🆕 Enhancement releases
We've been busy! Here's a sneak peek at our June 2024 new features and improvements:
Student Activity Log on Individual Formatives
Teachers can now effortlessly track student engagement on specific assignments! This enhancement provides detailed insights into each student's activity, including login times, progress updates, and time spent on tasks. The Activity Log helps educators identify students who may need additional support and allows for timely interventions to ensure everyone stays on track. Enhance your teaching efficiency and student monitoring with the Activity Log!
Quick Links on the Formatives Tab
To accommodate teachers' need to access content items from multiple locations (folders), we added a way to generate a Quick Link to any content item (formative, folder, or practice set) which can be added to multiple folders on a teacher's account
Ready, Set... SPIN!
Introducing the student name spinner on the View Responses page. Spinner benefits include:
Fair Participation: It randomly picks students who are present, ensuring everyone gets a chance to contribute.
Boosts Engagement: Students stay more engaged when they know they might be called next.
Saves Teacher Time: It automates the selection process, freeing up teachers to focus on teaching.
Encourages Collaboration: Great for group activities, promoting teamwork.
Math Skills Practice Sets
New math practice skills sets for K-12 students are available on the Formative website!
Student Submission Summary
Students' progress on a formative will now be captured on a summary screen just for them! The screen will show an overview of their performance on the formative along with any revision and scoring options as set by the teacher.
Flexible Advanced Scoring
Teachers can now add partially correct responses to the answer key, offering more nuanced grading options for teachers.
Class Card Metadata
Class cards on the Classes tab now include metadata on student count, subject, grade level, org, and Oneroster, providing a more comprehensive overview at a glance.
"Create +" button and dropdown menus
We made some changes to the creation / quick start menus across several main tabs, switching the old "Add +" button with a "Create +" button and making some adjustments to the dropdown menu actions included on each page. Mainly, the changes include:
Addition of the option to distinguish between the quick creations of a new formative (standard editor), a new lesson (new presentation view with lesson blocks), and a new practice set - on both the Home tab and the Formatives tab
Several quick start options that used to be available on the Formatives tab are now available on the Home tab only, with the purpose of focusing the Formatives tab on organization actions rather than creation actions. Learn more about all this option in the help article linked here.
For Gold plan members: a new quick creation option for Common Assessments. This option will open the standard editor view of a new formative while simultaneously tagging it as a Common Assessment.
🤖 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:
Lesson Blocks
As part of the Presentation (Slides) view, Formative now offers a Lesson Blocks tool as a Beta experience. Utilize this powerful tool to instantly generate questions and activities to match the desired progression of the lesson and the purpose of the assignment you are creating. We offer several lesson blocks to accommodate the beginning of a lesson, the middle of a lesson, and the end of it.
Improved AI Generation of Practice Sets
We improved the AI generation experience for practice sets. The generator now persists so that users can continue to add generated cards to the set. Users can also select which generated cards should be included and return to Ai generation at any time during editing.
🛠️ 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!
🐞 Bugs
The below bugs were resolved throughout the month
Show practice sets on formatives list when filter isn't set
Students can directly query for items outside the respondus lockdown browser
Overlapping Drag and Drop UI
Rating listings in the library is now working
Syncing large google slides does not result in 429 errors
Uploading Slide Max
"Click to Flip!" tutorial popover not disappearing