We are pleased to announce another update to the PlusPortals. This update contains several important feature fixes and enhancements:
- An added setting prevents teachers from sending e-mail notifications when posting content.
- The School Announcements area of the PlusPortals Admin Site loads faster.
- The Report Card tab shows the date and time the information was last updated.
- Students can see group events in all areas events display in PlusPortals.
- Teachers can access the details for their students’ other classes on the Students tab.
Feature Enhancements
Teachers can be prevented from sending e-mail notifications for new and edited content.
When teachers create or edit content for a class, such as a Homework Assignment or Class Announcement, they have the option to send an e-mail notification to parents and students. A new option has been added to the bottom of the Permissions > Teachers area of the PlusPortals Admin Site, allowing schools to disable this feature.
This option is selected by default to ensure that teachers’ existing functionality isn’t interrupted.
The School Announcements area of the PlusPortals Admin Site loads faster.
Improvements have been made to how data loads to the Announcements, Notifications, and Alerts tabs to significantly increase the loading speed.
Prior to this update, schools that frequently post these communications were experiencing long loading times when accessing these tabs.
The Report Card tab displays the date and time of the last Grades & Narratives sync.
The information on the Report Card tab comes from AdminPlus via the Grades & Narratives option in the TeacherPlus Setup & Sync Manager. The grading information in the rest of the PlusPortals is live from TeacherPlus Gradebook and always up-to-date.
To prevent parents and students from becoming confused if the grading information on the Report Card tab does not match the grading information in the rest of the PlusPortals, the date and time of the last Grades & Narratives sync is shown.
The Day and Week views of the Calendar default to Full Day.
The hour display settings of the Calendar’s Day and Week views can be toggled by clicking a Show business hours / Show full day button in the lower-left corner of the grid.
Prior to this update, these views defaulted to business hours (7:00 am to 5:00 pm), which may have caused users to not see events that occurred outside of these hours.
The Login History for users is shown in local time.
The login history for individual users can be viewed in the Manage Accounts area of the PlusPortals Admin Site. The most recent login appears directly in the Last Logon Date column and the history of logins appear on a pop-up when Login History in the column is clicked.
Prior to this update, these times were shown in Universal Coordinated Time (UTC). They are now determined by the time zone selected in the Logs > Time Zone Settings area of the TeacherPlus Management Site.
Feature Fixes
Students can now see Group Events in all areas events display in PlusPortals.
Prior to this update, students that were members of a group could see events created for that group only on the Group Calendar.
Teachers can access the details for their students’ other classes on the Students tab.
Prior to this update, clicking on a student’s class on this tab caused the teacher to be logged out of the PlusPortals.
Parents and students always see Homework/Assignments that are set as “visible” by the teacher.
Prior to this update, if the teacher set both the Visible From and To dates to today’s date, parents and students were unable to see the assignment unless they visited the Class Page.
Parents and students associated only with the Scheduling Year can be added as recipients for e-mails.
Prior to this update, these “incoming” users were showing in other areas of the PlusPortals but were not appearing on the recipient selection menu.
The batch approval process now works for all Course Request Forms.
Prior to this update, if any Scheduling Year students were selected, the Approve Selected Course Requests button on the Review Requests screen did not work.
When viewing students through a group, Group Heads are now able to see any assignments in the students’ No Score Posted as of box for individual classes.
Prior to this update, this box appeared blank for Group Heads, though parents and students could see the assignments in the box properly.
Attached files can now be included in the e-mails that are sent to parents and students when a teacher creates new content and uses the Send E-Mail Notification option.
If the attached file size exceeds 25 megabytes, the file cannot be delivered via e-mail. In this case, the file is omitted from the e-mail.
The History box on the Parent/Student Discipline tab now sorts incident records properly in descending order.
Prior to this update, the year of the incident record was not being considered – records were sorting in descending order by month and day only.
Changes to Demographics visibility settings for existing Groups save correctly.
Prior to this update, if an existing Group was edited to make additional Demographics fields visible to the Group Head, the new fields became visible but any previously visible fields became hidden.
User-created folders in the School Resources section can be deleted regardless of their position.
Prior to this update, the folder at the top of the list could not be deleted.
The root “School Folder” folder cannot be deleted, as it is part of the system.