What’s New: K12 Product Updates For July 24

Derek Nichols

The sweltering heat of July is here which means it’s time for you and I to talk about another Blackbaud Education Management release. Here’s what we have coming for you inside of the July 24 release.


As it has been for the past couple of releases, update 14.07 is again heavy on Core and Academics content. However, School Website has a couple of important features to talk about as well. In the meantime, here are just a few of the features coming to you on July 24, 2019.

School website: Website accessibility improvements! We’re happy to report that the School website team has made a number of quality of life updates towards accessibility. Here’s everything that we updated this month:

• Poll and Announcements now have H3 text style options.
• You can now create empty alternative text tags for images.
• Content managers can create an alternative text tag for link content with photos.
• The Date picker for news archive now has a submit button for ease of use.
• We now have WCAG compliant head tag ordering.

Core: Do More with Data Import! Data Import received a lot of attention this month. As of this update, you can now update block types and blocks, add a school program to the General User Import, as well as update the first and last name from there as well.

There’s a couple of new import types as well which include non-related emergency contacts from User Management and previous/sending school data from Admissions.


Finally, when you view the details of a data import file, there’s a link for either Processed file or Validated file based on the job status.

 

 

Canvas LMS and OneRoster Integrations Early Access: Sign Up Now! New EAPs are on the way and we want you! Today we’re looking at integration between the Canvas Learning Management System and Blackbaud's Student Information System using OneRoster APIs.

OneRoster is a standard set of REST APIs which enable schools to securely and reliably exchange information about rosters, course materials, and grades between multiple web services. Why is this important? It reduces the need to manually transfer data between systems and reduced the need to customize the format of import files for each web service. Want to know more and take part in this EAP? Sign up right here.

 

Believe me when I say this isn’t all for the July release. Summer isn’t slowing our development teams down, so make sure to visit the online help to read the full release notes or check out the updated help panel on July 24 for all the details.


By the way, don’t forget to head on over to our YouTube channel to check out a handful of new videos we’ve recently posted with plenty more to come as the summer rolls on. Already we’ve covered some important topics like the new Photo management options when working with images in School Website/Core, Assignment grades for teachers, and working with Report Card grades. Make sure to subscribe in order to stay up to date on our latest video content as soon as it goes live.


That’s going to do it for this week! Thanks for taking a moment out of the summer sun to stop by and check out the blog for this release. Leave a like and a comment below if you have any questions, comments, or just want to say hey!