Linewize - release notes

Welcome to Classwize and School Manager release 1.5.7!

Our focus for this release has been fixing common syncing issues and laying the groundwork for splitting Google Directory and Google Classroom out into their own synchronisation schedules.  Over the next few months, we’re expecting to move to a model where School Manager will continue to synchronize with directory services (e.g. Google, LDAP, Azure) with a dedicated schedule set for Google Classroom. Manual Synchronization can still be run by School Manager Administrators.

The first step in completing this split is giving teachers the ability to manually sync Classwize with their Google Classroom.  This will make sure that teachers can easily update Classwize with any changes that they make to their Google Classroom in between scheduled Google Classroom synchronizations.

We’ve added a new option in School Manager that, if enabled, will let teachers do just that.  You can read about that in more detail below, or access our quick guide for teachers in our knowledge base.  We’re also investigating if this feature can be made available to schools that use Clever, Classlink, OneRoster and Wonde classroom synchronization services.

New Features

There’s a new option in “School Manager > Configuration > Classwize” called “Allow teacher to sync Google Classrooms”.  Enabling this option will add a “sync” button to Classwize that lets teachers manually sync their classes with Google Classroom.  Disabling it hides the “sync” button.  School Manager administrators will still be able to run manual synchronizations for their school and district.

We’ve got a quick guide for teachers on using the sync feature and troubleshooting common issues in our knowledge base.

Bug Fixes

• We’re continuing to do a lot of behind-the-scenes work to improve performance and stability by cleaning up code and getting rid of unnecessary logout calls.
• In our last update, student tiles in Classwize were supposed to display alphabetically by first name.  This wasn’t working for everyone, but it should be now.
• You’ll now get an error message if you try to create a website content filtering rule in School Manager that doesn’t include a URL.  We’re also forcing domain names in filtering rules to be in lowercase because some of you like writing domains in mixed or upper case and that both disturbs us and confuses the filter.
• We fixed an issue where you couldn’t run School Manager reports on some iOS users because there was a mismatch between their iOS login and the School Manager directory.
• Microsoft Azure should now successfully sync with School Manager if you have got the “Use Microsoft API” option checked.
• We fixed an issue for OneRoster users where syncing would fail due to an invalid certificate error despite your certificate being entirely valid.
• If you use both Google Groups and Google Classrooms, you shouldn’t get duplicate classrooms in Classwize after syncing anymore.
• We fixed an issue for Wonde users where teachers couldn’t be imported into School Manager.
• We’ve done some clean-up of the Classwize user interface to make things neater, and the text on the Focus interface should better reflect how the Focus feature works.