This week, we added:

1. The ability to archive assignments.

2. The ability to make an assignment optional.

3. Email notifications for students

4. You can also tag questions more than one standard now.

You can now deactivate response flagging for specific questions. Previously, all student responses to free response questions were flagged if students self-assessed that they got the question correct and their answer was non-trivially different than the exemplar answer.

Now, you are able to disable flagging for specific free response questions:

You can read more details about deactivating response flagging in this article: https://podsie.tawk.help/article/how-to-handle-flagged-free-responses

We just launched our teacher collaboration feature where you can share assignments and questions with other Podsie teachers. Check out our help center article to see how it works: https://podsie.tawk.help/article/how-to-collaborate-with-other-teachers!

We updated Personal Deck Assignments to be more focused on promoting consistent studying. Here's how the improved Personal Deck Assignments now work:

1. Teachers set a target number of points for students to reach.

2. Teachers then set a due date, and students have until that date to reach the target number of points.

Students earn points by completing a personal deck study session. The first session of the day is worth 1 point, while any subsequent sessions that day are worth 0.5 points. Because the first session of the day is worth more, students should prioritize completing one session per day, rather than cramming all of the study sessions into one day.

In the screenshot below, this student has completed the first study session of today, so the student has so far earned 1 point. The student needs 1 more point to reach the target of 2 points, so the student should log back in the next day and complete another study session:

We just launched the concept of "Course". Each course you create is associated with a "Level", "Subject", and an optional standards chart. All assignments, questions, and classes you created are organized under a single course. We've migrated your existing data for each subject into the correct "Course".

You can see your current active course in the bottom left when you log into your teacher account, and you can click the "Edit" button to create new courses, edit your existing courses, or change your active course. Courses are useful when going into a new school year; you can simple create a 7th Grade TX Science (2021 - 2022) course and then create new classes for the new school year. We're currently working on the ability to transfer questions and assignments between courses and will launch this in July.

Check out this quick demo video!

We added a view for students to keep track of their personal deck progress:

On the student side, students can access this view by going to the "Progress" section, and clicking on the "Personal Deck" tab.

On the teacher side, teachers can access this view by clicking into a specific student profile, and navigating to the "Personal Deck" tab.

We're currently in the process of providing more data and feedback on the student side.

The first thing we've added is the abillity to see current progess on questions. On the student side, students can now see:

This view shows how many questions they're struggling with, how many are "work[s] in progress", and how many are mastered. If a section is clicked on, then students can see the specific questions that fall into each bucket.

Teachers can access this same view if they go to a student profile page by: Navigating to a class roster page > going to 'Roster' tab > clicking on a student name > going to 'Question Progress' tab.

Personal deck reviews are now broken up into individual sessions. By default, each session will have at max 20 questions in it:

Concretely, this means the following:

1. Let's say for example that a student had 68 questions due. When a student starts a study session, it will pull the 20 most due questions into a study session. 

2. If a student misses a question during the study session, that missed question will appear at the end of those 20 questions, and not at the end of the 68 questions. This will allow students to progress through review questions in a chunked manner.

3. When students complete the 20 questions, they will get an opportunity to review their progress, and then start another study session. 

Please feel free to email me at josh@podsie.org if you have any thoughts or feedback on the way this is set up!

You can now add student answers as an acceptable answer for free response questions:

For example, let's say that the exemplar answer to a free response question was "they are similar", but the student put "exactly the same" as the free response answer and then marked that they got the question correct. In this case, this free response would likely be flagged for review because the student answer is a bit different than the exemplar. 

If you mark that 'Answer is Acceptable', then "exactly the same" would be added as an acceptable answer that would no longer be flagged in the future for review. These "acceptable answers" are not visible to students, and they will continue only seeing your exemplar answer.

Teachers can now see breakdowns of individual question performance. To navigate there, click on Student Progress on the left sidebar:

Then, select the Question Progress tab:

This page provides insight on how students are doing on each specific question.