🆕 Enhancement releases
We've been busy! Here's a sneak peek at our latest new features and improvements:
Collaborator Avatars Update
We made teamwork on formatives and lessons a lot less like a guessing game and a lot more like a party. We’ve just leveled up our real-time presence and history tracking so you’ll never have to ask "Wait, is someone else editing this right now?" ever again. Teachers will see their colleagues avatars as they edit, real-time.
Here’s the breakdown:
Spot Your Work-Bestie (Live Avatars)
Contextual Presence: While you’re in the zone, you’ll see avatars pop up right next to specific questions or content items. If a teammate is focused on a block, their face is right there. No more accidental overwrites!
Sidebar Sneak-Peek: In the Lesson Builder, we’ve added presence to the sidebar outline. You can see who is working on what part of the lesson without having to scroll through the entire canvas.
The "Receipts" Panel (Collaborators & Version History)
Live Roster: The new Collaborators panel gives you the full rundown of the owner and guests, including clear online/offline status indicators.
Relative Timing: See "Just now" or "2 hours ago" for a quick pulse check, or hover over the event to see the exact timestamp down to the second.
Answer on Behalf of Student
This new feature allows teachers to enter formative responses on behalf of a student via an "answer on behalf of student" option in the grading sidebar.
This update provides a crucial tool for teachers to seamlessly capture oral or hands-on responses, ensuring accurate formative data tracking while removing technical barriers for students. It is especially beneficial for younger grades (Pre-K to 2nd) who haven't mastered typing or device logins, allowing teachers to input their verbal or play-based answers directly without interrupting their natural learning momentum.
Piecewise, Matrix, and Determinant Buttons on the MathLive Functions Keyboard
The MathLive keyboard has been updated with new dedicated buttons for piecewise functions, matrices, and determinants.
These buttons insert pre-formatted templates with placeholders, allowing students and teachers to input complex mathematical structures more easily. Users can use standard MathLive commands to expand these structures as needed, improving the accessibility and speed of math content creation and response.
Student Notes in Assign Modal
Teachers can turn Student Notes on or off while assigning; students see notes when teachers enable them, allowing teachers to regulate learning environment.
Enhanced PDF Import for Dropdowns and Blanks
The AI PDF importer now supports "Inline Choice" (Dropdown) and "Fill in the Blank" question types. This improvement allows teachers to import a wider variety of digital documents more accurately, as the system now correctly maps choices and correct answers for these complex interactive question formats.
Suggest Standards for Items Parsed from PDFs
Teachers using the PDF parsing flow (Generate Questions) can now enable an "Add standards" toggle during question generation.
This feature utilizes AI to analyze parsed content and automatically suggest and attach relevant standards to the generated items.
This automation significantly reduces the manual work required to align new PDF-based assignments with educational standards, streamlining the content creation process.
Rubric Tracker Report
Added Rubric Criteria Standards data to the Tracker to ensure correct standards and score calculations when criteria-level standards are present.
Image & Files upload limits
Increased the file size upload limits across the product so teachers can add more content easily.
In addition, the amount of page uploads available to Free Teacher account holder has increased to 200 pages per month.
Dark Mode (Students)
We introduced Dark Mode on student accounts.
Students can navigate to their account settings page and select between 'light mode' or 'dark mode' at their preference.
Numeric Tolerance Acceptance
Numeric questions now allow teachers to choose how strictly student answers are graded. This helps teachers support exact responses, acceptable ranges, and real-world measurement variation.
Teachers will be able to select from the following options:
Exact
Student answer must match the expected value exactly.Range
Student answer must fall within your accepted interval (minimum/maximum).Tolerance
Student answer must fall within answer ± tolerance value.Percentage Tolerance
Student answer must fall within answer ± (answer × percentage / 100).
Automatic Grade Passback for LTI connections
We’re excited to share a new time-saver for any district using an LTI-connected LMS (Canvas, Schoology, Jupiter, Blackbaud, etc.): Automatic Grade Passback.
No more extra clicks or manual syncs when all conditions are met, scores now flow straight back to your LMS gradebook.
All you have to do is toggle on automatic grade passback when assigning through your LMS for it to work (plus some additional qualifiers).
Click on the name of the LMS you're using above to learn more!
Graphing Inequalities
You can represent inequalities on the coordinate plane—not just equations—by combining a boundary line or curve with shading that shows the solution region.
🤖 Beta and Early Access Features Updates
The below features have been added to our list of future features teachers can opt-in to test with us:
Mark a Question as Extra Credit (Early Access)
Extra Credit arrived!
Teachers can mark any question as “Extra Credit.” Students earn bonus points for a correct answer, but a wrong one won’t lower their overall grade.
Points earned are added to the total score, but the question’s point value is not added to “points possible” — which means students can score above 100%.
How to Get Started
Teacher Opt-In: Teachers head to Profile Settings and toggle on “Extra Credit” to enable it.
Question Settings: Once enabled, a new “Extra Credit” toggle appears in the settings for any question type.
Assign Mode Consolidation (Early Access)
Teachers can now opt-in to a early access experience that consolidates the "Assign" and "Present" workflows into a single unified action.
This simplifies the logistics of launching a formative by allowing teachers to manage all delivery settings and modes in one place, streamlining their classroom preparation.
📚 Content Updates
The following content has been added to the Formative library! Click the hyperlink to grab a copy for yourself:
VaSCL Item Bank
The VaSCL (Virgina School Consortium for Learning) item bank is a vast library of high-quality content to support Virginia educators, and it includes thousands of Math and Science items.
Users who have both the Newsela and the VaSCL item banks can seamlessly toggle between them.
🛠️ Fixes
Every technological tool runs into hiccups here and there. If you run into any technical issues please submit a report to our team so we could go ahead and fix it!
Formative Title Editing
We have restored the ability to edit formative titles directly within the navigation bar. This change increases teacher efficiency by allowing quick naming updates without having to open the full introduction settings, maintaining focus during the formative building and grading processes.
YouTube for Education
Updated add-video modal, safer YouTube embeds, and aligned YouTube for Education delivery so teachers embed video reliably and students watch without broken players.
🐞 Bugs
The below bugs were resolved throughout the month
Pasted files in rich text | Teachers can paste files into rich text without broken uploads.
Private video React crash | Students and teachers can open private videos without the app crashing.
Student total score after first response | Students see their total score right after answering.
Preview header aggregate vs formative total | Teachers preview sees the formative total, not a misleading aggregate.
TTS + image alt text | Students using text-to-speech hear image descriptions.
MC labels + VoiceOver (iPad) | Students on iPad with VoiceOver hear multiple-choice option labels.
LaTeX copy in Tiptap | Teachers copy LaTeX out of rich text reliably.
Numeric dynamic expression duplicate labels | Teachers build numeric generators without duplicate screen-reader labels.
Contribution criteria + untagged standards groupby | Teachers grouping by standard get correct contributions when criteria lack tags.
FITB blanks detection on text change | Fill-in-the-blank items detect new blanks when question text changes.
Assign settings + student translations | Assign settings save correctly with student translations on.
DnD correctness indicator position | Students see drag-and-drop correctness in the right place
Graph shading direction auto-grade | Students are graded fairly on graph shading direction.
Rich text math padding | Students and teachers see full math expressions without clipping.
Password field aria-describedby | Screen reader users get correct hints on password fields.