Schoolbox v23.1 has brought many major updates and improvements to the Schoolbox platform, with a vast amount stemming from feedback and feature requests from our wider community.
Here’s a preview of some key features available in v23.1.
AI Assistant
We all know teachers are time poor, and anything that can help teachers do more in less time is extremely valuable.
This year, AI development took a major leap forward and has delivered some significant productivity enhancements to assist people with content generation.
At Schoolbox, we believe that careful and thoughtful adoption of AI will assist in helping teachers do more in less time. So with this release, we are announcing our first AI assistant that has been designed to help translate, review, generate and adapt content in all areas of Schoolbox featuring our rich content editor.
The AI assistant leverages the same technology behind ChatGPT, so you can use the assistant prompt to request the AI to create content for you to review. You can also highlight content in the editor and request that the AI improve, summarise, make age appropriate or translate to different languages.
At this stage we have limited access to the AI assistant to just staff to avoid any concerns regarding student exposure to AI agents. We are listening carefully to your thoughts on how we should move forward in this space.
But we have many more exciting ideas on how we can leverage this technology to simplify content generation on our product roadmap.
Improved Curriculum Documentation
Over the past year, Schoolbox has been working hard to find ways to ensure our customers have the tools that they need to ensure that their courses are appropriately aligned with their curriculum.
The new unit planner page streamlines this by providing the entire course documentation laid out on a single page.
Combining unit overviews, activities, rubrics and curriculum codes into a single page allows for quick identification of gaps and areas for improvement, while reviewing and reflecting on your course curriculum documentation.
Major Quiz Upgrade
Providing teachers with the tools to quickly assess a student’s knowledge is an important function within Schoolbox. With v23.1, we are making sure you have the latest and greatest tools available for building quizzes to create high-quality, engaging content and simplify the student experience.
New Question Types
The major upgrade to the quiz system brings over 40+ question types to choose from when creating a quiz. From STEM to drawing, audio to drag & drop, there are options to assess students regardless of how they learn best.
Here are just a few of the different question types:
- Graphing: Allow students to plot points, lines, and shapes on a coordinate grid.
- Drawing: Encourage students to interact with the questions in a more visual way, by enabling them to answer questions by drawing, shading or touching the screen to select a hotspot.
- Media: Allow authors to implement audio recorders into a question and students to record a video response to a question.
- Interactive tools: Add additional information or tools onto the page for students to interact with, such as protractors, rulers and calculators.
More Feedback Options
Version 23.1 brings greater feedback functionality inside the quiz system. Teachers now have the choice to mark each student’s quiz attempt one at a time, or use the horizontal marking page to mark all student answers for a question in one go. The horizontal page can also be filtered to show only the students who are yet to be reviewed.
Teachers can also choose to provide students with overall feedback or specific feedback per question, and give their final mark in whichever type they choose (letter grade, percentage or total mark).
Continuous Improvement
Listening to feedback from our customers to continuously improve our platform is part of our philosophy. For schools who have been using Schoolbox for a significant amount of time, the increasing amount of data accumulating inside their Schoolbox instance was making it difficult to find the relevant information quickly using the search function.
To help improve search results and performance, we have modernised our search function. Our new search interface introduces a range of advanced search filters to help you reduce the quantity of results and find your specific results. New filters include date ranges, author and type.
In addition to the new filters, we have added the ability to search for newer features including badges, activities, lesson plans and assessments.
If you want to find out more about how Schoolbox can work with your school to help achieve your strategic goals, contact us here.
