Classwize and School Manager Release 1.7.3

25 March, 2021

Welcome to Classwize and School Manager release 1.7.3!

New Features & Improvements

• We improved the performance of charts by improving School Manager’s memory utilization.
• You can now search inside Object Pools and Security Groups.

Fixes

• We removed the ability to create an invite code for Monitor Mode classes.
• Student’s names should now have correct capitalization in their student tiles.
• If you sync Classwize with Azure, you can now decide whether Classwize shows the Azure Group name or Group description as the default classroom name.
• Some users weren’t able to create new classroom groups if they were using a new School Manager device.
• Monitor Only classes wouldn’t start if Allowed Time Periods had been set in School Manager.
• We fixed a rare console error that could cause Classwize to crash.
• Selecting your school from another region’s Classwize login screen would send you to the wrong url.

Classwize 2021-03-22

22 March, 2021

Welcome to Classwize Release 2021-03-22

Just a quick tweak for you today!

New Features & Improvements

• We’ve changed the way that Classwize interacts with students’ school-managed BYOD devices to better ensure that student activity isn’t captured when students aren’t at school.

School Manager Release 1.7.2

22 March, 2021

Welcome to School Manager release 1.7.2!

This week we’re excited to be rolling out the first phase of the Student Journey Report to our partner beta testing schools! The Student Journey Report is our new and improved reporting tool, designed to help you get better insights about your students from the data that School Manager captures.

You may also notice that we’ve begun a campaign of beautification. Over the coming months, we’re going to be updating the look and feel of School Manager to make it easier to use and make it more color-blind friendly.

This release, including our new beta features, will be rolling out in stages over the next few days. Our Australian and New Zealand schools should see the update on 22 March 2021, while our US users will get the release over the following few days.

New Features & Improvements

• We’re rolling out the beta version of the Student Journey Report to our partner test schools. Users in this test group can access the new report by selecting a user in Statistics > Users and then clicking User Timeline.
• We’re improving the usability of our reports by giving you more options for sorting them inside School Manager. You can also now sort the Cyber Safety > Red Flags report by the student’s system name or full name, and you can sort on all columns in these reports:
  • Filtering > Emailed Reports
  • Statistics > Realtime
  • Statistics > Network
  • Filtering > Bandwidth Quotas
  • Filtering > Safe Search
• We’re continuing to do a lot of work, mainly behind the scenes, to improve School Manager’s security. As part of this work we’ve increased the minimum password length for local accounts to 16 characters, while letting you choose to see your new password while you're changing it. You may be required to reset your password in the future if it does not meet the new length requirement
• We’ve updated the colors for our Red Flag alerts to make them more readable. We’ve also added new icons to them to indicate what triggered the Flag : a magnifying glass for searches, and a globe for attempted website visits.
• School Manager’s charts have been given a big facelift, with more consistent colors in a more modern style!
• We’ve added the option to force OneRoster to do a full resync with School Manager if they become out of sync.

Bug Fixes

• We resolved a case where performing a test of an email report could cause browser timeouts.
• Students’ full names, when available, name will populate within  Statistics > Apps and Websites reports.
• Using special characters in Group Names could cause a verdict gateway error.
• If you edited a rule within about five seconds of reordering any rules in Content Filtering > Rules, there was a chance your changes wouldn’t save.

Classwize 2021-03-10: Close Chrome Tab

10 March, 2021

Welcome to Classwize Release: Close Chrome Tab!

We’re excited to bring you a much-requested feature: the ability to close students’ Chrome tabs!

New Features & Improvements

• Close Tab is finally here for Chrome! If a student is using a Chrome account that's managed by your school, you can close any Chrome tab that they have open just by clicking the X on their tile. Your school can turn Close Tab on by following this guide, while teachers can learn how to use the feature by checking out our quick guide.
• As a bonus, if Close Tab is turned on and you create a new Block rule in Classwize , it will immediately close Chrome tabs that match your rule!

Classwize 2021-03-03: Help Drawer

3 March, 2021

Welcome to Classwize Release: Help Drawer!

This release we’re proud to continue our work bringing you better help resources for Classwize with our new Help Drawer! This new feature gives you instant access to our growing collection of help articles from inside Classwize.

New Features & Improvements

• Have you ever wondered what “waiting on student activity” actually means? Well, now you can click on Help and find out! Clicking on Help will pop out our new Help Drawer, which contains our growing collection of guides and help articles!
• We’ve added a new, special type of class: Monitoring Mode. Monitoring Mode classes are designed to let teachers and other staff members, like school counselors, monitor a group of students throughout the whole school day without accidentally enforcing a rule on them. This feature is optional and can be turned on by your school by following this guide.
• Close Chrome Tab is almost here! Over the next few weeks we’ll be rolling out an update to our Chrome and Chromebook extensions that will give teachers the ability to close Chrome tabs. We’ll have some more info for you soon about how it works and (most importantly) how to turn it on!
• We’ve made it so that users who are in a Teacher Group will never have a tile or screenshot visible in Classwize. It also won’t be possible to add them as students to classes by using the Modify Students button in Classwize.
• How many stores does it take to store users? Fewer than it used to!
• We’ve made it so that you can use Focus on a signature that doesn’t contain at least one URL.
• We’re making some changes to the way you login to Classwize to make it easier and more secure. While most of this work so far is behind the scenes, you can now see your school’s unique Classwize login url in School Manager, by going to Configuration > Classwize.

Bug Fixes

• We fixed an issue with Wonde syncs that could lead to teachers not being matched to their classes.
• We un-stuck Google Classroom from getting stuck when there's a failure saving the sync state.
• We broke an endless sign-in loop. If only breaking other things also fixed them.

Mobile Zone for Windows 3.0.4

19 February, 2021

Welcome to Mobile Zone for Windows 3.0.4

Bug Fixes

• We fixed an issue where Webex wouldn't work properly if off-network filtering was enabled.
• We fixed an issue which stopped ScreenConnect from working in the filter was in Full/Web Socket mode

Mobile Zone for Windows 3.0.3

3 February, 2021

Welcome to Mobile Zone for Windows 3.0.3

Bug Fixes

• We no longer accidentally drop Webex audio connections.
• We fixed an issue that stopped the GlobalProtect VPN service from working when Mobile Zone was active.
• We fixed an issue where users were unable to access secure (https) websites via their ip address.

School Manager Release 1.6.9

3 February, 2021

Welcome to School Manager release 1.6.9!

New Features & Improvements

• The User Timeline Report now includes the student’s machine name. This is particularly useful for working out what machines are generating large amounts of traffic in computer labs or other shared environments.
• We’ve made a bunch of report columns sortable, including all columns in the User Timeline Report and in the Cyber Safety, Cyber Safety Videos and Cyber Safety Block Reports.

Bug Fixes

• We fixed an issue that could cause the Captive Portal to be very slow to load after a user had connected to the school’s WiFi.

Classwize and School Manager (Cloud) Release 1.6.7

14 January, 2021

Welcome to Classwize and School Manager release 1.6.7!

We’re hoping to start 2021 off with a bang for you, releasing the first of many new features we have planned for both School Manager and Classwize and laying the groundwork for several more.

1.6.7 begins with some Classwize quality-of-life improvements. In addition to the usual bug fixes and tweaks, we’ve  changed the way you start and end unscheduled class sessions. Instead of giving a class session a set duration, you can select or set your desired end time. You can also stop or extend these sessions while the class is running!

With this release we’re also laying the groundwork for two important features, one in Classwize and one in School Manager:

Coming Soon

School Manager: Phase One of the Student Journey Report

We’re committed to bringing you more and more useful information about what students are viewing online throughout the day. We’re making a bunch of changes in the back end to give your richer data in a better interface called the Student Journey Report, so watch this space!

Classwize: Close Student Tab

We’re making some changes to prepare for the release of the new Close Tab function in Classwize, which will let you close any Chrome tab a student has open. Most of these changes are behind the scenes, but we have removed the ability to create rules directly from the student’s tile. You can still set rules for individual students by using the Rules tool.

New Features & Improvements

• Starting a new class? Just pick when you want it to end! And if you want to extend it or stop it early, you can now do that too!
• If we have the student’s machine name, we’ll now show it to you in School Manager’s student timeline.
• We've improved the way that School Manager synchronizes with Clever.
• Classwize users may notice that the Block toggle is gone from the student tile. This is part of the work to prepare for the upcoming Close Tab feature. You can still create Rules that block a signature for a single student using the Rules tool.

Bug Fixes

• We fixed a rare issue where students’ connections were being linked to the wrong signature if captive portal was enabled in School Manager, and another where searches containing special characters weren’t always being correctly flagged.
• School Manager will no longer get stuck loading if you delete all Object Pools in Configuration > Objects > Pools.
• School Manager wasn’t letting you add top level domains or other urls that begin with a full stop to object pools on Configuration > Objects > Pools.
• We fixed some typeos typos.
• Alternating between Pausing the internet and Focusing students could sometimes cause Classwize to crash. We don’t crash when you do this anymore.
• We fixed some Classwize UI glitches that happened when you had lots of classes.

Mobile Zone for Windows (3.0.1) and MacOS (2.4.6)

13 January, 2021

Welcome to Mobile Zone for Windows (3.0.1) and MacOS (2.4.6)

Welcome to our first release of 2021! This release is for Mobile Zone on both Windows and MacOS laptops.

The big change for this release is that Mobile Zone will now capture the user’s machine name to support an upcoming reporting change in School Manager. We've also made a bunch of changes that should improve performance of the Windows client, improved the way we handle verdict timeouts and fixed a couple of bugs.

New Features & Improvements

• The Windows installer is now about 60% smaller.
• We now capture the user’s Machine Name so we can report on it in School Manager.
• We’ve improved the way we handle verdict timeouts, and we're also quicker to trigger our fallback mode, Safe Guard, in some cases.
• We've made a lot of improvements to packet handling, which should improve performance on Windows machines.

Bug

• We fixed an issue where users with Mobile Zone for Windows couldn’t upload files to MIT’s App Inventor.
• We fixed an issue where laptops could be served an expired agent certificate from the cache.