Coming to Edsby in fall 2015

Coming to Edsby in fall 2015

Posted on by Dallas Kachan

New Edsby features coming for fall 2015 were unveiled to customers last week at Edsbyfest, Edsby’s annual product planning & customer feedback forum at Edsby headquarters in Toronto, Canada. Delegates from some 35 school districts & private schools offered feedback on the Edsby development roadmap and gave input into future Edsby engineering priorities.

In all, some 65 new Edsby capabilities coming this fall were previewed. While some were small improvements or changes to existing functionality, many significant new capabilities were detailed, and in some cases demonstrated to attendees.

The following were among the significant new features scheduled to be available in Edsby in the fall of 2015:

Expectations/outcomes/standards-based assessments

  • Ability to tie assessments, observations and lessons to state, provincial or federal expectations, outcomes or standards
  • Easy ways to track coverage by class
  • Easy ways to track progress by student
  • Private observation enhancements, including tieing observations back to expectations/outcomes/standards, scoring observations with a single click
Standards-based assessments in Edsby
Teachers will be able to map assessments and observations to local or federal educational expectations (i.e. standards or outcomes) in Edsby. Colors indicate individual and rolled-up results. Coming in fall 2015.

Online assessments (formative and summative)

  • Support for true/false, multiple choice and specific answers
  • Support for text answers
  • Can be used as formative or summative assessment
  • Tie questions to strands/categories
  • Tie questions to state, provincial or federal expectations/outcomes/standards
Example of an online test in Edsby, showing multiple question types. Coming fall 2015.
Example of an online test in Edsby, showing multiple question types. Coming fall 2015.

Rubric-based assessments

  • Built in rubric creator
  • Ability to share and reuse rubrics
  • Tie rubrics to strands/categories
  • Tie rubrics to state, provincial or federal expectations/outcomes/standards
  • Online scoring of rubrics
Edsby rubric scoring
Rubric-based assessment scoring in Edsby. Coming in fall 2015.

Online forms (approvals)

  • Allows schools/districts to electronically receive parent approvals for student activities like field trips
  • Student zoom used to select students of specified type, e.g. specific class, grade, other filters
  • Teacher/administrator can edit text body
  • Status summary of approvals provided once sent
  • Parents receive workflow in their Edsby mailbox
  • Notifies both or all parents when one has approved it
Edsby form approvals
A field trip approval form sent to a parent through Edsby. Reducing paper in the backpack. Coming fall 2015.

Parent-teacher interview booking

  • Replaces paper process in some schools
  • Replaces complex 3rd party solutions for others
  • Complete workflow for admin, teachers and parents

Many other features and improvements were described and demonstrated to Edsbyfest attendees.

Edsbyfest Attendees 2015Read what Edsby and others tweeted from Edsbyfest 2015.

View pictures from Edsbyfest 2015 here and the last year’s event here.