Grades, Grades, Grades

So what does every teacher have in common? Well for one, they all do grades! (for the most part at least). As I've stated time and again, this venture is about you, the teachers, students and educational community at large. Its about what you want, what you need, and about getting it to you quickly and effectively.

With that in mind, this upcoming release is going to be a bit different. I am going to go against convention, and tell you that in our next release we will be giving you a grade book! We have already spoken to several teachers and have a pretty good list of features that will be introduced for the grade book, but we also realize that every teacher has their own style of grading, and so as hard as we try, we wont be able to hit this one exactly on the head first time around, but we do want to try. We will be sending out a formal survey to all of you very soon outlining our current feature set for the first version of the grade book, asking you to vote on your preferred features, and giving you the opportunity to suggest features you would like to see! But before we do that, I thought I would start an informal discussion here to get some ideas. So here is what you will see in the first version of the grade book:

• Add an Assignment: Easily add a new assignment column to your grade book (including name, point value, etc.)
• Quick Edit: Edit any grade by clicking it, simulating writing on a piece of paper, its real time!
• Sort: Sort your grades by students, or any assignment score.
• Export/Import: Export your grade book to an excel spreadsheet, or import your grades into your VirtualOffice.
• Print Friendly: Generate a clean, print friendly version of your grades to post up.
• Apply Weights: Apply a bell curve or other method to your grade book.
• Publish: Make your grades available to your students in their HomeRoom. This would ensure absolute privacy to all your students.

Anyway, this is a short list, and we have tones more ideas, but those will be saved for future releases. In the mean time though, we would love to hear about features you would like to see!

Cheers, Dan

VirtualOffice 2.4 is Out!

All the hard work has paid off! VirtualOffice 2.4 is out! As most of you already know by now, we have just released the latest version of VirtualOffice. This was a relatively big release.

So what did we add? In summary:

• Course Glossary: Students need to know terms and definitions, and sure you could put your own glossary page together using our webpage creator, but we thought we would take it further, and let you not only add terms and definitions in a snap, but also let your students suggest their own terms and definitions! In case you haven't noticed, we believe that your website (like your classroom) should be interactive. Even cooler is the auto-indexing feature! Every time you create a glossary word, our technology will auto-index your entire website and turn every instance of a glossary word into a pop up definition word! All your student has to do is place their mouse over the word, and the definition pops up! How cool is that?! I know I could have used that when I was in school.
  
• Forum Upgrades: This one comes directly from our users (special thanks to Felicia Estrada and Marjory Thrash on this one!). Sure our forums are easy to set up and easy to use, but why not make them a bit more powerful? To do that, we are now allowing you and your students to attach a document to any post your create, and we allow you to add quick comments and posts to any existing post, allowing you add your 2 cents (or more if you like) to any existing post.
  
• Messaging System Upgrade: Once again, this one comes from our users. Many times teachers want to send messages to groups of students or parents. Our new groups feature allows you to create custom groups of website users (teachers or students) that you can then send messages to.
  
• Tell-A-Friend: I've said it before, and I'll say it again. We love our users! And we like to think they like us too :) So we have added a new feature that lets you (our users) spread the word quickly and conveniently from your VirtualOffice. Simply fill in the names and emails of friends and colleagues who might be interested in VirtualOffice, and we'll send them some quick info! We do not save any of the information you submit, and under no circumstances do we spam.
  
• Upgrades, Upgrades, Upgrades: We love upgrades! We are always looking for new ways and new technology to make things run faster and smoother for you, and we've done it again! Our new upgrades should make your experience a lot better and faster.

That covers the major new features, and I hope you enjoy them! We have been getting a lot of great feedback from our users lately (ranging from 4th grade teachers to university profs), so we must be doing something right. Time to start working on the next big release! Stay tuned.

Cheers, Dan