We are always trying to make Wixie better and we try to update Wixie once every month or two. Our goal is to use this blog to let you know when big changes are coming, when updates come out, and what is in them that you might care about.
Our updates to Wixie address three basic areas: bug fixes, performance and systems enhancements, and new features. In every update we try to address something in each of these areas.
When we work on Wixie, there are three parts to the service:
Administration – Basically this is about getting users into the system and managing which schools and classes they belong to. It is not fun, and most people’s eyes glaze over when we talk about it and they start thinking about what they might have for dinner.
Teacher Tools – This started as the place to do all the stuff we couldn’t do well in Pixie. Things like finding and assigning activities, associating student work to standards, scoring student work, and sharing what students are doing in their classrooms. This is the area where we try to make Wixie an effective tool for teachers and help them integrate it into their classes.
The Student Tool – This is the fun part where teachers and students get to create stuff with their paintings, their writing, and their voice.
Often, updates will only address one of these three parts. Wixie is created by a small team, so we don’t do everything at once. The goal is to make everything better, but as with most things in life, we have to prioritize.
So how do we prioritize? We get feature requests from users all the time. The more we hear about a feature from different users the higher we prioritize it. We get technical issues from customers that we work on. We also get complaints from our servers (they text us when they are sad) and we work very hard to keep our servers from being sad.
Right now we are spending a lot of time on performance and system enhancements. We expect at least three or four times as many students to be logging in to Wixie in September than are logging in today. We want to be ready.
