outcomes that have entries. For example, Robert's printed report will include 3 outcomes and Maria’s printed report will have 6 outcomes.
The teacher has the option of including assessment results. In this example, the teacher has elected to include summaries, shared assessments and has not entered a class comment.
The classic version of the Progress Report is still available. When the Progress Report is accessed through the Class Perspective, Panorama, Students Zoom, and My Students Zoom, the classic version is used. The new version of the Progress Report is only accessible by the teachers of the class through the Gradebook.
Classes Zoom
A new Published column has been added to the Zoom. The column displays the number of published assessments associated with the class.
Parent Details page
The Prefix field has been added to the Parent Information form to enable the Senior Admin, Office Head, and Office roles to update this information for the parent accounts.
Launching phone calls
Phone calls can be initiated by clicking on the telephone number.
Course Models
The Class Setup’s Allow Students and Parents to Capture Learning Evidence field can now be set through modeling.
Training implications and resources
We've developed comprehensive new Evidence video tutorial and help pages aimed at empowering teachers to fully explore and utilize the latest features. Links to these resources will be added shortly to provide additional support and guidance.
Given that evidence items are now linked to individual students rather than class segments, teachers might observe that they have visibility into items collected by the previous teacher. You can assure them this is by design, and they will see the benefits when the homeroom classes are balanced in September 2024.
The Edsby Release Reviews for 2023-24 videos can be found here.
Permission and roles changes
School and District Calendars
The ability to create new events and edit the district calendar has been added to the District Administrator and District Tech Support roles.
The ability to create new events and edit the school level events has been added to the Office role.
Course Models
The ability to edit course models have been removed from the Senior Admin role. The course models can still be viewed by clicking the course model link within the Class Setup form.
Quality improvements in this release
Assessment form: Grade schemes are listed in alphabetical order.
Attendance: Creation of planned absences suppressed where attendance data is imported.
Attendance: Class planned absences list the Class’s short name (TEJ3E_A) instead of the name (Computer Engineering Technology).
Calendars: Deleting one meeting of a repeating event no longer requires re-login to see the change.
Calendars: Formatting improvements to the mobile calendar view.
Class Notes: On mobile, the button text has changed from Post to Share.
Class Roster: Removed extra blank page from printed roster.
Class Setup: Formatting improvement to the summary column picker.
Classes Zoom: Term facets can be individually selected.
Evidence form: Performance level scoring and student selector are keyboard navigable.
Groups: After joining a group with the option to join is no longer visible.
Groups: Closed groups membership request phrases have changed to Request Accepted or Request Denied.
Integration: Aspen attendance exports lists correct courseNumber for combined classes.
Links: Improved copying and pasting of links.
Messaging: Resolved issue with a few parents not being able to message teachers.
News River articles: Expired posts no longer visible to parents on the School page.
Panorama: Parent phone numbers are visible on mobile.
Panorama: The account Status field is now populated with Active, Inactive, or Account Suspended.
Panorama: The School IT role can see the sender names in View Messages.
Parent Home Screen: Where academic records exist, the View Academic Records button has been added to the desktop version. The mobile version already included this button.
Parent-Teacher Interviews: Calendar event is updated when the campaign dates are edited.
Personal folder: Pasting item into folder no longer requires a refresh for the item to be visible.
Learning Story: Formatting improvement to class picker.
Notifications: Links are invalidated if the article is subsequently deleted, unapproved, or expired.
Notifications: Changes to the expiry date of a News River article no longer generates a notification.
Notifications: Hidden assessments no longer trigger reminder notification.