We’re very proud to announce the release of Firefly 6.2.0
Annotation on the web
It's been great to see how teachers have taken to using the new assessment workflow in Firefly 6. Teachers using Firefly for Teachers on iOS have particularly loved having the ability to annotate and mark students’ work - and avoid carrying hordes of books home!
For Firefly Cloud hosted schools, Firefly on the web now gives teachers and students the same ability to annotate work that has been set as a task. All the work set and marked on Firefly, every pen stroke as well as contextual notes and comments are recorded and archived.
Teachers can keep their annotations for their own records or share with students, parents, heads of dept or inspectors. They can then quickly show off their students’ and indeed their own work via the markbook. You can read more about annotation on the helpcentre.
Improved form reports
Although Firefly 6 focusses on task setting from the teaching perspective first, it doesn’t mean that we think that other jobs previously fulfilled by Firefly 5 tasks are not important. In fact we think these jobs are better catered for by other features and this release expands the functionality of forms to help better manage the collection of information from teachers and parents. Recipients of forms can be emailed with a link to the form and we’ll shortly be adding the ability to send reminders too.
Form editors can now view lists of recipients who have and haven't submitted a form. This list can also be filtered by:
- groups/individuals the form was recommended to
- when the form was recommended to them
- whether or not they have responded to the form
Plus, lists of those people who have and haven't completed the form can be exported. Read more about viewing form reports.
Lesson planning for the web
This release comes hot on the heels of 6.1.0 which introduced the teacher’s planner for the web. As well as planning lessons on Firefly for Teachers on iOS, teachers can now create and edit lesson plans via the web interface as well as see a brand new view of their timetable. To make the most of this feature, you will need to add the new planner preview component to your students’ and teachers’ dashboard.
What else is new?
The feedback since we launched Firefly 6 last December has been incredible. A big thank you from all the Firefly team goes to everyone that has been in contact, whether that was via the smiley faces survey or our support team.
We have been working hard to act on your suggestions and we have now released well over 40 updates to Firefly 6 across all platforms since launch. As a result, Firefly 6 is already the most successful version of Firefly yet with the vast majority of our students, teachers and parents using it every day.
- Updated Firefly 6 Teacher Planner for Windows - compatible with Firefly 6
- Quicker workflow for students using swipes and clickable dashboard tasks
- Quicker task setting for teachers using ‘Skip to preview’ (more improvements coming soon)
- Added ‘at a glance’ task list information on the apps
- Custom groups for schools using SIMS
Coming soon
Our brand new Firefly for Parents app is currently in beta testing in iOS. Stay tuned for developments as we work towards a release date for both iOS and Android phones.
Activate Firefly 6
We’ve been hugely encouraged to hear how teachers have taken to the new richer tasks, using them to create super simple class diaries, track project based work and encourage group discussion among many other practical day to day applications. You can read more about these ideas in our inspiration section on the new helpcentre.
Support for Firefly 5 will end in August 2017 as previously announced. This is a great time to activate Firefly 6 and let teachers get used to the new features before the next term.
