What's New in Classroom 9.8 - October 2024

A new version of Securly Classroom is being released next week! Here are the new updates that are on the way:

Observation Groups

The new Observation Groups feature enables additional staff, like special education teachers, to monitor specific students throughout the day, even as they switch between different classes. Meanwhile, regular classroom teachers maintain their ability to monitor and manage student devices using Securly Classroom.

The above screenshot shows what an Observation Group looks like in action. Note the lack of controls and the eye icon in the upper left corner identifying it as an Observation Group.

Admin Dashboard Enhancements

Most Active Teachers Widget: Renamed from “Top Teachers,” this widget now includes a column for schools, shows 100 teachers by default (up from 50), and can be expanded to display 500, 1,000, or 5,000 teachers. An export button is also available to download the data as a CSV file.

Most Active Schools Widget: Renamed from “Top Schools,” this widget now displays all schools and can be sorted by either duration or number of sessions. It also includes an export button for saving the data to a CSV file.

Large Class View Paging and Student Group Limit Improvements

Previously, classes with more than 48 students required paging. Paging has now been removed, so all students (up to a class size limit of 150) will be displayed on a single page. Additionally, student groups can now be created regardless of class size.

Other Changes

• Sync Settings Update: For Classlink, OneRoster, and Securly Sync, the settings page now displays the start and end times of the most recent sync.
• Sync Email Notifications: Administrators will now receive a confirmation email after each successful sync for Google Classroom, Classlink, OneRoster, and Securly Sync.

• Securly Pass Notification Center: The “Active Passes” tab has been renamed to “My Active Passes” to clarify that this tab only shows passes involving the currently logged-in user (as either the source or destination for the student’s hall pass).

Fixes

• Fixed an issue where a student’s browser window would repeatedly close if a class was started with a tab limit of 1.
• Fixed a problem where Site Lock auto-release was not consistently working.
• Fixed an issue where the time spent on a site was inaccurate when students closed their devices before the end of class. The system now detects this within 1 to 3 minutes, improving the accuracy of the time logged on the last site visited.
• Fixed an issue where the Start menu on student Windows devices was blocked when using an allow-only blocking plan.