With the latest update to the Wixie app for Android and iPad, the account log in procedure has been changed.

We updated Wixie this weekend and gave lots of new sharing options to teachers. All teachers can now share projects with other teachers in their school by adding activities to their school activity folder. Teachers can also easily share their projects by email, Facebook, and Twitter.

For the new school year, we have added two new methods for doing a single sign-on with Wixie. SAML and Clever Instant Login are now available as options to schools and districts that want to be able to create a single sign-on for their students.

One of the hard things about developing software is that sometimes you release an update that had a lot of hard work go into it, but there really isn’t anything to “show” for it. There are a lot of really good, important changes, but nothing like a new feature you can point to that gets people excited about using it.

Today we released just such an update. There are a lot of cool changes, necessary changes, but not a lot to write home about.

Full disclosure: My 9 year old son can’t type. Actually, he has no interest in technology unless it is playing Clash of Clans. He would rather be playing soccer. He can juggle a soccer ball 1,194 times without stopping but it takes him 10 minutes to type a simple sentence (a minute of typing and 9 minutes of groaning). Because he types very slowly, he isn’t really interested, and he would rather be outside running around, he gets frustrated easily when asked to do things that involve typing. After watching him fatfinger his Wixie password five or six times and getting frustrated, I decided he really needs to be able to see whether he is typing in his password correctly. Since his password is iain111 (I made that up, but it is something just as easy) every kid in his class knows every other kid’s password. So there really wasn’t much of a security concern; just make it easier to get the password entered correctly the first time.

We like to keep little enhancements to Wixie rolling out as often as we can. Often times these updates are just little additions to make life easier for some subset of our users. This update offers a little something for account admins and activity publishers.

Today we released an update to the Wixie Teacher Tools and Administration tools. This update adds a new privacy setting for schools and districts as well as reorganizes some functions to hopefully make them easier to find.

Here is what is new:

New privacy setting. Organizations now have the option to only require a Public Key when viewing student work. This makes it much easier for teachers to share what they are creating in Wixie while still restricting access to student work.

We are heading into the holidays and we have one more update to Wixie before we take a little time off.

Backgrounds in the Library. There is now a collection of backgrounds available in the library. When you add these to a page, they are added to the background layer, behind your painting, stickers, and text objects. There are photos of landscapes and locations, there are illustrated habitats and backgrounds for stories and fairy tales. Your students will find over a hundred backgrounds to choose from for their projects.

There will be a brief maintenance window starting at 9PM Pacific Time on Monday, December 1, lasting approximately 15 minutes.

During this window, technicians will install an additional 208-volt circuit and automatic power transfer hardware to reduce the risk of downtime in the event of a utility power failure.

Wixie and other Tech4Learning resources will be unavailable briefly during this maintenance event.

Today’s Wixie update has a few small tweaks that hopefully most people will not notice but will make hopefully save people a few mouse clicks.

Updates to the training materials

It turns out a lot of people try to use the Wixie training materials when they are not logged in to Wixie. We noticed this while pouring over some of the page analytics. Unfortunately, when not logged in, only the student level training materials were available. This was not helpful for district level techs who were trying to learn more about the program or troubleshoot admin issues. Now, when you are not logged in to Wixie, the training materials for all user levels in Wixie are available.