What's better than a nice Thanksgiving dinner? A second helping of Speak Agent product updates, of course! It's our way of saying "thanks" to our partners. Version 2.1.0 fixes several usability items and adds many helpful new enhancements. Here's what's in it:
Improvements in This Release
For students:
- Fixed loading issues with Tall Tales and Explain Your Work activities.
- Improved Math Puzzle Maker. Previously, the puzzle-making checklist step was hidden by the word bank. We have now added a separate step for the checklist so that it can never be hidden. The instructions also make it clearer to students what they need to do to submit their puzzles! Once they check all the boxes, the Send to Teacher button becomes active:
For teachers:
- Improved the lesson search on the Organization tab. We now hide the clutter of lessons and copies made by your colleagues—unless you check the box to including them in the search results. That way you can more easily find your school district's "official" lessons.
- Made lesson searches faster than you can say "gobble, gobble!"
- Improved the Assign Lessons process in the Classes & Students section. When you search for a lesson to assign, you can now filter lessons by grade level and include or exclude teacher-made lessons.
- Improved the Manage Class Roster process. You can now search students within your class sections and see their unique usernames. That way you know you are adding or removing the intended student(s).
- Removed those rogue "Portfolio Item" links on the Lesson Report page that lead nowhere.
- Fixed a bug when assigning to a class from a lesson page you made. Now that it finds your classes correctly.
- Added the ability for teachers to add Read Alongs to their custom lessons from our growing searchable library.
Coming Soon
We're working next on an iPhone app for students. Another big plateful of news to come in January 2021...
Wishing you and your family a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday!
Written by Katie Cunningham
Katie is CTO and Co-Founder of Speak Agent, Inc. A leading expert in the Python programming language, Katie designed the Speak Agent architecture and wrote the very first line of code for the current platform. She is an accomplished technical author and keynote speaker worldwide, as well as a leader of the Washington DC chapter of PyLadies, an organization dedicated to training women in Python.
