We are pleased to announce the release of excellent new features within the Digication Assessment Management System (AMS). For those of you who are not currently using the Digication AMS, the following features will not affect you in any way.

First, thanks to all of you who have been giving us feedback! This release of new features is designed to help faculty members manage their classrooms more effectively using the Digication AMS.

Enhanced Data Grid Functionality
The data grids under the “Assignment” and “Standards” tabs are now even more interactive. Clicking on any column or row headings or cells will allow you to access more related information in a “drilled down” fashion.

All of the above feature enhancements are available immediately. Simply log into your Digication system and check out the “Assignment” and “Standards” tabs of any course or assessment groups. (Please note that your school must have the assessment management system turned on. If in doubt, either contact us at support@digication.com, or your school’s Digication administrator).

We were notified a few days ago that embedding TeacherTube.com videos no longer worked. We looked into it, turns out they changed the way their videos are embedded in other sites. Unfortunately the change they made is incompatible with all the old embedded content – meaning that all the existing blogs and webpages that had embedded TeacherTube videos no longer work.

We’ve updated our software so that new and existing videos on our site work again. Embedding new videos may have a few quirks, but we’re working to iron out the last of the issues now. It appears that many of the videos no longer show the option to embed in other websites and the site having load problems, which is contributing to problems with the embedded video.

If you’re looking to embed videos in your site, please know we also support and recommend YouTube, SchoolTube, Vimeo, Google Video, and BrightCove for video hosting.

As we mentioned earlier this year, we’ve been working on adding cool new features that will enable you, our users, to make your e-Portfolio more engaging and dynamic. We started by adding a Twitter module so you can pull your latest tweets into your e-Portfolio. Now I’d like to introduce you to our latest addition: social bookmarking.

As you may know, the internet has developed far beyond the original bulletin board services and AOL chat rooms – it has become a network of people and social interactions, sharing breaking news, how-to’s, and inspiring artwork. We’re excited that people are using our services to share your creativity with other users at your school. We’re even more excited that now others can more easily pass on your e-Portfolios.

Let’s say you want to create an e-Portfolio showcasing some paintings you made over the summer and share it with all your friends and family. Normally, you would create the e-Portfolio, add the artwork, and begin the task of posting links and sending emails or instant messages. Since we want you to avoid as much hassle as possible, adding the Social Bookmarks module to a page in your e-Portfolio gives you one-click publishing to your favorite social media sites, including Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and Digg.

By adding the Social Bookmarks module to your e-Portfolio, you’re also letting other people post your e-Portfolio page to their favorite social media sites. When someone likes something you’ve done, they can tell all their friends, and you will get traffic back to your e-Portfolio. The major search engines like Google and Yahoo! also use these kinds of social links to figure out how relevant or popular your site is, so by letting your visitors easily tell their friends about your e-Portfolio, you’re also boosting your ranking in search engines.

We were originally scheduled for maintenance tonight, between 12p and 1A EST, this has been delayed. Our service provider had some difficulties this morning, resulting in approximately 6 minutes of downtime around 10:30A EST this morning. Since we work hard to minimize downtime, the minor maintenance has been put off. We will post another entry when it’s rescheduled.

Every e-Portfolio in our system gets a unique URL, chosen by the user. This has some huge advantages, such as a single short address that can be given out. It also has a disadvantage as our user base grows – it can be more difficult to find an unused address.

We’ve received a few requests over the last month for quicker feedback on whether an address is available, so here it is. In a few days, when you enter a URL, the page will immediately update and let you know if that URL is taken.