The new teacher home page coming in the Wixie update makes it even easier to organize, distribute, and grade project work. All project management options now appear on the left-side of the screen when you log in to your Wixie account.

Wixie is more accessible than ever before. Not only does it work on more devices, like phones, it includes powerful new features like text-to-speech. Text-to-speech makes written information accessible to a wider range of learners.

The Highlights feature in the upcoming version of Wixie makes it even easier for students to archive, share, and celebrate learning.

As the school year winds down and we get closer to the release of the Wixie update this summer, we want to make sure you are aware of changes coming and how to support your teachers and students through the process.

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.

Over the past 10 years of Wixie, we have built a lot of templates for students. Here are some things that we have learned that you will hopefully find helpful in your own templates.

Landscape vs. portrait orientation. It is almost always better to create templates using landscape orientation. This layout works best on a variety of devices. Portrait layouts become hard to work with in the work-space of a tablet, so try to use this orientation only when designing templates that will need to be portrait when they are printed.

With back-to-school in full swing, or looming for others, now is the busy time with Wixie. Tech4Learning has just released an Implementation Guide and Introducing Wixie Workshop Kit to help you get Wixie up and running.

The Wixie legacy UI will disappear this summer. For many users this means nothing. They have never seen the legacy UI and they don’t have a hyperlink that lets them switch into it if they want. For some, this just means that a hyperlink that they have never clicked in the upper-right corner next to Settings will no longer be there. For a few, it means they will start using the new UI instead of the one they were trained on over two years ago.

Today we released an update to the Wixie Teacher tools and Administration tools. The update adds the Virginia and Texas academic standards, several requested features, and has a number of performance improvements.

Here is what is new:

Virginia and Texas standards. The Virginia SOLs and Texas TEKS standards have been added to Wixie. Schools and districts can now choose which standards they want to show to their users on the Settings tab for the school or district administrator.

Teachers’ student standards view. In order to add the Virginia and Texas standards into the system, we changed the layout of the Standards view when teachers are logged in and viewing student work. We changed the view from a grid to a list letting users see the entire standards. 

I hate it when kids have a bad experience with our products. Since I am ultimately responsible for them, I take it very personally when I hear of a student losing work or being frustrated by our tools. I also have a second grade son, so when I hear it is a second grade class having a problem I can imagine how that would affect him. This week was one of those weeks. Calls came in from Wisconsin and Colorado. Both had the same issue, both were new to using Wixie, and both had frustrated kids and teachers.