Even More Academic Updates for your Virtual Classrooms

Derek Nichols

We're continuing to make improvements to Academics this week. With how important this product is, we hope these updates continue to make your experiences better.A little over a week ago, the Blackbaud Education management team released a Saturday update. While not intended to replace the usual Tuesday update, this supplemental update targeted the Assessments feature inside the Academics product. We wanted to get these features out before the new week started to hopefully reduce potential downtime for an aspect of the product that’s a bit high in demand right now. If you missed it, have a look right here.

We hope these changes have helped improve you experience with Academics overall. I’m also happy to report that we have a few more updates to Assessments this week as well. Let’s have a look.

Bulk grading in Gradebook
Educators can now see the status of assessments while selecting students during bulk grading from the Gradebook. We hope this change helps educators avoid work that is technically still in progress or not submitted.

Longer skill labels
We’ve also enhanced the report card builder by making the maximum length for assessment skill labels 255 characters from the previous number of 50. This change will hopefully go a long way to prevent labels being cut off. 

Landscape Schedules
Wouldn’t you know it, we’ve made it so that when you’re viewing, printing, or exporting teacher schedules, they can be set to Landscape.

Other UI Updates
One thing to note is that under Assignment settings, we changed the tile formerly known as View access to child’s assignments. After this update, it now appears as View access to student’s assignments.

By the way, the release notes for the April 21 update is now live. Have a look to see the rest of the update.

That’s going to do it for now but join me next week when we look back at everything that happened in April with Blackbaud’s Education management. As always, I hope you are all staying safe and remain healthy during these unique and trying times. Stay strong everyone and I’ll see you back here next time.

James Hoos

Re: Bulk grading in Gradebook

This is a good feature, but it is now cluttering the gradebook with excessive markings.  It would be much more beneficial if the teal S symbol only displayed for submitted, ungraded assessments.  Once the grade has been entered, the symbol serves no purpose and should be removed.

Also, could a similar notification be added to the gradebook for assignments that have a file submission?  When a student uploads their file a symbol appears letting the teacher know that it is ready to be graded?  Just a thought...

Derek Nichols

Thanks for the feedback James Hoos‍. I'll pass this along to the LMS team.

Angie Addison

Hi James Hoos‍ , we do have a request in to also do this for online submissions in our upcoming sprint so keep an eye out for that soon! Would you mind putting your suggestion on the icon out on the idea forum so we can get some visibility and collective feedback on it? It raises a couple of questions for me that I can get in touch with you directly on but in the meantime would be great to crowdsource. Thanks!

James Hoos

Hi Angie Addison‍ , I have just created a new post on the idea forum for this https://blackbaudk12.ideas.aha.io/ideas/K12OC-I-2378


Feel free to reach out if you'd like to discuss this further.

Angie Addison

Thank you James Hoos‍ will do. I'm going to keep an eye on it for a bit and see what input or votes we get before putting something on the books with you but am making a note to follow up shortly. Thank you for your input!

Meghan Flynn

Would really love to be able to access submissions through the Gradebook. Cumbersome to have to go back and forth between Assignments and Gradebook - would prefer to be able to work solely through Gradebook (dislike Assignments). Would also like to set default view options for Assignments (ie. current month, previous 30 days, previous week, assignments not yet graded....)