July 2016 Product Release
With July comes our summer release, and we made some pretty big changes. We strive to improve TeacherEase/SchoolInsight, and whenever the improvements are large we save those changes for the summer. This gives users time to explore the upgrades without the pressure of the school year. We’re excited about the improvements, and hope you like them. See the short video for an overview of changes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAbP6azq3WM&feature=youtu.be
Online Student Work. The largest change is online student work. We originally added learning management system (LMS) functionality a few years ago. This included online quizzes, online documents, hand-in files through upload, teacher-led discussions, and publish-peer review. At the time we added it to “Digital Resources”, which seemed reasonable.
There were few problems with this decision. Many customers did not find the new functionality, because they were not using digital resources. Consequently they are unaware that TeacherEase includes LMS functionality. There were overlapping options for assignments and digital resources, which made setup clumsy and counter-intuitive. Different types of student work were developed independently and had inconsistent settings.
With the update, we did some serious clean up. All digital resources that can be handed in by students are now assignment types. Traditional offline assignments (where teachers manually enter grades) are still supported, of course. Online work has consistent options that function similarly.
The changes can all be seen on the Create Assignment page. This is currently only available to users who subscribe to full TeacherEase, online work is not available to gradebook-only customers. In a future release, we’ll add the ability for existing customers to enable free trials for their teachers.
Instructor Main > Scores/Comments > Create Assignment
Payments and Fees. Customers who match payments to fees often had trouble getting everything to match up correctly. We enhanced this area to better apply payments to fees and reduce user labor. Unmatched payments and fees are highlighted on the “Fees” page to be easily identified. When creating payments or fees, the matching ability was enhanced. When parents pay fees online, the payment is automatically matched to unpaid fees.
Admin Main > Modules > Tuition/Fees > Fees
Failed Prerequisites. Schools can easily spot and adjust schedules for those students that do not meet their prerequisites. Admins can run the Failed Prerequisites report to change student schedules in the upcoming academic year based on those students’ grades in the past year.
Admin Main > Modules > Scheduling > Failed Prerequisites
News Feed Redesign. We made some visual changes to the News Feed to make it easier to read. These changes were similarly applied to the “Assignments & Lessons” page.
