Interactive help, teacher instruction areas, intelligent word and HTML import

Schoolshape 2.9 released:

Interactive Help

The first of a series of interactive guides to the software has been released, which shows teachers how to use Schoolshape to find educational resources, set them for homework and assess the results.  To start the guide, use the 'Help' button on your home screen.

Teacher Instruction Areas

When you are creating resources, you can now include instructions to the teacher, which are not shown to students.  If you are creating resources for your own use, the teacher instruction areas are also useful for making notes for yourself.  To add a teacher instruction area, when creating a resource, drag the 'Teacher Instruction Area' button anywhere onto the canvas.

Intelligent Word & HTML import

You can now import word files into Schoolshape, including multiple choice and gap fill questions.  As long as gap fill answers are labelled 'A', 'B', 'C', etc, and the gaps in the gap fills are inserted using underscores ( __ ), Schoolshape will automatically find these and convert them into automatically marked interactive exercises!  Of course, once imported, you can continue to edit and improve the resources by adding speaking exercises for example.

Powerpoint import has been further improved - once you have imported all slides from the powerpoint document, you can delete individual slides, convert them into exercises and edit the text within the slides.  These functions are available from the 'Spanner' drop-down menu on each imported slide.

Latency Improvement Option

If you do a lot of pair speaking work and you find there is a slight lag when your school internet is busy, there is now a low latency option to help matters.  Go to Admin -> Subscription, click 'Edit', then switch the media streaming option from 'Encrypt Streaming Media' to 'Minimize streaming media latency'.  This should solve any 'lag' issues.  Please be aware that changing this option makes it theoretically possible for a third party to listen in on student conversations, and that we cannot take any responsibility for the consequences.  To put things in perspective, the same applies when you make a normal telephone call.