Digication Blog

We're excited to announce that we are expanding! Due to the overwhelmingly positive response we've received regarding our new Assessment product, we are anticipating an increase in usage over the next 12 months. For this reason, we will be performing some data center upgrades.

We will be performing the upgrade on August 22nd at 8 AM EST. For some  people (particularly those whose ISPs cache DNS entries) there may be a downtime of 1-2 hours. These people will see a message explaining what's going on.

We hope this change doesn't inconvenience anyone too much. We'll be in a much better position to sustain the kind of growth we've seen over the last several years once this upgrade is completed.

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us at support@digication.com or call us at 1-888-342-3444.

We are excited to announce that the Digication UI has been updated:

Login Page
The layout has been updated. There is now a larger area including a video tutorial that introduces Digication to users as they login.

Personal Dash Board (Home Page)
The overall UI has been updated to be more consistent with the rest of the site. All the existing functionalities have not changed.

Course / Community Tab Interface
We have added a tab interface to all courses and communities:

-Notifications
This is the "landing page" when a user clicks on a course or community. For faculty, it shows a small "Checklist" that allows for quick adding of discussions. For both faculty and students, it also shows a list of discussions that contains unread posts so that they can get to them quickly.

- Discussions
This tab has the same features as the existing discussion topic listing, with some enhancements to the UI.

- Students
This tab shows a list of all the students that are within a class, along with any relevant information about the student.

- Settings
This tab is for faculty only. It contains a number of administration tools for managing the course or community, user access, attendance, and grade book.

We hope you like the new user interface. As always, we look forward to your feedback.

Note: No changes have been made to e-Portfolios.

We're happy to announce that we'll be providing a number of new enhancements and features shortly before the new school year. Alongside our new Assessment Management System (announcement to come soon), we've updated the look and feel for consistency and help make sure Digication is compatible with all major browsers.

If anyone's interested in a preview of the new layouts, or wants screenshots to update their school-specific documentation, please get in touch with us!

We have decided to discontinue the color chooser found under "My Courses". According to our data, less than 1% of all courses are set up with custom colors. As much as we are sad to see a feature go, in order to not fall into the trap of software feature creep (link to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_creep) (think Microsoft Word...) and maintain our "simple by design" moto, we have decided to retire the color chooser sometime before Fall 2008 as we make our next round of updates.

You can now embed TeacherTube (http://www.teachertube.com/) videos right in your e-Portfolio.
Other embeddable services include BrightCove, Google Video, Photobucket, SchoolTube, TeacherTube and YouTube. If there is another service you would like to see just contact us and let us know.

We appreciate all the feedback you've given us about how we can make our e-Portfolios better. Today, you'll notice that we've changed our editing tools to make them easier, more intuitive, and more flexible.

Here are some of the highlights:

1. Flexible page layouts: Want to customize the layout of your pages instead of being limited to a simple "image and text"? We still offer preformatted page layouts, but now you can modify them or build your own with modules of text, images, and more.

2. New Navigation Editing: Instead of going to a separate area to edit your top and side menus, you can edit them from any page at any time.

3. Better text editing: Our updated text editor is more stable and has added features such as find and replace. We've heard a lot of feedback from those of you trying to paste formatted text from Word - now, you can use the "Paste From Word" button to get better results.

4. Edit and Publish: Tabs along the top of every page let you switch between editing, previewing your changes, and seeing what your published page looks like.

Any customers who would like more information or assistance in updating their documentation and training plans, please feel free to contact us at support@digication.com.

As always, we look forward to hearing your feedback on these changes and thank you for using Digication!

We're very excited to announce an update to our popular e-Portfolio solution in the next few weeks. We typically schedule upgrades during the summer to allow our schools to schedule additional training, however these updates were so strongly requested that we decided to release it early.

The increased functionality can be grouped into two areas. The first are a series of user interface updates that make editing different areas of your e-Portfolio more consistent. We've consolidated editing the navigation and the page content into one easy-to-use screen. For the second update, we broke down our pages into more granular objects to allow more flexibility in designing your e-Portfolio. You'll still have all the same options for creating pages and using our flexible templates, but you can further customize the page afterwards if you choose.

We're running through our exhaustive testing now and will be posting more details and screenshots in this blog in the coming days. Any customers who would like more information or assistance in updating their documentation and training plans, please feel free to contact us at support@digication.com.

As always, we look forward to hearing your feedback on these changes and thank you for using Digication!

Does your school have a central site where students and teachers can log on?  Wouldn't it be convenient if they didn't have to log into Digication separately?

We're developing single sign on capabilities so your school can integrate more easily with Digication. This would allow members of your school to log in to your school site and click over to Digication without having to log in again.  If you are interested and want more information, contact us.

We've made a language change throughout our system - we're now referring to Spots as e-Portfolios. Many of you suggested this, and we realized it would be a more transparent way to let you (and everyone new to our product) understand what Digication does.
Error messages, which were sometimes easy to overlook, are now more visible. This will make it easier for you to know if something needs to be fixed when you're filling out a form.

For e-Portfolios, we've built a new, more robust navigation editor. e-Portfolio pages now default to being taggable, to help Digication users amass a richer and more easily searchable directory.

Plus, we've fixed some bugs in the following areas:

- General - signup form
- e-Portfolios - horizontal and vertical gallery layouts
- e-Portfolios - updated uploader to make it faster
- e-Portfolios - portfolios created from template inherit categories
- Courses - course settings form
- Courses - course import layout
- Courses - course creation form
- Calendar - item export
- Calendar - items ordered by time
- Calendar - supports long urls
- General - accidentally typing www.campus.digication.com will no longer cause problems

Thank you for all your help in making Digication a better tool!

We are always impressed by the wealth of good work in our directories, and we wanted to give our visitors an easier way to find e-Portfolios that might interest them. Now, school directories can be browsed by category. Schools with admin accounts can easily create categories, such as academic departments, to which portfolios in their directory can be added.

Otis College of Art and Design is already using categories to showcase their productive and abundant community. Check out the Otis directory and click the "By Category" tab to check it out. Otis decided to categorize portfolios under academic departments as well as by the role of their owners (student, staff, faculty or alumni).

Here at Digication we're always creating new features that will help our users make the most out of Digication. We hope you enjoy our two features latest features inspired by the feedback we receive from users like you. Your feedback plays an important role in the innovation of our products so keep sending your ideas and comments to support@digication.com!

New Feature: Create New e-Portfolio from a Template
We now offer templates to give you ideas and save you time. Maybe you're not sure how to organize your e-Portfolio, or maybe you're a teacher who wants to have a whole classroom of students quickly set up portfolios. Either way, these templates should make the process even easier.

When you're creating a new e-Portfolio (after logging in, click Create under My e-Portfolio Showcase on the right), you'll see a new tab which says Create From Template. Click this tab and you'll be able to preview the available templates and select the template you would like to use to kick start your site. Currently we offer a general portfolio template as well as templates for students and teachers. Once your e-Portfolio is created you can use the template as is or customize it to suit your unique goals.

We plan to give schools that are taking advantage of our Admin Tool the opportunity to create custom school-wide templates very soon!

New Feature: Export to an e-Portfolio
For schools taking advantage of our classroom tools, we now offer the ability to export from a post directly to a portfolio page. This feature provides a quick and easy way to showcase student work and achievements. At the left of any post, click the Export to Spot link and choose which parts of the post you'd like to export. Watch our video demo (2.5 mb) to see this feature in action.

Good Morning Digi Members-

We are happy to announce the addition of a new file attachment feature which allows you to upload multiple file attachments at one time. This new feature additionally gives you a progress view so you can see what percentage of the attachment has downloaded, and easy to use drag and drop ordering of attachments. In order to take advantage of this new feature, you will need to install the latest Flash player on your computer. To download the latest Flash player click here.
We hope you will all find this new feature useful!