Classwize 2021-03-22

22 March, 2021

Welcome to Classwize Release 2021-03-22

Just a quick tweak for you today!

New Features & Improvements

• We’ve changed the way that Classwize interacts with students’ school-managed BYOD devices to better ensure that student activity isn’t captured when students aren’t at school.

Classwize 2021-03-10: Close Chrome Tab

10 March, 2021

Welcome to Classwize Release: Close Chrome Tab!

We’re excited to bring you a much-requested feature: the ability to close students’ Chrome tabs!

New Features & Improvements

• Close Tab is finally here for Chrome! If a student is using a Chrome account that's managed by your school, you can close any Chrome tab that they have open just by clicking the X on their tile. Your school can turn Close Tab on by following this guide, while teachers can learn how to use the feature by checking out our quick guide.
• As a bonus, if Close Tab is turned on and you create a new Block rule in Classwize , it will immediately close Chrome tabs that match your rule!

Classwize 2021-03-03: Help Drawer

3 March, 2021

Welcome to Classwize Release: Help Drawer!

This release we’re proud to continue our work bringing you better help resources for Classwize with our new Help Drawer! This new feature gives you instant access to our growing collection of help articles from inside Classwize.

New Features & Improvements

• Have you ever wondered what “waiting on student activity” actually means? Well, now you can click on Help and find out! Clicking on Help will pop out our new Help Drawer, which contains our growing collection of guides and help articles!
• We’ve added a new, special type of class: Monitoring Mode. Monitoring Mode classes are designed to let teachers and other staff members, like school counselors, monitor a group of students throughout the whole school day without accidentally enforcing a rule on them. This feature is optional and can be turned on by your school by following this guide.
• Close Chrome Tab is almost here! Over the next few weeks we’ll be rolling out an update to our Chrome and Chromebook extensions that will give teachers the ability to close Chrome tabs. We’ll have some more info for you soon about how it works and (most importantly) how to turn it on!
• We’ve made it so that users who are in a Teacher Group will never have a tile or screenshot visible in Classwize. It also won’t be possible to add them as students to classes by using the Modify Students button in Classwize.
• How many stores does it take to store users? Fewer than it used to!
• We’ve made it so that you can use Focus on a signature that doesn’t contain at least one URL.
• We’re making some changes to the way you login to Classwize to make it easier and more secure. While most of this work so far is behind the scenes, you can now see your school’s unique Classwize login url in School Manager, by going to Configuration > Classwize.

Bug Fixes

• We fixed an issue with Wonde syncs that could lead to teachers not being matched to their classes.
• We un-stuck Google Classroom from getting stuck when there's a failure saving the sync state.
• We broke an endless sign-in loop. If only breaking other things also fixed them.

School Manager Release 1.6.9

3 February, 2021

Welcome to School Manager release 1.6.9!

New Features & Improvements

• The User Timeline Report now includes the student’s machine name. This is particularly useful for working out what machines are generating large amounts of traffic in computer labs or other shared environments.
• We’ve made a bunch of report columns sortable, including all columns in the User Timeline Report and in the Cyber Safety, Cyber Safety Videos and Cyber Safety Block Reports.

Bug Fixes

• We fixed an issue that could cause the Captive Portal to be very slow to load after a user had connected to the school’s WiFi.

Classwize and School Manager (Cloud) Release 1.6.7

14 January, 2021

Welcome to Classwize and School Manager release 1.6.7!

We’re hoping to start 2021 off with a bang for you, releasing the first of many new features we have planned for both School Manager and Classwize and laying the groundwork for several more.

1.6.7 begins with some Classwize quality-of-life improvements. In addition to the usual bug fixes and tweaks, we’ve  changed the way you start and end unscheduled class sessions. Instead of giving a class session a set duration, you can select or set your desired end time. You can also stop or extend these sessions while the class is running!

With this release we’re also laying the groundwork for two important features, one in Classwize and one in School Manager:

Coming Soon

School Manager: Phase One of the Student Journey Report

We’re committed to bringing you more and more useful information about what students are viewing online throughout the day. We’re making a bunch of changes in the back end to give your richer data in a better interface called the Student Journey Report, so watch this space!

Classwize: Close Student Tab

We’re making some changes to prepare for the release of the new Close Tab function in Classwize, which will let you close any Chrome tab a student has open. Most of these changes are behind the scenes, but we have removed the ability to create rules directly from the student’s tile. You can still set rules for individual students by using the Rules tool.

New Features & Improvements

• Starting a new class? Just pick when you want it to end! And if you want to extend it or stop it early, you can now do that too!
• If we have the student’s machine name, we’ll now show it to you in School Manager’s student timeline.
• We've improved the way that School Manager synchronizes with Clever.
• Classwize users may notice that the Block toggle is gone from the student tile. This is part of the work to prepare for the upcoming Close Tab feature. You can still create Rules that block a signature for a single student using the Rules tool.

Bug Fixes

• We fixed a rare issue where students’ connections were being linked to the wrong signature if captive portal was enabled in School Manager, and another where searches containing special characters weren’t always being correctly flagged.
• School Manager will no longer get stuck loading if you delete all Object Pools in Configuration > Objects > Pools.
• School Manager wasn’t letting you add top level domains or other urls that begin with a full stop to object pools on Configuration > Objects > Pools.
• We fixed some typeos typos.
• Alternating between Pausing the internet and Focusing students could sometimes cause Classwize to crash. We don’t crash when you do this anymore.
• We fixed some Classwize UI glitches that happened when you had lots of classes.

Mobile Zone for Windows (3.0.1) and MacOS (2.4.6)

13 January, 2021

Welcome to Mobile Zone for Windows (3.0.1) and MacOS (2.4.6)

Welcome to our first release of 2021! This release is for Mobile Zone on both Windows and MacOS laptops.

The big change for this release is that Mobile Zone will now capture the user’s machine name to support an upcoming reporting change in School Manager. We've also made a bunch of changes that should improve performance of the Windows client, improved the way we handle verdict timeouts and fixed a couple of bugs.

New Features & Improvements

• The Windows installer is now about 60% smaller.
• We now capture the user’s Machine Name so we can report on it in School Manager.
• We’ve improved the way we handle verdict timeouts, and we're also quicker to trigger our fallback mode, Safe Guard, in some cases.
• We've made a lot of improvements to packet handling, which should improve performance on Windows machines.

Bug

• We fixed an issue where users with Mobile Zone for Windows couldn’t upload files to MIT’s App Inventor.
• We fixed an issue where laptops could be served an expired agent certificate from the cache.

Classwize and School Manager (Cloud) Release 1.6.6

17 December, 2020

Welcome to Classwize and School Manager release 1.6.6!

This is our last major release for 2020, and our focus has been on laying the groundwork for things that we want to accomplish next year.  We’ve made our first steps towards providing better help for Classwize from within Classwize by adding a new Guide button which links to our Classwize cheat sheet pdf.  We’ve also started work making student tiles more informative and giving you a better idea of why you might not be seeing any activity from a student in your class.

Thank you all for your continued support this past year.  We’re very excited about what we’re planning to bring you in 2021!

New Features & Improvements

• We’ve added a new Guide button to the Classwize menu.  This opens up a pdf cheat sheet covering the Classwize interface and how Class Tools work.  It’s a bit barebones at the moment, but it’s a  stepping stone to providing easier access to help information from inside Classwize.  Watch this space!
• We’ve updated what Classwize student tiles show when Classwize can’t see any activity from a student.  Previously the student would show up as offline when that wasn’t always the case.
• We’ve given School Manager administrators the ability to stop users from being able to logout from the block page.
• The Send Message Class Tool in Classwize stores the last message you sent to your students.  The drawback of that, aside from being able to see the embarrassing typos you made, was that you had to manually delete the old text before you could send a new message with new typos.  We’ve now added a ‘Clear’ button to quickly remove the old message text.
• Our Australian School Manager support phone number has changed and we changed the support menu accordingly.

Bug Fixes

• We fixed an uncommon issue where OneRoster and ClassLink syncs would fail because it had a sync status of ‘none’.
• In very large schools with tens of thousands of classes, adding or editing a class shouldn’t cause School Manager and Classwize to timeout or give an internal server error any more. 
• We fixed an issue where clicking on a Red Flag in School Manager would return a ‘no data to display’ error.
• Video views and search counts should now correctly update if you change the time period of a User Timeline Report in School Manager.

Mobile Zone for Chrome 1.8.5

11 December, 2020

Welcome to Mobile Zone for Chrome 1.8.5!

Our focus for this release has been on improving performance and giving teachers better visibility on what their students are actually up to.

We’re rolling this update out in stages over the next week, so it may take a little while for it to be available for you.

New Features

• We've improved the logic behind when Mobile Zone takes screenshots.  It now takes a screenshot if:
• the student opens a new tab or window.
• the student goes to a new website.
• the teacher sends a message or pauses the internet.
• it hasn't taken another screenshot in the last ten seconds.

Bug Fixes

• We discovered and fixed a situation where entering a Bypass Code didn't actually let you bypass anything.
• Some strange things were happening when students opened a blank page as a new tab or were in one of Chrome's internal (chrome://) menus.  There should be less strangeness (and fewer crashes) now.

Classwize and School Manager (Cloud) Release 1.6.1

7 December, 2020

Welcome to Classwize and School Manager release 1.61!

Our focus for this release was to build on some of the work we’ve done in other releases over the past few months.  For Classwize users, this means improving our menus and interface to make it easier to use and give you more information about what’s going on in your class.  For School Manager users, we’re continuing to do work in the background to improve performance, particularly when syncing.

New Features

• We now tell you if you can’t modify students in your Classwize class because they’re being managed by your school.
• The toolbar in Classwize no longer gets hidden if you have a large class and scroll down the page.
• You should no longer need to refresh Classwize to see changes you’ve made using the Modify Students tool.
• If you’re not certain who you are, Classwize will not help you resolve any existential crises but it will now show who you’re logged in as.
• We’ve improved the way that School Manager syncs with OneRoster, particularly for schools that have very large data sets. 
• Teachers who were assigned to a Classwize class as observers were being treated as if they were students by Classwize, and being affected by all of the class tools settings.  We’ve made it so that doesn’t happen anymore if you use Exceptions in School Manager to add teachers to a class.
• We’ve made some descriptions of configuration options in School Manager more, er, descriptive.
• Classwize is now compatible with Python 3.9.0.

Bug Fixes

• Substitute or relief teachers should now see all of the Classwize classrooms that they’re eligible to teach in.
• We fixed an issue where keyword blocking wasn’t always working if the student was not on the school network.
• School Manager's Alert Manager shouldn’t throw a tantrum when it encounters Red Flags containing certain uncommon unicode characters.
• A recursive loop was causing Signature/Category searches in School Manager to get stuck at the ‘loading’ stage because they were stuck in a recursive loop.  
• It was possible to use Classwize to send messages and set focus, reward and pause rules for students and have them apply even when your class wasn’t in session.  We’ve fixed this and also made it more clear which of your class tools can be used when your class isn’t in session.
• We fixed an issue where School Manager administrators could see the Cyber Safety, Overview and Activity pages of groups they weren’t assigned to.
• School Manager shouldn’t direct Australian users to US-based support.

Classwize and School Manager (Cloud) Release 1.5.9

5 November, 2020

Welcome to Classwize and School Manager release 1.5.9!

Our focus for this release has been on giving some love to content filtering tools and giving School Manager Global Administrators the ability to import more and more useful data.

New Features

• We’ve expanded the types of data you can import into School Manager. You can now import IP ranges, IP Subnets, MAC addresses and search keywords in the "Configuration > Tools > Pool" workflow. We’ll have a guide to doing this soon!
• The ‘Signature/Category Search’ in "Filtering > Content Filtering" will now tell you if a domain you’re searching for sits in a category that has a parent category, and what that parent category is. For example, if you search for webjet.com, the search should tell you that this domain sits in the ‘Travel’ category, which is part of the ‘Shopping and Travel’ category.
• We’ve completed moving Classwize from being styled with CSS to being styled with SCSS. We’re sure you’re as excited about this as we are.
• We’ve continued to tweak the Classwize UI, this time to save you valuable clicks when using Class Tools to message students or open new sites for them.

Bug Fixes

• The ‘Signature/Category Search’ in "Filtering > Content Filtering" in School Manager no longer returns incorrect results if you have blocked or allowed top level domains like .co.
• We fixed an issue for Australian and New Zealand schools where Filtering Alert emails thought you were in America.
• When editing or making a report in "Filtering > Emailed Reports", you should now be able to see all available Red Flags instead of just the ones that fit on your screen.
• You shouldn’t get unwanted duplicate classrooms in Classwize after syncing anymore. You can, however, deliberately create duplicates if you’re certain you really want to.
• We fixed a rare issue in Classwize where adding a student to your class using Class Tools could cause Classwize to hang and return an error message until you refreshed your browser.
• Our banner in School Manager alerting you of incidents was automatically giving you a start and finish date even when we didn’t actually have them.
• You should be able to apply schedules to Classwize classes created from LDAP and Azure group imports once again.
• We fixed an issue in School Manager where using a Client’s OAuth Key for Google Sync would stop Classrooms from syncing about an hour after you turned on.
• While we normally value out-of-the-box thinking, we had to fix an issue in Classwize where the student tiles would break out of their container boxes if students opened a lot of tabs or websites in very quick succession.