Tuesday 9 December 2014

RESOLVED: Interact Service Outage -- Dec 8, 2014

1:05 PM PST: The underlying issue that caused this morning's Interact outage has been resolved. Interact service should be back up and running normally for all users.

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9:17 AM PST: We have implemented a workaround for this issue, so that student tabs and screens can display on Interact. Teachers should now be able to use Interact successfully.

Important note: As a result of this workaround, students who are not online will display a spinning wheel in their tile on Interact. This is expected, and will occur until we have a long-term solution in place.

We will continue to work with Pusher on the core issue, and will provide additional updates later today with the status of the permanent fix. If you notice additional problems connecting to student devices, please submit a request to support.hapara.com and we will get back to you as soon as possible.

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8:40 AM PST: The issue has been isolated as a problem with Pusher, third-party infrastructure we utilize for making connections to student devices. Student device connections are not being recognized when Teacher Dashboard is loaded, preventing the display of tabs and screens. However, connections are recognized individually, so screenshots and messages should be unaffected.

We are working with Pusher support to resolve this issue now, and will continue to provide updates as we receive additional information.

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8:10 AM PST: We are continuing to investigate issues with Interact, and have escalated the outage with the third-party service we utilize for the tool. We will send another update by 9:00 AM PST.

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7:10 AM PST: We are currently experiencing a global service outage with Interact. The Browser Tabs and Current Screen pages are not displaying any data from student devices, though the screenshot and message features should still function normally.

We have all hands on deck to investigate and resolve this issue as quickly as possible. We will send another update by 9AM PST.

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Best regards,
Hapara Support

Sunday 7 December 2014

New Release: Teacher Dashboard 2 - Open Beta

Hapara customers are welcomed to try our new-look interface, designed to be cleaner and easier to use.


Improvements

  • SmartShare can copy/share up to 5 documents at once.  This was the most-requested feature from teacher feedback.
  • SmartShare lets you copy/share to multiple classes at once (“I want all my English students to get this rubric”).  This was the second-most-requested feature.
  • We’ve added a progress bar so you can see how your SmartShare is going.
  • Students can belong to multiple groups.  (As a consequence, “sort students by group” doesn’t make sense when the students are in multiple groups, so that option has been removed)
  • Drive, Interact, Portfolio, Sites, Sharing, Class Info are all in this new interface.

Caveats

  • Major functional areas yet to be added: Picasa, G+, Teacher Notes, Calendars, Blogger, Audits, Top Link.
  • We’ve improved the startup and display times from the closed beta period, but there’s more work to do here.

Known problems

  • Schools where students are in multiple domains cannot use the new Teacher Dashboard yet.
  • French translation is incomplete.
  • Mobile support is incomplete (in particular, Google’s file picker does not work well on very small devices).
  • Safari users cannot change the order in which students are displayed.
  • Some content may not load if user is logged into multiple accounts and their teacher account is not the most recent login.

General Improvements

  • SmartShare reliability and performance have been improved.