If you logged into School Jotter this morning, you might have noticed a few changes. Or perhaps not, a lot of what we’re doing is behind the scenes and designed to make School Jotter run better than ever.

System Changes

• The way we display graphs has improved in our Surveys, Spellings, MIS Portal, and Merits apps.
• Stability, performance and security changes.

Dashboard

• The School Jotter app store can now be accessed via the blue + at the bottom right of the dashboard.

Why not try a new app to enhance the functionality of School Jotter? Many are available on a 30 day, no-obligation FREE trial!

Office 365 Integration

• Synchronisation has been improved when using multiple Office 365 calendars.
• Word, Excel and Powerpoint shortcut tiles display when that user has logged in with an Office 365 account.

Does your school use Office 365? Ask your account manager about our School Jotter / Office 365 integration.

Site App

• Slideshow captions can contain special characters and there is no limit to their length. (If your school’s website doesn’t support customisable header slideshows then call us to discuss getting a theme redesign. We can refresh, update, and modernise your school’s image at the same time!)
• Improvements to site search security and performance.
• Changes have been made to help improve SEO.
• An issue that prevented some of February’s webstat data from loading has been resolved.
• An issue that affected private page permissions has been resolved.
• An issue where apostrophes were occasionally shown incorrectly in emails that were sent out has been resolved.
• An issue where accordions could have an incorrect layout has been addressed.

Have you tried inserting an accordion to your website? It’s great for FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions.)

Broadcast App

• Reliability of sending SMS text messages has been improved.
• A character count has been added when composing SMS text messages.

Learn App

• Admin users can view and manage all learning sites.
• An issue with the styling of Wiki Resources has been resolved.
• An issue with the display of Animated Sequence Resources has been resolved.
• An issue with saving Link Resources in the resource manager has been resolved.

SIMS Integration

• Users that are disabled in SIMS will now also be disabled in School Jotter upon the next sync.
• Admins can now choose not to sync email addresses from SIMS for certain user roles. This is really useful if you store parent emails against student records in SIMS.

Purple Mash Integration

• Single Sign On (SSO) will now work for users that do not have their firstname and surname saved in their School Jotter profile.

Picture Logins

• An issue where incorrect picture login passwords could be generated has been resolved.

Address Book

• The address book will now show a count of how many contacts have been selected.

Don’t forget to press the ? icon to the right of your username at any time to bring the help sheets and videos up in an adjacent tab, this is especially useful for the All Apps Help section!

Our Think Of An App competition is closing on the 18th of July. We’ve already received many ideas, but there is still time to enter with yours, and you could win £7,000 worth of existing apps like Blogs, Surveys, Learn and Merits for your school. Click here for more blogs on our app suite.

Our recent webinar on engaging parents using apps was a great success. You can watch the recording here for ideas on how to bring interaction for students, parents and teachers using Jotter 2.

The development of all our apps has been based on comments, suggestions and feedback from teachers – and this is your chance to see an app developed and made available to school, based on your own thoughts and ideas. We want you and your pupils to think of app ideas that maybe save you time, make learning more fun, or engage learners more. We’re welcoming ideas from both pupils and teachers.

The best app idea will be rewarded with a full suite of apps, worth £7K. Three runners up will win School Merits and Bloganywhere for their school.

We’ve put together an information pack for the competition (download here), which includes a lesson plan to get pupils involved. The closing date for the competition is Friday, 18th July, 2014.

Sign up for a free fully featured demo of the Jotter system here.

For those of you who follow us on Twitter (@webanywhere_ltd) you’ll know that we held a webinar today, Engaging Parents Using The Jotter Apps.
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We’ve already hinted at the forthcoming arrival of our new Surveys app (in our app guide, which you can find a link to here). As its arrival gets closer, here’s the full lowdown on this exciting new addition to our app suite.

The purpose of the Surveys app, much like the rest of the education apps we have launched at various stages over the last five months, is to make teachers’ lives easier.

We’ve already covered the basics with the apps already available, of course: there’s School Jotter of course (the app for this is merely titled Site) which is your tool for building an engaging school website; School Merits is your online rewards system; Jotter Learn is the next generation of learning platform; and Bloganywhere, which is an intuitive blogging tool, and already proving to be a hit in schools across the UK.

Free 30 day trial School Jotter Mobile App

Now, as our app suite becomes more and more populated, we’re branching out into apps that cover other tasks that, as a teacher, will help you with your job. One of these is the new Surveys app.

Surveys does exactly what it says on the tin. It’s a very simple idea, but also very useful. It allows a teacher, or school, to create a survey about anything and aimed at anyone. It came into being after we’d received requests that ranged from a product that allowed parents to book parent’s evening slots, to suggestions for a website add-on that allowed visitors to rate your website’s features.

Surveys allows you to create survey of any length, and with different  question types for you to choose from. This is probably best described by an image of the app, showing how the question-type options work:

As you can see, the variety of question types means you can use the survey for just about anything: to create a form for parents to fill in to request parents’ evening slots, or to get feedback on your website from visitors. Most importantly, any survey you create can be added to any page of your School Jotter website.

Surveys can be created that are only accessible in-school too, via your app dashboard.

The feature we like best in Surveys however is the survey results. The app takes the results of every submission and colates them into useful graphs. So, at a glance, you can see all the feedback you’ve received.

It saves you having to go through endless paper questionnaires and totting up your results!

The Surveys app is available now to order. You can request a demo today here.

Back in February, when Webanywhere revealed the next generation of e-learning, we had just two apps available to buy: Learn and Merits.
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Since February, Webanywhere has launched many exciting education apps. Now, for our next development, we need your help.
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One of the hardest tasks for some schools is not just engaging pupils in their learning – but engaging parents in the pupil’s learning, too.
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Last month, we posted the first of our Featured App blog posts, giving an overview of Bloganywhere, our new blogging app. Continue reading →