A couple of minor improvements:

1. We decided to auto-archive your notifications after you submit your assessment of a free response in order to make that whole process more convenient.

2. We also stopped marking the first multiple choice as "correct" by default. We heard that this was causing some inadvertent mistakes where the wrong answer choice got marked correct, so we hope this prevents that moving forward!

We added rich text to free response questions:

Hopefully this makes free response questions more conducive to some science and math questions!

Some quick minor updates!

You can now name your personal deck assignments something other than "Personal Deck Assignment". As part of this change, we added a new column to the assignment tables so that you can easily identify what kind of assignment it is from that view:

We also changed the student name format in tables to be [Last Name, First Name] since some teachers mentioned that's the alphabetical sorting that they are more used to.

We've heard from some teachers who want to use the student's Personal Deck for Do Nows/Warm Ups that sometimes if a student has too many cards due in the Personal Deck, then studying the Personal Deck becomes a discouraging experience. 

To help address this issue, we added a field for you to configure the max number of questions that can be due for each student on a "Personal Deck Assignment":

If you don't want a limit, and you want for all of the questions that are due in the student's Personal Deck to be pulled into the assignment, then leave the field blank.

We added the ability to see how many late assignments each of your student has:

If you click on the number, then you can see specifically which late assignments they have not turned in:

This past week we worked on increasing the speed of our app and added a couple of new features.

Note: Please refresh your browser if you are unable to see these updates.

For the speed increase, we removed one of the key bottlenecks and increased the speed of Podsie by about 2x.

We also added the following new features:

1. You can now adjust due dates even after students have started working on assignments and after the assignment is past due.

2. Math and science teachers, you can now add subscripts and superscripts to multiple choice answers. To do this, type out the multiple choice answer choice text, and then highlight the characters that you want to turn into a superscript or subscript:

3. If a student misses a short answer or multiple choice question, then the deeper learning will automatically be opened for them.

4. You can now use an existing question as a template for a new question. To do this, open the Question Preview while putting together an assignment and click the Copy button:

In addition, you can also choose to "Keep Question Content" when creating a new question, and that would allow for the question you just created to still be there as a template for your next question:

If you have any questions or thoughts, please don't hesitate to email, slack, or submit feedback on this google form.

Today, we updated how standard masteries are calculated. Previously, any time a student answers a question, we update the mastery data for the standards the question is tied to. Standard masteries were inflated because

• Podsie requires students to answer a question correctly once before moving on, so the last answer is always correct 
• We use a decaying average formula where the most recent response is weighted most heavily

To address this, we did the following

We updated the formula formula to weigh the most recent response a bit less.
Previously, the formula used was

old mastery * 0.35 + new assessment * 0.65 = new mastery

Now, the new formula is 

old mastery * 0.5 + new assessment * 0.5 = new mastery

In the future, we plan on implementing features that allow teachers to customize how they want to calculate mastery score.

Only the student's first attempt for a question on an assignment or personal deck session will count towards their mastery store. Any subsequent requests will not count.
We've updated our FAQ (https://www.podsie.org/faq) to include an example on how we calculate mastery.

Today we improved the security of our app by requiring email verification if you use the Email/Password login flow. Note: this only applies to Email/Password login, and you will not be required to verify your email if you use the Google or Microsoft login.

If your students are unable to find the verification email in their email inbox, please reach out to us, and we can resend another verification email to them.

We also removed the restriction that requires multiple choice questions to have four answer choices. Multiple choice questions can now have two to six answer choices. We decided to cap it at six because the student view gets a little cluttered when there are several answer choices. Please let us know if you prefer having more than six answer choices.

Note: Please refresh your browser if you are unable to see these updates.

If you have any questions or thoughts, please don't hesitate to email, slack, or submit feedback on this google form.

Some teachers mentioned that it was tedious to have to assign to each class one at a time, especially if they had a lot of classes.

To help improve that experience, we added the ability to bulk assign to more than one class at a time: