Welcome to Classwize Release 2021-006
We’ve got a bumper update for you this time, containing a lot of work we’ve done over the past few months to improve Classwize and release new features.
The big news is that we've been rolling out our new Classwize Chat feature to schools that have a Chrome environment. Classwize Chat allows teachers to direct-message students in their current class without letting students chat with each other.
We’ve also continued to make big improvements to the Live View feature by adding the ability to take high-quality, time-stamped screenshots of students’ screens!
If you’re not at a school with Chat or Live View yet, don’t worry, we haven’t forgotten about you! We’re working hard to bring these features to you. In the meantime, we have made improvements to your Classwize experience, including making Google Maps much more responsive for your students.
For Teachers
- Google Maps now loads faster for students than a particularly disinterested sloth.
- The Latest News button now remembers if you’ve clicked on it since the last published update.
- Schools with large numbers of groups should notice that Classwize is snappier in general.
- We improved overall performance by:
- removing some unnecessary feature audits.
- optimizing the way Classwize looks for information based on student emails and usernames.
- stopping Classwize from trying to check against the list of restricted users except when it needs to.
- We’ve renamed the students’ Chrome extension from Linewize Connect to Connect for Chrome - Education. Students can see this name if they click on the Extensions button in their Chrome browser.
- Class tools are now disabled in classes that don’t have any students in them.
- Classwize could get stuck on a loading animation if you tried to start a class from within the class.
- You shouldn’t need to refresh Classwize to get List View to appear with content in it.
- We’ve tweaked the design of the login page to make it more consistent with our other products.
- We’ve streamlined how you create Classwize rules. You can no longer create rules that only last for a few minutes, and all the ways you can create a rule now use the same popup.
Live View
- You can now take screenshots of students’ screens in Live View! Open up Live View for one of your students and click the Screenshot button to take a timestamped PDF screenshot of the student’s screen.
- We’ve improved Live View’s performance by slightly lowering the resolution of screenshots and making some changes to the service we use to send data back and forth between your computer and your students’ devices.
- You should see fewer cases of ‘Tab has not loaded’ when looking at a student’s active tab.
- Live View performs better for users in Monitor Mode.
Classwize Chat
- We released Classwize Chat to Chrome-environment schools!
- Teachers can direct-message any student in their class.
- All messages are logged and timestamped.
- Students can't message other students.
- Chat only works while classes are running and school is in session.
- Chat is off for each class by default.
- The chat bubble now disappears on students’ devices when you disable Chat for your class. Sorry students, you can’t use the bubble to tell if Classwize is running or not anymore.
- You asked for it and we’ve delivered it: hyperlinks now work in chat!
- We’ve heard that everyone is pretty tired of unwanted push notifications, so we:
- turned off push notifications for classes that you’re not actively looking at.
- stopped the ‘class ends in five minutes’ notification from appearing if you end the class early.
- updated the chat interface with instructions on how to turn off push notifications entirely for Classwize through your browser.
- Reading a message will now mark that message as read for all teachers of a class.
- Clicking outside of the chat window will close the chat interface.
- If chat is turned off, clicking on the ‘Turn on chat’ button will turn chat on instead of sending you to an article telling you how to do it.
- The Chat interface won’t show classes that you’ve archived.
- We made the student search bar stick to the top of the student list so you don’t lose it when you scroll down.
- We now let you know if you message a student who can’t reply because they’re not using Connect for Chrome - Education Edition.
- Students can send messages to the teachers of their class even if those teachers aren’t set as owners of that class group in School Manager.
- We changed the default font for the student’s Chat interface to be the ever-stylish Roboto.
- Classes with unread messages now appear at the top of your class list when you open up Chat.
- The number in the unread messages button was off-center and that bothered us. A lot.
- Teachers and school administrators who monitor or are co-teachers of more than one class and who have Connect for Windows or macOS won’t get spammed by chat messages from all of their classes.
- Students should only receive the ‘your chat is being monitored’ message once per day, when they first open up chat, instead of multiple times per day seemingly at random.
- We fixed an issue that could cause Classwize to crash when enabling chat for a class.
- We removed some unnecessary UI elements from monitor mode.
- If a student messages you while you’re chatting with them, their message will automatically be marked as read.
- We improved performance by only returning grabbing new messages from our servers, rather than all of them from all time. We also only get and show unread messages from the Class the student is currently active in.
IT Administrators
- Parent and Child School Manager devices now have the same Classwize URL.
- Google Classroom will sync all classes and students with School Manager even if there is a bad or external domain email address in the sync data set.
- If you have enabled Safe Search on Bing, it will now only trigger for identified Bing domains and not any URL that contains the word ‘bing’ (e.g. www.climbing.com).
- We’ve improved how the Connect for Chrome extension performs in Parent/Child device configurations by:
- fixing a timeout error caused by a device id/authentication mismatch when the user was connected to the Child device.
- cleaning up our code for detecting whether the user was connecting to the Parent or Child device.
- The Connect for Chrome extension no longer requires a restart if it fails to authenticate the first time, and we have improved how it handles authentication in general.
- The config gateway no longer spams the monitor class endpoint.
- The service that determines if a signature is blocked or allowed no longer accepts requests for a verdict if the requestor doesn’t have a school manager device ID.
- We improved logging of Google authentication errors.