We’ve built many new features recently and wanted to recap the newly available functionality for fall 2013. We hope they’re useful to our users. Enjoy!

Student Comments, Newsfeed, and Main Page. The Instructor Main page has been redesigned to provide teachers and students valuable real-time information and simplify navigation. Immediately see announcements, email communications, and recent events right on the main page. Additionally a commenting mechanism has been implemented that allows students and teachers to chat about classroom activities. In conjunction with the News Feed, teachers can monitor and moderate the student discussions to maintain a positive digital classroom environment.

Online Quizzes. Teachers have the ability to easily create, administer, and auto-grade online quizzes. It supports numerous question types: multiple choice, ordering, fill in the blank, short answer, etc. It also supports adding rich digital media to make standards-aligned questions more engaging.

Semester Running Total for Grading. We’ve added a new grading mode to track student progress across the entire semester. Calculate a running total across multiple grading periods to find a semester average (instead of averaging quarterly grades).

Teacher-Led Online Discussions. Teachers can facilitate online discussions. This gives students time to think and research while writing responses. Teachers engage in the conversation by asking follow up questions and encourage deeper conversations. After discussions are completed teachers can see all comments and give students individual scores.

Publish and Peer Review. We’ve added a redefining activity to help students develop 21st century skills. Publish student work to the entire class where it can be read by all students. Students are assigned to write reviews of each other’s work. This allows students to analyze and provide constructive feedback. Teachers can give scores based upon the quality of student analysis.

Share Lessons/Assignments Across Multiple Classes. Teachers can create an assignment or lesson in multiple classes/subjects. Since it is shared, edits in one class are automatically applied to all classes. In the past teachers have had to maintain multiple copies in each class and edit each one individually.

Online Registration with Fee Calculation and Online Payment. Online registration now calculates fees and can accept payments. When parents register students for the upcoming year, fees can be automatically calculated, applied to student accounts, and parents can pay online with a credit card. The system handles waiver requests and free/reduced lunch applications. To reduce errors, parents register all of their children from a single page, and are offered a checklist of steps to complete.

Updated Login Page. We’ve changed the look and feel of our login page. This will allow us to better communicate news to our customers. Frequent users will probably want to update their bookmarks.

Changes in Tdap Immunizations. Vaccination requirements have updated. We now can model more complex requirements - allowing you to better track students’ immunization data.

District Lunch and Automatic School Switch. Improvements have been made for smaller districts where multiple schools share a single lunchroom. This is common when an entire district is housed in a single building. Search and scan students within the entire district. SchoolInsight will automatically “switch schools” making it easier to process lunch.

Asynchronous Lunch Processing. To speed up the lunch line, we’ve separated the saving of lunch data from the user interface. Users no longer need to wait until the order is saved before scanning the next student. The information is stored locally and saved in the background while users continue working. This helps keep the lunch line moving.

OK Eligibility. Automatically calculate two week eligibility. Quickly see students not eligible to participate in activities based upon gradebook scores. (Oklahoma Schools only)

- Common Goal Systems, November 4, 2013