Product Updates

Schoolbox v17 is now GOLD!

By bojana.lazarevska

The v17 GOLD Release is now live!

We’re proud to announce that the Schoolbox v17 release is now GOLD. As always, a huge thank you goes out to our active Schoolbox Help community, whose ideas heavily influenced the updates and features of this new release.

This release is focused on giving you more control over your Schoolbox instance, which is why you’ll see a heavy improvement to our Pastoral Care system, as well as the introduction of a Date Picker for better insights, and filters for enhanced LMS views.

Introducing the new features to your team

We have previously outlined the most important updates of the release, but to provide you with even more guidance, here is a change management guide to support you in rolling out the release to your staff, and a guide written specifically for teachers.

Since the first v17 beta release, we have added some more bonus features, which you need to be aware of:

Added acknowledgment of offline submissions
Course unit capabilities and indicators are now editable, even when in use by assessments
When editing indicators, you can now see what assessments are using them
Improved workflow for completing tasks and quizzes
Added assessment status and task ticks to the grades page
The ability to email house masters from the class list
The inline grader has been updated to now allow you to continue to the next student without publishing first
Added a time option to homepage news expiry and publish dates
Ability to share Synergetic academic reports directly in Schoolbox

A quick refresh on the notable v17 features:

Pastoral Care

A new dedicated dashboard and search feature makes it easier to access and navigate records.
New pastoral groups component to share records or send notifications between group members.
The ability to save and tailor reports, then save them to your dashboard for future use or share them with pastoral groups.

Date Picker

Teachers can now easily select dates while in timetable view.
Date Picker allows you to view any events that are on during your selected date, ensuring you never schedule clashing events ever again!
See the amount of due work a student has on any given day, so you can keep track of their workload.

Enhanced LMS Views

Specify what you’re looking for with our new filtering option by turning filters on/off from your admin system.
Customise pages to display only what is relevant to your organisation and tune the default views to show only your required items.

Other features

There are additional changes you may be interested in. To view these important updates, as well as other minor updates, make sure you visit our Schoolbox Help release notes area.

Looking ahead to v17.5

The next release, v17.5, will be released fairly soon. As Crocodoc will be shutting down on the 31st of December, we need to make sure that all of our schools upgrade to 17.5 before the end of the year, so that we can quickly (and painlessly) migrate you to our new system.

The upgrade won’t take long, and schools should start planning to update either over the Term 3 break, or at the end of the year.