In 2019, there’s lots that’s new in Edsby
Welcome back from the holidays! There are many new Edsby features to learn about and explore.
Not all new features below will necessarily be available to all users immediately, as it’s up to individual schools or districts when or if they choose to introduce new Edsby capabilities. This list is here to help teachers and administrators with planning and to give end users insight into new things you may see in Edsby soon.
This release also includes many quality and performance improvements too numerous to list.
New
Edsby Capture – a new mobile Edsby App
Edsby Capture provides an exciting and easy new way to quickly and easily create evidence items in Edsby. It provides a simple way for students, as young as those in kindergarten, to capture photographs of their work and have the images automatically upload into their Edsby evidence stream. In addition, teachers will find Edsby Capture provides a convenient way to capture and assign media images to students in one easy step.
Edsby Capture is a mobile device application now available in the Apple App Store and Google Play stores.
Class enhancements
Flexible Roster Print-outs
This area has been completely re-written to enable teachers to choose the number of columns and the height of each row in a printed roster list. Column headers can be typed in as well if the teacher wishes:
Emoji Support
Edsby user-entered content can now include emoji. They can be entered via the mobile app or on the web using the normal mechanisms (e.g. emoji pickers, copy/paste, etc.)
Ability to hide “New Evidence” button
Edsby provides teachers with a New Evidence button on each class on the Edsby home page. Sometimes a teacher has classes in which the Evidence feature is not being used. There is now a Class Setup option to enable the teacher to hide the button on a per class basis.
Printing QR Codes
The Member view (and the Evidence view) provide a way to print QR Codes that can be used with the new Edsby Capture app to quickly create new Evidence items:
Time/Date Displays on Evidence Organize View
The Organize view within Evidence now shows a date/time at the bottom of each evidence item. The default text provided displays summary information regarding when the item was created. The exact date and time of the creation of the item is available by hovering over the summary date/time.
Portfolio Filtering
Portfolio navigation has been enhanced to add in filtering by subject, grade and tab. This makes it easier for students to manage large portfolios.
Comment Library Filtering by Grade
The Personal Comment Library interface has been enhanced to support comment filtering by Grade if grade fields are used in any of the comments in the library.
Hiding Classes
Teachers now have the ability to hide classes from the Classes panel. This is typically done when a class has been assigned to the teacher in the Student Information System and so it exists in Edsby but it isn’t in use for the teacher.
Reporting enhancements
Enhanced report card fill
Edsby now provides a more powerful report card fill feature. The “Field” picker enables the teacher to select any data-fillable field on the report card sheet (including drop downs such as Learning Skills). An entry field is then provided to align with the field being filled. If a comment field is selected the user can enter the standard Edsby comment library mechanisms for entering the student name, pronouns, etc. Fill can target blank cells, all cells and cells for selected students. It also supports both append and replace modes.
Personal comment library import support for mxWeb comment library exports
Edsby has now added support for directly importing a personal comment library export from mxWeb. Edsby automatically converts the data to Edsby format including name and gender substitution tokens.
Find/replace in report card data entry sheets
Edsby now provides teachers with a “Find/Replace” button on all report card data entry sheets. This new feature enables teachers to quickly change one word or phrase into another across the entire sheet. Options enable the teacher to control whether it is case sensitive or not, and whether only whole words should be matched or not.
More flexible report card comment character counter
Edsby comment entry support has been enhanced to permit a teacher to go beyond the configured character count limit. When that happens the character counter turns red and shows how many characters over the limit the comment currently is. The teacher can then edit further to ultimately adjust the comment to be within limits. Comments in red can be saved, but not submitted.
Report card comment categories search/usage
Edsby has been enhanced to support comment categories. Comment categories can optionally be turned on for a report card data entry template with the specific set of categories defined in the template. Each category then provides a shortcut method to filter whatever comment library(s) are set up with the tag associated with the category. If a library comment is chosen the category checkmark is set automatically. A teacher can also type in a comment, and manually click the category checkmark to help track which categories have been covered by the comment entered.
Parent teacher interview (PTI) scheduling enhancements
PTI support for booking student contacts
Previously in parent teacher interviews, a teacher or administrator could book a parent into a PTI slot, but only if that parent had an active account in Edsby. In this release, this restriction has been relaxed, so the teacher or administrator can now also book in “student contacts” (which are parent/guardians without an active Edsby account). This saves time and typing for the teacher/administrator.
PTI support for viewing/booking individual seats in multi-booking slots
This has been enhanced in this new version of parent teacher interviews.
Add PTI information to calendar
Parent teacher interview campaign information now shows up on a user’s calendar, and when the user hovers on the calendar event they are provided with a convenient link to open the PTI workflow for the PTI campaign.
Groups enhancements
List/Monitor Groups
Edsby Groups now supports a new kind of group called a list/monitor group. Students can be added in to these groups but however they don’t know they are in the group. List groups provide handy way for a collection of staff members to track, collaborate and communicate around a specific group of students.
New Member List View
The Member List view that comes up when clicking Students on the roster panel has been enhanced to provide a more condensed view:
Other
Community Service Hours App
The optional Edsby community service app has been enhanced to enable a set of organizations to be pre-specified at setup time so that students pick from the provided set of organizations rather than typing in an organization name themselves.
New default profile picture
Edsby now provides users that don’t have a profile picture with a new “Edstronaut” profile picture.
