Wednesday 31st August (The Starz Team)

The developers have announced lots of improvements to your Primary Learning Platform, released this week, stating that:

As we start the new school year, we are pleased to introduce a number of new features to make your portal easier to manage, save you time and allow you to monitor usage.

One of the most requested features has been to introduce usage statistics for your users.  We have taken your comments on board and now provide access to statistics for your school portal.  This will start to log usage stats from today.

We have also introduced a new bulk management tool which will enable you to easily make changes to accounts en-mass such as upload files to multiple people, create Learning Logs in bulk or add a blog entry to a whole class at the same time.

Some of you may have voted for the new theme in one our usergroup communities.  We are now pleased to announce the release of the new Alien theme.

A summary of some of these exciting new features is shown below. As always, these enhancements have come in response to requests from our schools using DB Primary so please keep your ideas coming in.

More detailed information on these and other updates can be found on our help wiki here.

Bulk Management Tool

The bulk management tool is a great time saving feature that allows teachers to easily carry out tasks on multiple accounts simultaneously, including:

• Uploading files

• Creating local communities

• Adding to blogs

• Adding tags to my work and gallery areas.

For example, you may wish to show the children in your class an example of how to complete their blog task or upload and share weekly spellings. These tasks can now be carried out in a couple of clicks.

Viewing usage statistics for your school portal

Superadmin accounts are now able to view the recent activity of users on their school learning platform with a clear indicator of whether the usage was in school hours or not.

Time of login, amount of time spent on the platform as well as any activity a user carries out such as writing on a blog or uploading a file can be quickly referenced.

Alien theme skin for starter communities and accounts

An exciting and colourful new theme for younger pupils:

Look out for additions to the available themes in the near future.

Changing the look of your login screen

Change your school login screen by choosing a background picture.

Integration with Espresso

A ‘Quicklink’ button can be added to any of your communities, providing access to your Espresso content. If you currently subscribe to Espresso (or would like to) and would like to include quicklinks in your platform please email espresso on operations@espresso.co.uk  They will set you up and pass your details to us.  We will then enable it for you and advise you how to use it.

If you do not currently have espresso home access, you can download the forms direct from the espresso website here

Other new features and improvements

For more information on a number of features new to the platform, please click on the following links for more information:

• A new look Page Creator tool

• Notification of Files Awaiting Moderation

• Enhanced Email Monitor

• Drag and drop files directly to the My Work and My Files area

• Exporting emails when transferring accounts

• Restoring deleted files from community galleries and restoring deleted communities

• Quick links to online help and support

Thursday 16th June (The Starz Team)

We have received notice from the developers that a small update is due on the 22nd June 2011.   It is not expected that this release should have any great impact on users and in the main.

The following changes are expected:

Calendar

• Remove calendar doodles from the teacher themed calendar.

Task Tool

• Within the progress screen for all the pupils within a task, include a button to ‘Mail All’ which sends a mail to all participants of the task.
• Within the instructions of a task, enable attaching a file (works in the same way as a community page).
   
• Inclusion of a ‘Repeat Weekly’ option when you are setting up a task
   
• Allow a task assignment work to be saved without finishing - currently saving a document automatically marks the assignment as finished and it disappears from the "To Do" list.  Instead, for most task types we can ask the user whether it is finished. If if is not finished then the task should remain in the To Do, and clicking on the item should load the previously saved work.
   
• When an email is sent to the pupil to say that the task is completed there is now a link to view their work.
   
• Media Embed has been added to the instructions of a task meaning that you can add media content such as a Youtube video.
   
• New task type will allow a file to be chosen. The file may be uploaded, created or chosen from existing files in the user's My Work area
   
• Addition of a Markbook tab to the task management page, providing a table of marks for all tasks created within the community. The tasks can be filtered by status.
   
• Currently you cannot create a task for an existing survey or quiz.  Provision of creating a task when the survey or quiz is published so that the task can be initiaised with the title, start and due dates, and the mark schema for quizzes.
   
• Add browse for task participants for existing tasks to more easily add larger numbers of users once a task has been set-up
   

Starter Theme (KS1) Email

• Display a notification, when deleting a message, to confirm which message has been deleted.

Teacher Theme Email

• Ability to create folders in areas other than the inbox, i.e. the sent folder, in staff webmail.
• Inclusion of a more detailed explanation as to why an email has not sent. i.e. “There are no addresses to send the mail to”
   
• Addition of 2 lists, 1 for address book contacts and 1 for friends within the platform to help manage pupils from adult contacts
   
• The selection area for each mail be extended to include the column, so that check boxes cannot be missed when selecting multiple mails
   
• change the sort order within teacher webmail

Surveys and Quizzes

• Added functionality through the admin cogs to include the cutting and pasting of surveys and quizzes.
• Quizzes and surveys will only appear in the ‘Whats’ On feed if they are not associated with a task

Account Administration

• Move the main administrator accounts out of the staff list (superadmin, dbadmin and laadmin) to support previous change introduced when populating communities with members using the 'select folder' option
• Ability to disable the friends feature - this is will affect the whole school and is only available as an 'all on' or 'all off' option.
   

Other

• Instead of sizing the background image to fit within the dimensions of the screen, it should resize to fill the dimensions of the screen.
• Icon designs improvements tosupport the document icon on the homepage.
   
• Abitlity to add export email contacts through a csv file - not specified if this is just for teacher usage

The Starz Team

Tuesday 12th April (The Starz Team)

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