Teacher’s Guide To Summer Product Changes

Welcome back! We hope you had a wonderful summer vacation!

During these summer months we’ve been hard at work enhancing the teacher experience within the product. If you’ve recently logged in, you’ve probably noticed some of the changes we’ve made.

While these navigation changes are arguably the biggest and most visible part of the summer releases, we’ve also made plenty of updates, enhancements, and changes to many of the areas that you use. Rubrics, Assignments, and even the Gradebook settings have all received important tweaks which we’re hoping will improve your experience when using these products.

To help you get up to speed before school starts, here’s a recap of all of our teacher focused changes from our June and July releases.

Separation of Assignment Grade and Cumulative Grade
Student and parent access to Cumulative Grades and Assignment Grades can now be done independently under Gradebook > Display Options if that option has first been set up by a manager. This flexibility helps schools that were hesitant to open up gradebooks previously because they didn’t want students to be hyper focused on their final grade.

Less Cluttered List of Assignment Types
When adding or editing an assignment, only the Assignment Types that you have specifically configured inside the Gradebook Setup appear by default. If you want to see the entire list or select an Assignment Type that wasn’t included in the gradebook, we’ve added Select from all assignment types.

For those of you that only use assignments and not gradebooks, we now only display the most frequently used Assignment Types to help make selecting the right type easier.
 
Rubrics Changes and Enhancements
Back in April we posted a survey on Rubrics that almost 400 teachers completed. Thanks to the feedback we received, we’ve made the following improvements:

• To make it more transparent that there is a rubric associated with an assignment, the rubric label will now appear on Assignment Center. This makes it much easier for students to see which assignments have them without needing click into the assignment detail first.
• We’ve also removed the character limitation for adding text to level descriptions. You now have more space to explain your expectations.
• Previously, there was no way for teachers to override a rubric grade. Now rubrics will have a Point Adjustment option so teachers can add extra or deduct points on a Rubric that supports points.

Create Multiple Instances of Assignments
If needed, you can now assign the same assignment multiple times through the course of a term. When adding a new assignment, you can enable an option to just create the assignment once or multiple instances of it.
Resubmit Files
You can now enable an option to allow students to resubmit files for assignments as often as needed until the due date is met.

Students To Do Tasks
In order to make the Assignment Center even more useful to students, they can now add a task for themselves. Using tasks, students can post general or class specific reminders to themselves and manage the tasks due date and status which include To Do, In Progress, and Complete.

And More Teacher Content!
Just in case you weren’t aware, our online help center also features more content geared towards the teacher experience. Did you know we have Interactive Assignment Rubrics? Not only can you create your own to use, these can be shared with our teachers at your school through a Rubric Bank.

You may also be interested in learning more about Graded Discussions, Assignment Annotations, and working with Gradebooks as well.

Tip: If you want to discover more details regarding our summer updates or just want to read up on various K-12 topics, make sure to head over to our online help center.

So that’s everything you need to know from our summer releases. Thanks for reading and have a great school year!