We are pleased to announce another update to PlusPortals. This update contains several important feature fixes, including the following:
- The Course Requests export is improved.
- Announcements, Notifications, and Alerts are easier for users to read.
- New Year Transition Mode can be applied to teachers.
- Incoming students transferring to another school in the district can access their Course Request Forms in the new school.
- The Count in Averages default settings in the TeacherPlus Management Site are adhered to when teachers create assignments in PlusPortals.
- Teachers can add Class Files from the previous year.
PlusPortals will be updated during the early morning (EDT), April 13, 2018. If you have any questions related to this update, please e-mail [email protected] or call Tech Support at 800-882-2994.
Feature Enhancements
The Course Requests export includes only pertinent courses by default.
The Course Requests export contains only the courses which have at least one selection or comment by a student, parent, or reviewer. If users want to see all courses in the export, they can select the Include courses with no selections or comments option before generating the export.
This option always defaults to unchecked.
Prior to this update, the Course Requests export included all courses on the course request form, whether or not a student, parent, or reviewer selected and/or commented on the course. The resulting file was much larger than necessary and the user had to filter the spreadsheet on multiple columns to see which courses were selected and/or had comments.
The Course Requests export includes the date the form was submitted.
The date field is helpful for schools that approve requests in waves and give priority to students that submit their forms early. Prior to this update, the Course Requests and Course Form Status exports had to be generated and compared.
Announcements, Notifications, and Alerts are easier to read.
The dialog boxes that display the details of these communications are enhanced for readability, specifically to support the larger character limits implemented in the February 1st, 2018 PlusPortals update.
New Year Transition Mode can be applied to teachers.
The Active for teachers option has been added to the New Year Transition Mode section of the Manage Accounts > Settings area in the PlusPortals Admin Site. When set to Yes, teachers can log in to PlusPortals. However, they cannot see scheduling information or access TeacherPlus Gradebook through PlusPortals.
The Restriction List feature has been relocated and saves faster.
The Restriction List feature was moved from the Permissions > Summary area to the Manage Accounts > Settings area to group it with all other account-related options.
In addition, when Save Restriction List is clicked, updates that add large numbers of parents and students to the list save faster.
Feature Fixes
- Students transferring between schools that are connected by the PlusPortals District feature can access their Course Requests Forms in the new school. Prior to this update, if a student was added to the Scheduling Year of the new school using the same PlusPortals username as their current school, they could not access their role for the new school.
- When teachers create assignments in PlusPortals, the Count in Averages setting adheres to the defaults set in the General Settings > Columns area of the TeacherPlus Management Site.
- Teachers can add class files from the previous school year. Prior to this update, when a teacher attempted to add a file from the previous year, the selection panel loaded continuously.
- Group Heads with teachers as Group Members can access the teachers’ Students tab for a class based on the group’s permissions. Prior to this update, if non-teaching staff members (APIDs of ST301-600) attempted to access this tab, an error displayed.
- Group Heads with teachers as Group Members can access teachers' schedules based on the group’s permissions. Prior to this update, if a Group Head clicked View Schedule for a teacher, an error displayed.
- Announcements in the School Announcements box on a teacher's, parent's, or student's home page sort based on the school’s settings.
- E-mails can be forwarded from the Archive folders. Prior to this update, an error displayed when a user attempted to forward an archived e-mail.
- The delivery details for e-mails with large groups of recipients appear in the E-Mail Analytics > Activity area of the PlusPortals Admin Site. Prior to this update, when an email detail screen containing more than several thousand records was loading, the records did not appear.
- The start and end times for calendar events imported from .ics files are no longer offset. Prior to this update, the event times were offset by the number of hours between the school’s time zone and Universal Coordinated Time.