Enhancements released during August 2022
New Pricing Plans are now available!
The Premium plan has been retired, and while existing Premium users will still have access to all Premium features, this plan is no longer available for purchase. Instead, we have released the Silver plan for individual teachers, and the Gold plan for schools and districts!
New Graphing Question! (Available for Silver and Gold subscribers)
Students will now be able to demonstrate their graphing skills on Formative. With our new graphing item type, students will be directed to graph one of four elements: lines, parabolas, exponential curves or points. The demonstrated ability to graph is a requirement in multiple sets of standards.
If teachers have an old graphing question on a formative and choose to replace it, they will be able to click "Use Graphing 2.0", which will replace the old question instead of adding a new one below it.
New Feature Requests Portal!
We LOVE getting suggestions from our educators on how we can make Formative better for them and their students! If you have an idea or a request for our Product Development team, simply click "Resources" in the left-side menu and then "Feature Requests" to fill out a quick form. You can also click "Open in Portal" to view other teachers' suggestions, vote on them, and follow up on the status of all suggestions. We can't promise to implement all of our educators suggestions, but we can promise to take them all into consideration!
New Formative Add-On in Google!
Teachers working from Google Classroom will now be able to open and edit a formative right from their Google Classroom screen. THIS. IS. EPIC. and opens a range of possibilities for formative growth. Formative is one of only a few apps with the Google Add-On privilege.
New Add+ Capabilities
There is now a quicker access to formatives and content using the new Add+ button. Located at the top right of the Formatives page, the button unifies a place to add formatives directly or by adding an imported document or enhanced video. This button also unifies the options to either create a new class or roster sync with Google Classroom, Microsoft Teams or Clever. These options will be offered on the Classes page as well!
Upgrades to Teacher-Paced Mode!
A new Lobby experience was added to the Teacher-Paced Mode where teachers will now have a live presence indicator for their students as well as easy to access join instructions, and the navigation bar has gone through a modernizing upgrade to become a floating bar with easier functions.
Two new enhancements to our Text-to-speech accommodation!
Reader speed - students will now be able to change the speed of the reader. This is another way we are supporting student comprehension in the learning process.
Highlighted click to read - To activate text-to-speech, students will activate the reader tool by clicking on content compatible with text-to-speech. The reader will begin AND it will highlight the text being read! This visual cue is an additional support for students to follow along with the content.
New languages added to the language chooser in settings!
Queen's English? The app now supports regional languages starting with British English which is currently available.
Arabic has also been added to the the language chooser in settings.
We removed the banner that allows the addition or dismissal of standards after a formative has been tagged with a standard(s) that is not set in settings from underneath the banner and made it less distracting by making it a floating banner.
The back button is back!
We heard you, and brought back the back button to make navigation easier.
From now on there is no need to "Ignore extra spaces" in Numeric question! Any whitespace in numeric questions will always be ignored.
The Formative editor page has gone through more design upgrades! Item types are now accompanied by a thumbnail, the blue circle around the item number is gone and margins and instructions are more consistent throughout. Additionally, each item's settings will be housed in Settings section marked by a Gear icon. It looks so nice!!
Formative is making strides towards conforming with site accessibility standards (WCAG2.1, Section 508, and EN 301 549). As an interim step, we have updated the site with the Formative Accessibility Statement.
Microsoft users will now see the Share to Microsoft button when they assign a formative to a non-Microsoft class. The share button will also appear when the user assigns in teacher paced mode.
Teacher and students will now see a timer to help them track time when they make an audio recording either in content items of in audio responses.
The user experience for functionalized images has improved by moving the edit tool and zoom feature to live inside the image container. The edit tool produces the 'change image' modal within the container and the zoom brings the image to full screen.
Users can now use the all seeing eye to view their password as it is typed
Admins will be able to publish listing to the bundles (folders) of teachers within their org.
Bundle (folder) owners will inherit edit access to other people's listings that are included in their bundle. Admins will now inherit editing access to any listing that is shared to their org.
READING has been added as a subject of choice!
The math keyboard has been updated by replacing the red circle and highliter editing keys with the "approximate" symbol and the "inequality" symbol
