News in Tools



ActiveClass

School Year 2023-2024

01/2024 Assigning boards based on groups or sections 

Assign discussion boards to different group and sections that are created in Canvas People. Learn how to easily manage large class participation in discussions

School Year 2022-2023

06/2023 Insights Dashboard

Visualize patterns of student participation. Get a look into individual participant details and interactions between students for insight into what posts are most engaging in your classroom and to your students. Learn more about Insights and how can it be used.

04/2023 Copy over discussion boards

Copy over assignments and discussion board configurations from prior courses.

04/2023 Enrollment updates

Enrollment updates to reflect student status for students who drop or withdraw.

01/ 2023 Comment due dates

Set comment by due date in addition to the post due date. 

Return to Top 

Feedback Fruits

Feedback Fruits (All)

05/2023 Mute email notifications

Teaching staff can now mute email notifications for specific activities. To mute notifications for a specific activity, click on the three-dot button located in the top right corner of the assignment. This action can be undone at any time.

02/2023 Confirmation button when deleting learning steps

When deleting a step in an assignment (either when creating a new activity or editing an existing one), FeedbackFruits will ask for confirmation first. This double-check provides more security to teachers when managing assignments: no step is erased by accident, nor configuration settings or student data is lost.

01/2022 Sharing of learning activity set-ups 

Share a copy of activity templates from "My library". Receivers can edit the copied template further and implement the activity. Generic data such as settings, instructions, criteria and notes will be copied. Student data will not be copied.



Feedback Fruits Peer Review

04/2023 Keyword Insights

Get a short summary of the most used words in the discussion and see the comments in which these words appear



Feedback Fruits Group Member Evaluations

05/2023 Automated Feedback Coach 2.0

The Coach provides real-time formative feedback to students, helping them improve their feedback skills and literacy. Besides, it detects any potential offensive language in the reviews. Learn how to turn on the AI Feedback Coach.

05/2023 Group Contribution Grading explanation

More detailed and informative dialog to the Group Contribution Grading feature to reduce questions and confusion with this feature. See the updated help articles for the feature, which now includes the formulas to calculate it manually, if desired.

04/2023 Keyword Insights

Get a short summary of the most used words in the discussion and see the comments in which these words appear



Feedback Fruits Comprehension

02/2023 Summary drafts in Comprehension 

Draft auto-saving for summaries. No work will be lost even if the student navigates away from the text field, refreshes the page, or is logged out. 



Feedback Fruits Discussion

03/2023 New rich text editor when writing instructions (Discussion Topic)

Emphasize or highlight your texts by using bold, italic, headings, bulleted lists, equations, and other options. Preview the text formatting before publishing, ensuring that the text looks as desired.

02/2023 Free Form Discussion (Discussion Topic)

Students chose comment on any one of their classmates' posts rather being assigned to comment. Assigned discussion ensures everyone's posts is discussed by allocation.

01/2023 Search through posts in Discussions (Discussion Topic)

Search through posts, in addition to comments creators, and comments, by clicking on the search bar.

01/2023 Flagging and deleting posts (Discussion Topic)

Students can flag posts to be reported to the teacher. Teachers can delete reported and non-reported topics when necessary. The flag is not visible to other students.

01/2023 Select most valuable contributions (Discussion Topic)

Allow students to select their most insightful or valuable contributions to be graded by the teacher by adding it as a learning step module.

Deep dive into the details and watch videos on Feedback Fruits monthly feature updates

 Return to Top 

Gradescope

School Year 2023-2024

07/2023 Grade versioned exams

Manage collections of Exam / Quiz assignments with different questions as a single exam version set.

07/2023 Grade fully anonymously

Enable anonymity for to redact name and ID regions specified on the Edit Outline page when viewing the submission.

07/2023 More accessible Gradescope 

Accessibility enhancements uses the browser-native date/time picker, making it fully accessible via keyboard and screen reader navigation

07/2023 Export submissions for online assignments 

Easily export student submissions for Online Assignments, including a CSV of all students’ responses for all questions on a given online assignment with timestamps.

07/2023 Annotate with emoji 

Apply any one of the thousands of available emoji and stamps (like checkmarks, Xs, question marks, and more) directly on a student’s submission.

07/2023 Demo assignments by discipline 

Demo assignments. The examples were developed by real educators who use Gradescope, and include subject-specific exams, as well as a demo bubble sheet, programming, and online assignment.


School Year 2022-2023

04/2023 Instructor uploads for variable-length assignments

Upload images and PDFs on behalf of students to variable-length assignments via the new Resubmit button on a student's submission.

04/2022 Statistics by course section 

Isolate grading statistics for your applicable courses by one or more section(s).

04/2023 Rubric visibility options 

Show only applied rubric items for both positive and negative scoring schemes.

04/2023 Code autograder output formats 

For programming assignments, use HTML, Markdown, and ANSI formatting in the required results.json file for code autograders to format output for students to include line breaks, colors, and more.

04/2023 Gradescope in Traditional Chinese

Native users of Traditional Chinese can enjoy Gradescope in their preferred writing system. This is in addition to the nine (!) languages Gradescope supports: English, Spanish, French, Brazilian Portuguese, German, Dutch, Japanese, Korean, and Turkish.

Return to Top 

Kialo

School Year 2023-2024

09/2023 Grading and Feedback feature

The Grading and Feedback feature lets you give scores and written feedback within discussions, and students can see your feedback right alongside their work. (Note: the grades and feedback do not pass back into Canvas. There is the ability export the discussion stats into a CSV spreadsheet file.

09/2023 Interactive sunburst

Toggle the minimap at the top of your discussion to show a new interactive sunburst instead of the argument tree. The sunburst can be used to browse the discussion, letting you keep the big picture while exploring in detail. Learn more about using the sunburst navigator.

School Year 2022-2023

06/2023 Customize default settings

Save custom default settings for your future discussions. You can save your preferred settings for language, tasks, and other discussion options.

04/2023 Export discussions and sources

Export a discussion into a plain text file for offline reading. Sources, along with any of their quotes or notes, will be right beneath the claims in which they appear.

011/2022 Topic Templates

Pick from a topic template from their extensive library of debate topics. The topic templates are ready-to-go discussion resource that students can dive right into, complete with background info and a few prompt claims to get the gears turning. When copying a Topic Template, you can change or exclude any element: title, thesis, background info, starter claims, or cover image.

05/2022 Anonymous Discussions

Select Anonymous Participation and Kialo will randomly assign each participant (including the teacher) a colorful animal avatar. Instructors see users' identities after clicking on the List De-anonymized Users button.

Return to Top 

Poll Everywhere

School Year 2023-2024

12/2023 Autofit Feature

Automatically scales your polls to fit within the screen for Multiple Choice and Ranking question types. To enable Autofit, navigate to the Visual Settings panel, check the box next to Autofit content, and save your settings.

09/2023 Accessibility Improvements

Updated designs to activities like multiple choice and clickable image to improve readability.

09/2023 QR Codes

QR codes added by default to the instructions at the top of the activity screen. Participants now have the option to scan the QR code with their mobile device in order to quickly join an activity. QR codes cannot be hidden but can be minimized or maximized.


School Year 2022-2023

07/2023 New Visual Design Settings

The design changes offer presenters increased visibility and simplifies the experience across activities.

07/2023 Heats maps are disabled. 

The activity will now show and choose visual colors.

05/2023 Deprecating: insert a video or a web page into PowerPoint presentations

Ensure that any existing videos and web pages are migrated to the Microsoft-supported products.

04/2023 Poll Everywhere LTI removed

The option to use the LTI in Canvas has been removed due to a security bug.

10/2022 Response Limits

There are response limits for Poll Everywhere Activities depending on the activity. The response limits range from 1,100 participants for Q&A to 10,000 responses Clickable image activity.

10/2022 Updated Guides

Instructor and Student Guides are available for the 2022-2023 academic year.

Return to Top

Yellowdig Engage

School Year 2023-2024

09/ 2023 Video Auto-Captions

Users can generate, edit and display video captions to all videos recorded or uploaded to Yellowdig boards.

09/ 2023 LMS Course Roster Management

Identify any learners enrolled in your Canvas course who have not yet joined the Yellowdig Community and remove students who have withdrawn or dropped  the course.

07/2023 Earn points for every post and comment, regardless of its length or content

Earn a smaller number of points for every post and comment they create without reaching a text-length goal. Then get more points when they dig deeper.

07/2023 Earn points for adding a video

Earn points for recording or uploading a video to a post or comment.

07/2023 Earn points for reaching a character-based text length goal.

Before the minimum text requirement could only be set to count words.
Now minimum requirements can count characters instead. Beneficial for courses using character-based languages.


School Year 2022-2023

08/2022 Image Annotation

Draw directly on any image. Navigate to "Draw on image attachment via settings icon.


08/2022 More Image Support

Move images inline, resize, and add animated GIFs.


08/2022 Tables

You can now add & edit tables.


08/2022 Code Block Editor

Displays ANTLR4, Bash, C, C#, CSS, CoffeeScript, CMake, Dart, Django.

08/2022 Emoji Picker

The emoji picker now includes skin tone options.

08/2022 Enhanced Notifications with @community Mentions

Community members can notify the whole community with @community or just the admins (typically the instructor and TAs) with @admins.

08/2022 Bookmarked Conversations

Save posts for reference.

08/2022 Draft State

All drafts are easily accessible via the “Drafts” button on the left, with the number of drafts you have in progress indicated by a notification.

08/2022 Topics Without Points

Create topic tags with points disabled or disable points later in the term for overused overused topics. Allow casual conversations for build community connections and still maintain “on-topic” conversations pertaining to the course.

08/2022 Accolade Widget

Award accolades for exceptional posts. Posts and comments  with accolades are highlighted for quick access.

Learn more on how to enable the August 2022 Yellowdig Engage feature updates.

Return to Top