As a team we love to build new features and capabilities; things that make your lives easier, smarter and more fun each and every day. With OPENHIVE, all our customers receive future product releases as part of their subscription, at no additional cost. So customers have the excitement of something new every year, benefiting from the latest technologies that help them do ‘things’ faster and easier.
So let’s delve into our new September 2010 OPENHIVE release: what’s new?
Create Ad Hoc Classes on the fly
We’ve developed a new instant class creator feature that allows you to flexibly create new groups/classes beyond the formal class and timetable structures that are imported from your MIS system. On top of this capability, OPENHIVE automatically creates a new collaborative web space in OPENHIVEportal and new email distribution lists within OPENHIVEmail. So if you run poetry classes or drama clubs outside of your normal timetable this is a brilliant new way to manage your extracurricular activities.
Improved resource selection
We’ve redesigned our resource selection view in OPENHIVElearning. Now in just a few clicks you can view all documents and resources across all of your document libraries in your school, by class, by year or subject and reuse materials in your courses. In addition, we’ve added new capability behind the scenes so that if a student doesn’t have access to the resource/document library, OPENHIVE recognises this and gives them access permissions on the fly. It’s time to say goodbye to access problems.
View all your chat discussions in one place
We have improved the chat functionality within OPENHIVElearning. Now teachers can view all of their chat discussions with pupils across their classes in one place. What was John struggling with on this topic? How did I guide him and has he followed my advice?
New Tooltips to help you on your way
We’ve added some new tooltips to make our VLE even more intuitive. Hover over some of the buttons and tooltips will appear guiding you on what to do next.
New Dashboards for Parents & Teachers
We now have a smarter, quicker dashboard for parents to instantly see their child’s attendance, punctuality, attainment and assessment information. Parents can now toggle through the visual charts to show information, this week, this term or this year – quickly seeing the ‘here and now’ data that’s most useful to them, along with quick indicators against the class average scores. Parents can also customise their dashboards and print reports to share amongst the family.
Teachers also now have a similar view to allow them to view information on every child across classes.
Get access to Windows Live SkyDrive, Office Live and Live Messenger
With OPENHIVElive you get so much more than email. We take the hassle out of provisioning Microsoft Live@edu services by linking accounts directly to your MIS via OPENHIVEiD. In this latest release, we deliver 10GB email storage, 25GB of online storage through Windows Live SkyDrive, collaboration and document sharing through Office Live Workspace, Live Spaces and Live Messenger. You can also enjoy Live Writer the flexible blogging tool for learners. See the screenshot below: editing Word documents with integrated Live chat.
OPENHIVE Primary is here!
Totally customised for primary schools, we’ve taken the best features of OPENHIVE and weaved them into new and exciting interfaces to engage younger learners like never before. Your portal, virtual learning environment, email service and parental reporting solution have been tailored for primaries, making OPENHIVE more intuitive and engaging for key stages 1 & 2.
Keep up to date on new releases!
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