I hope the new school year is off to a great start!

We hope you are enjoying the updates from this summer. We just couldn't wait until next summer to include a few more features to make using Wixie with your students even easier.

As a follow-up to my blog on the new pencil-only feature in Wixie, there is a similar option to set a project to hide all of the tools. With this setting, students can interact with objects already on the page, like drag them around and add and edit text, but they don’t have access to all of the new object and paint tools. This feature helps teachers deliver formative assessments without the distractions of all of the tools Wixie has to offer.

Sometimes, less is more.

Wixie now includes a feature that allows teachers to set a project to make only the pencil tool available to students. When the pencil only option is selected in the project settings, Wixie hides all of the tools except the color palette and instructions, helping to keep students focused on the activity that they are working on. 

Here are some examples of templates from the Wixie curriculum library that demonstrate how this feature will look in action.

Delete letters to form new words

Wixie got a major update this summer. 

This has been such an unprecedented year in schools. Wixie usage has doubled and we are seeing Wixie used in more ways and in more classes than ever before! With the change in instruction and increased use, users have made a ton of feature requests.

Wixie’s development is driven by these requests.

This update includes hundreds of little changes focused on teachers using Wixie everyday with students. Improving the workflow, through new features and improvements in interoperability with other tools, is the driving theme in the update.

Here are just a few of the highlights.

You can use the text-to-speech feature in Wixie to code and play music. When objects in Wixie are selected, you use the yellow text-to-speech (TTS) icon to have the computer say the contents of a text box or the alt text for an image. 

Wixie has been granted the IMS TrustEd Apps™ Seal from IMS Global Learning Consortium®. The seal certifies that Wixie has successfully completed the IMS TrustEd Apps vetting process and meets rigorous expectations to protect student data privacy.

2020 is almost over, but we are squeezing in one last (amazing) Wixie update before the year ends. Here's a brief description of what is new in Wixie this December!

Export projects as videos

Yes, you read that correctly! You can now download projects as videos to share on your classroom site, via email, or on social media, or even upload to your LMS like Canvas or Google Classroom.

You can set up Wixie to open in its own window from the Shelf on a Chromebook.

This makes it easy to launch Wixie without distractions in the browser window like tabs and URLs.

You can set up Wixie to work like an application on Windows, opening it from the Start menu and running in a dedicated window.

This makes it easy to launch Wixie without distractions in the browser window like tabs and URLs. It also gives it the feel of a local application, making it more comfortable to launch for new computer users. You can even pin Wixie to the taskbar to make it really easy to find and open.

This weekend's Wixie update has even more features to get students up and running at the beginning of the school year as well as huge improvements in accessibility.

Create a Wixie project from a PDF

Stories from users often provide the best inspiration for new features. This past spring we received this note from a teacher using Wixie during quarantine: