We're wrapping up November and 2023 seems to have whizzed past! But not without some stop-in-your-tracks new feature releases (especially

AI assistance!) Here's a quick overview of what we've been busy building for you this past month:

Let's take a deeper look into all the improvements you’ll find with the latest release.

Early years educators are no stranger to heaps of notes and observations. Nor to losing many of these observations - critical for formative assessment - in the paper shuffle. Or juggling between notes and web tools to and map out each child's development journey from observation to assessment. In this release, we're helping you solve for that. With our revamped observation and assessment feature, educators can now build assessments, record observations, track student progress and generate reports - all in one place!

With this new approach, you'll be able to streamline the student assessment process and prevent redundant work when tracking student progress. By utilising these observations, teachers can efficiently generate assessment reports with notes, photos, detailed observations, and milestones achieved. Here's how you can start using this.

From the left panel, select 'Student Assessment'. You will see the following five sub-modules.

Record observations, reflections, and concerns effortlessly for single or multiple students. Tailor details like development areas, lessons, and labels. Keep observations private by default or share them with parents for enhanced communication.

Track student progress across development areas in a user-friendly table layout. Dive deeper with a timeline view, simplifying progress status tracking. Adding observations, reflections, or concerns is now a breeze! Here's where you can monitor and track every observation, reflection, and concern for all students in one place. This section brings together the Development Areas and Lessons linked with each Observation/Reflection/Concern and the ability to view each student’s timeline against each development area.

Effortlessly evaluate students using curriculum frameworks and age-specific assessment templates. Track progress across various development areas and milestones achieved with ease.But wait, there's more! You can select pre-recorded observations from a specific period, attach observation photos, and even choose images from the student gallery. Plus, our AI-powered feature rephrases comments and allows you to add notes, creating a comprehensive assessment.

And the best part? With just one click, download this detailed assessment as a PDF report and instantly share it with parents. Say hello to streamlined assessment and seamless communication—all at your fingertips!

Discover a selection of new reports! Engage with the comprehensive 'Assessment Progress Report,' presenting student progress across various assessments in a grid format. Utilize the 'Assessment Report' checklist to monitor completed assessments. Explore the 'Comparison Report' for enlightening assessment comparisons between different cohorts.

Customise assessment templates to fit your needs! Seamlessly integrate the 7 EYFS development areas and personalise assessments based on various criteria. Design cover and student detail pages to match your school's branding.

AI isn't just a buzzword for us. We dug our heels to try and find ways in which this revolutionary new technology can better support early childhood education. And designed a super assistant for teachers 😎😎

With your new sidekick, while recording any ‘Observation/Reflection/Concern’, you'll see that the 'Description' and 'Next Steps' sections have now got these nifty buttons right below the comment box: 'Suggestions' and 'Paraphrase.'

These buttons are like your writing assistants! They give teachers helpful pointers on what to write and even help rephrase your text. Oh, and heads up: to use 'Paraphrase,' you need some text in the text box already. Try starting with 'Started saying simple words' and then tweak it using 'Paraphrase' to jazz up your thoughts.

The ‘Suggestions’ and ‘Paraphrase’ options are not limited to the Student Assessment module but also extend to all comment boxes where staff members input their comments – be it pertaining to activity posts, notes, etc.

And that’s it – no more feeling overwhelmed about what to write, or try and fight off writer's block. With AI assistance, your comments will be more meaningful and much clearer – a win-win for both staff and parents!

The student daily report is a powerful tool! It keeps tabs on each student’s day, ensuring all daily activities are recorded for each child, and promptly communicated to families.

So what’s new here? Previously, this report was only available on the web portal. Now, it’s also on the Teacher App—both on Android and iOS!

How to access it? Just scroll down on the teacher-app home screen to the 'Post Activity' section, and there it is: the 'Daily Reports' option, ready for you to use. On clicking, you're greeted with an app screen showcasing a list of students and the activities they’ve been a part of. For each activity listed under a student, you have the convenient option to post another activity instantly using the ‘+’ option. Moreover, advanced filters are available! They allow you to fine-tune your view, focusing on specific students or activities that you want to see.

Looking to add a fun touch to your communications? You can now jazz up your messages with emojis! Whether you're chatting with parents, leaving notes in assessments, or commenting on activities, just click the ‘emoji’ icon and add the perfect emoticon to give your message the right vibe! It's time to get expressive! 😄

Note: Emoji has always been supported on illumine, only that the web-portal never had the emoji picker available, but now it does ;)

Calling all administrators and co-teachers! Now, on illumine, you can tag staff members effortlessly. Need to get someone's attention in the comments section of an activity? Just type ‘@’, select their name from the list, or type it out, and voila—they're tagged and informed! Easy peasy.

Once a staff member is tagged, they get a notification on their illumine app.

Note:

You can only tag staff members who have access to a particular classroom when the comment is associated with a particular classroom. Furthermore, only staff can tag each other (i.e. it’s not open to parents).

Having all form submissions available as a PDF helps in record keeping, and one of you wonderful users recommended that we help make it posssible.

Moving forward, across all form submissions – be it for admission enquiries, existing students or staff - you now get the option to export as a PDF using the ‘Generate PDF’ option.

Example, from the left-panel go to 'Forms'→ Student Applications. From the forms created that have submissions, click the form name, and choose the ‘Submissions’ tab from the top. Click on any student/staff to view the form submitted by them, and you’ll see the ‘Generate PDF’ option.

Here’s what the PDF looks like. You can download and save it digitally or print and maintain physical records.

You can now download a PDF summarizing all the communications sent to parents.

With this PDF, you can review all the learning activities, updates, and announcements shared with parents over the past few weeks or months. It's like having a snapshot of your centre's parent communication history in one easily accessible document.

From the left panel, go to 'Parent Communications' → 'Activities'. You will now see a button on the right hand side called ‘Generate PDF’ (right below the activities filter).

Please note, that the generated PDF contains a sequential list of all activities posted irrespective of the students involved.

On illumine, you could previously create/add a particular item to a staff member’s schedule for a specific date-range in one-go. However, editing or deleting the whole set of schedule was not possible. With this update, you can now ‘Edit Multiple’ or ‘Delete Multiple’ items of a schedule that spans across multiple dates.

Go to 'Calendar' → 'Staff Schedule', and create a new item for a particular staff member that spans across a date range.

In our example below, we’ve added ‘Lunch Monitor for Kids’ as a schedule item that spans from Mon to Fri. After it's created, you can click on the 3 dots "⋮" and under 'Edit', and 'Delete' you get the additional option of ‘Edit multiple’ and ‘Delete multiple’ respectively.

Let’s say you selected ‘Edit multiple’ - the window that opens shows the date-range field as part of the editing process.

Further, you can also click ‘Show affected schedules’ to see how your edit will affect the existing schedule that was initially created together.

Having the ability to quickly update the same set of changes across multiple students or staff members can help greatly reduce the time and effort required.

From the left panel select 'Management' → 'Students', and now use the checkbox to select particular students (or staff). Once you select one or more students, a new drop-down field called ‘Select Operation’ appears.

The bulk operations include - Update Classrooms, Update Status, Update Groups, Create Folder, and Delete. Likewise for staff members.

The ‘Access Control System’ is one among the most used features under ‘Settings’. Previously, we had the ability to add and delete ‘Roles’ as an option within the ‘Access Control System’. With this update, ‘Roles’ has been brought out as a different sub-module under Settings, with a dedicated page showing various roles currently available at the centre, and the staff members who have that role assigned to them.

And using the ‘Action’ button against each role, you can either ‘View Permissions’ that the particular role has, or ‘Delete’ the particular role.

And that’s it for this round of new features and feature updates from us!

Got feedback?

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