Built-in Microsoft Office Tools are now faster, and accessibility checker enabled
With this release, all built-in Office tools – Word, Excel and PowerPoint – have been upgraded with support for accessibility checking and many new features. This allows teachers to create and check that their content works better with screen readers, which is especially helpful for students with disabilities.Additionally, Word now comes with word count; PowerPoint has more transitions and Excel now supports conditional formatting, sort & filter, pivot tables, pictures & shape, additional charts and more options to freeze panes. Office tools are also notably faster when starting up, so teachers have more time to create great content in itslearning.
Post Bulletins Across Multiple Courses
Teachers have told us that they LOVE bulletins – read why:- it’s a great way to quickly share updates or content with students.
- Teachers are now able to post the same bulletin across multiple courses at the same time, saving a lot of work and time.
- Adding to multiple courses is easy, just click on the new option next to the ‘Add bulletin’ button.
- Select courses from a list or search for courses by name. Once added, teachers can see which courses the bulletin appears in.
- Each bulletin is unique to the course it is added to, which means it does not share comments with the other bulletins.
Manage Inappropriate Behavior in Messages
It is important for teachers to have good tools to deal with inappropriate messages. Teachers can now close a conversation they are in, if they find that it is no longer useful, or there is inappropriate behavior. Prior to this release, teachers could only close conversations in a course, but now this can be extended to any group conversations. Teachers who have been part of a closed conversation have the option to re-open the conversation. Teachers can now also delete any inappropriate messages in a group conversation they are a part of. If a message is accidentally deleted, it can easily be un-deleted.
Better Management of Courses Synchronized with Student Information Systems
In the course profiles management interface, administrators can give their teachers more choices on how they manage participants in courses synchronized to external systems such as SIS.
By default, teachers are not allowed to make any changes to participants in a synchronized course. We have now extended these options to give course teachers more control over managing their participants.
- No access – The teacher is not allowed to make changes to the list of participants.
- Only manually added participants – Teachers can manually add participants to their course but are not allowed to make changes to synchronized participants.
- Manually added and synchronized participants – Teachers have full access to add and remove participants – manually added or synchronized.
As this is a course profile setting, administrators can choose which level of access each type of user within a course has available.
Even More
Prevent Test Mode from being blocked
From this release customers who use Test Mode Browser will need to update to the new version of the app. The new version is 2.0.4.01 (Windows, both student and lab versions) and 2.0.4 for Mac. This does not apply to Chromebook or iPad users.
Registration Tool
In the registration tool teachers can now edit choices on behalf of a student. This means they can make changes on behalf of students who are out of school or unable to log in.
3rd Party Tools
We now give clearer information if there are issues when linking to 3rd party tools through the IMS LTI standard.