It is data crunch time as Wixie using schools start syncing their teachers and students for the new school year and new Wixie schools start adding their users for the first time. The latest Wixie update gives schools and districts another option for how they provision users in our system. Wixie now supports adding users using CSV files that meet the OneRoster^TM specification from the IMS Global Learning Consortium.

There is never a perfect time to do a UI update on an educational product. Someone is always still in school, or it’s a holiday in the middle of the school year.  The latest Wixie update includes a lot of UI updates and we wanted to get it out as early in the summer as possible to catch as many summer trainings getting ready for the next school year as possible.

Tech4Learning is about to release an update to the Wixie sign-in page to make it easier for teachers and students to get logged in. These changes will:

Tech4Learning is about to release an update to the Wixie tablet apps that will change the sign-in process on the iPad and Android tablet. 

This update will only affect users who enter their username and password into Wixie directly. If you use a third-party system, such as Clever or Google, you will not see any changes to the way you log in.

As part of a unit on colonial America, my son came home with an assignment to spend an evening behaving like a puritan child. The assignment included a few bullets in faux-Colonial English describing what was expected of a puritan child and a space for my signature and grade for his work.

When you are sitting at Thanksgiving, politics is generally off the table for a topic of conversation... especially this year! In San Diego, where it is always sunny, weather isn’t really a good topic either. So one of the things left to talk about is work.

I strike up a conversation with my brother and he says to me “Remember when Iain was showing off his California missions project last year with his Wixie project and map? Wouldn’t it have been neat if each time he showed a new mission in Wixie, a light would show to indicate the location of that mission on his map?”

As we dug into the usage data for Wixie we discovered a couple of things. One was that thousands of people look at Wixie projects on their phones every month. The other was that for almost every visit to the log in page on a phone, the next page viewed was the student home page. So we decided to spend some time making that user experience in a student account better on the phone.

Today’s update makes it easier for curriculum writing teams made up of teachers from schools to share their work with the district. Teachers are already able to share the activities and templates that they create with other teachers at their school. We have gotten many requests from districts to make it easier for teachers who are part of a district curriculum writing team to share their activities and templates with the entire district.

With the latest Wixie update, students and teachers can now share their projects to Google Classroom.

The student dashboard allows students to browse Wixie projects on a device that does not have Flash installed. It is also the first screen students see when logging into Wixie using a browser on an iPad or Android tablet. To make it easier for students who might be just trying to log in quickly to their account to print a project or two, we have added a print button to the project list.