Release 106 Notes

Office Online Assignment Answer Templates

When teachers add a Microsoft Office resource (Word, Excel or PowerPoint) in assignments they can choose to make a copy for each student, follow-up in-progress work and provide just-in-time feedback directly in the browser. You don’t even need a Microsoft account to do this.

Students can work on the assignment from inside itslearning without downloading or uploading their answer. This saves both students and teachers time, allows teachers to better scaffold the assignments, removes any need for copying or uploading assignment answers and gives teachers new ways to provide quality feedback directly in the Office productivity tools.

Chromebook app Improvements

Users had previously been automatically logged out from itslearning when they closed their Chromebook. From now on (and if G Suite Single Sign-On is used) we will keep the user logged in to itslearning.

Users will be automatically prompted to connect their G Suite account if they log in with their itslearning account and the app is installed.

Viewing G Suite Documents

If a student uploads a Google Doc, Slide or Sheet as an assignment answer, but the teacher does not have a G Suite account to view them (and the built-in Office Tools are enabled for the customer) we will automatically convert the G Suite resource so that it can be viewed in Office. This will allow the teacher to review the student’s assignment answer. 

Default G Suite Integration

Google customers can now set-up and manage their integration between itslearning and their G Suite domain. This makes the set-up and management quicker and easier. 

System administrators have a set-up guide that walks them through the process of connecting their G Suite domain to itslearning.

Google SSO Setting

Customers who use 3rd party log on systems and have connected their G Suite domain to itslearning can now choose to disable Single Sign-On (SSO) with the school’s Google account.

Security Boost

• It is no longer possible to automatically log on with Google personal accounts. You can now only use the enterprise accounts managed by the customer. This was because some customers could not manage the password complexity for personal (@gmail) Google accounts. 
• Single-Sign-On SSO for the itslearning Chromebook app and the itslearning Marketplace app now only works on the official Chromebook app or Marketplace app.

Engage Students By Sharing 360° Reports With Them 

Teachers now have the option to give students access to their own 360° reports on a course-by-course basis. This can help students be more engaged in their own learning and help them better understand how they are progressing with course content. 

Teachers can select which of the reports (progress, engagement and grades) students can see. Students will only see their own data, they will not be able to see the course overview that is available to teachers.

As a default access for students is off, but teachers can easily turn on (or off) access at any time. There are three new options for teachers in ‘Course settings’ to toggle access on/off for each report. Once activated for students a new option appears in the course menu – ‘360° reports’.

Note: This was part of Release 105, but we removed it for all customers due to some not being able to access the feature. If you are still having problems accessing this feature, please contact the itslearning Support team. 

360° Reports for Mentors

Mentors in itslearning are staff with cross-course responsibility for students. They may provide pastoral/academic support or can even be the year tutors. We now provide mentors the same deep insight into student progress, activity and grades that teachers can see in their courses. Mentors can only see detailed information on the students in their care. This allows mentors to understand how their students are progressing in any of their courses and provides quick comparison across all their students to the course averages. Access to the reports is through a new option in the Mentor’s menu. Mentors can send a group message to groups of students or individual message to one student directly from the reports.

Student View 

The ‘Your students’ view shows all students in the mentor’s group. It shows:

• All students that a mentor is responsible for 
• A list of all active courses that students are enrolled in 
• View a summary of activity, progress, grades for each course for each student. This allows a mentor to see courses where the student may be struggling or needs extra support 
• Clicking on a course will show the detailed summary for the student

Courses View 

The ‘Courses’ view shows all active courses that the mentor’s students are enrolled on.

• Search, so the mentor can quickly find a course.
• Send a message to one or more students. Note this sends a group message and students can respond.
• Swap between activity, progress or grades summary for each course.
• Clicking on a course will show the detailed 360 report for that course for that student.

Message Directly from 360° Reports

Reviewing student progress and communicating with them has never been easier. The 360 Degree Reports allow teachers to quickly compare all students in the class and deep-dive into each learner’s performance through easy-to-follow, visual info-graphics. From this release Teachers can now send messages to individual students or groups of students directly from the reports with one click.

Use Microsoft OneDrive Resources With Ease 

System administrators can give consent to the itslearning OneDrive picker app on behalf of users in their organization. This means users do not need to manually connect their Microsoft account to their itslearning account. It will makes using OneDrive resources in itslearning even easier. Set this up in the Cloud services section of the Admin menu.

Test 3.0 Enhancements

• Assessment on Learning Objectives/Standards has been added to the Test tool. Standards can now be connected to individual questions. The assessment for each standard is based on the average point score of the questions it is connected to.  
• The Test tool report is enhanced to give you an overview of how your students performed on the different questions, as well as a general high-level summary.

Even More

• Teachers can use the Registration tool to ask students to self-enroll in Course groups. As the Registration tool is an activity, teachers can use this in their planning, and it will appear as a task for students. 
• Customers using IMS-ES integration can now have their student information system (SIS) create Courses based on course templates which create ready-to-go content, plans and resources for teachers to use. 
• The Survey tool can now show extra information about participants, both in the overview of replies and in the exported results. This can be used to better differentiate users in the export. The extra information is chosen by Administrators in ‘Admin’ > ‘Edit global settings’ > ‘Features and security’. The extra information is not shared for anonymous surveys. 
• We have improved the emails generated by itslearning (for alerts, new assignments, etc.) to be more modern looking and easier to read. 
• We have removed the ePortfolio Summer Sky skin and replaced it with a more mobile-friendly skin. 
• Two years ago, we created easier to follow, simplified rules for who can search for and communicate with using the message tool. We are removing the now defunct rule-set. 
• When viewing courses in the drop-down menu the course codes will now appear in the tooltip. This should help clear up confusion for teachers who have multiple courses with identical titles. 
• Supervisors (headteachers and mentors) can now sort by parent name or email in the parent overview to more easily find who they are looking for. Please note that if there are multiple parents related to a student, the list will be sorted by the name of the first of these. 
• Administrators in large schools or districts can have a lot of mentors and headteachers in their site. We’ve made it easier to find the one you are looking for by adding a search. The search starts after typing at least 3 letters. 
• We have updated personal API endpoints to contain the following data: Location Title, Location Color and Import Description.