See what's new in NavEd. Product updates, new features, and improvements for micro school, co-op, and small school management.
PDF materials now open right in the page.
Upload a syllabus or handout as a PDF on a class's Materials tab, and students can now
view it with one click instead of downloading it every time. If the same file covers
several assignments, they only ever have to open it once. Word documents and other file
types still download as before.
Accepting a batch of applications now respects your free student count.
Adding students one at a time, or importing a class list, already stopped you before you
went over your free student count and offered to add a payment method. Accepting a batch
of applications at once now does the same, instead of letting the batch through.
If you're on a paid plan, nothing changes for you.
See at a glance which students can't sign in, and fix it right from the list.
The Students list now shows a "Can't sign in" count, with a filter to pull up just
those students. Any affected row is marked right next to the student's email, and
an admin can jump straight to fixing the sign-in address without opening the
student one at a time.
Teachers can now add their own classes.
Staff could already edit a class, take attendance, enter grades, and build lessons for it,
but adding a brand new class required an admin. Now a teacher can add a class themselves
from Manage Subjects, with the teacher picker already set to them, ready to change if the
class belongs to someone else.
Adding a class material now shows you it's working.
Picking a file to add or replace on a subject's Materials tab now shows the file name right
away, and the Save button lets you know it's uploading until the save finishes. Before this,
a large file could take a while with no sign anything was happening.
Pages now update the moment we ship a fix.
Some browsers were holding on to an older copy of NavEd's page scripts and
styles even after we shipped an update, sometimes for weeks. A normal reload
now always brings you the newest version, so a fix reaches you as soon as
it ships, no extra steps needed.
Your form questions now appear where you put them, and the builder keeps up with you.
Three fixes to building a form, all reported by a school putting one together.
Questions now appear to families in the exact order you arranged them. Before this, a
signature block, a payment block, or an application section always moved to the bottom of
the form when a family opened it, no matter where you placed it while building.
Deleting a question no longer shows an error when the question was in fact removed.
A question you add or rename now shows up right away in the list you choose from when you
link a charge to a quantity, so you no longer have to reload the page to find it.
Your School Calendar now shows what's actually happening on each day.
The School Calendar already knew your school year, quarters, meeting days, and
closures. Now it can show what's dated everywhere else in NavEd, right on the
day it happens: student birthdays, club and elective sign-up windows, form
deadlines, and more. A busy day shows a few at a glance, with a click to see
the rest.
Everyone who looks at the calendar picks which of these to show, and NavEd
remembers that choice from one visit to the next. Teachers can now open the
School Calendar too, so the whole staff sees the shape of the year, not just
admins. Setting up the school's calendar itself is still an admin job.
Tell NavEd which days your school meets, and which days it's closed.
Every school's calendar is its own: two or three days a week for a co-op, a
holiday break, a snow day. There's a new School Calendar page, under Academic
in the sidebar, where an admin can set the school's meeting days and mark
dates as closed.
Take Attendance now checks that calendar. If you open it for a day that falls
outside your meeting days or during a closure, it lets you know, but it never
stops you from saving. Attendance always saves exactly the way it does today.
Nothing about your school's calendar or attendance changes until an admin
visits the School Calendar page and sets it up.
Teachers see birthday reminders for their own students.
The upcoming birthdays shown on a teacher's dashboard now match the students
they actually teach, instead of the whole school. School admins still see
every student's birthday, as before.
You can give a student a sign in email while you are adding them.
The Add Student page has a new Sign in Access section. Fill in an email and the
student can sign in; leave it blank and nothing changes. Most students,
especially younger ones, are added without one and that is exactly right.
When you do add an address, NavEd offers to email that student a link to set
their own password, so you are not left with a student who has an email on file
but still no way in. You can switch that off if you would rather hand them a
password yourself.
The same offer now appears on the Set Sign in Email screen the first time you
give an existing student an address.
The assignments you add every week now come first in the gradebook.
On a subject's Gradebook tab, the Regular Assignments section used to sit below
Midterm and Final, so a teacher scrolled past two exam sections to reach the one
they add to most often. It now sits above them.
Nothing you have already entered changed. Only the order of the sections on the
page.
Parents and school admins get one button for a student's account.
Changing the email a student signs in with, or sending them a password reset
link, used to sit in the last tab of a nine tab strip. Whoever is allowed to
change those things now gets one button on the student's profile that opens
all of them, and on a phone it stays pinned near the bottom of the screen no
matter how far you scroll.
If a student has no sign in email yet, the same panel says so plainly and
offers to set one.
Your school can now clear a stuck club fee payment itself.
When a family opens the club fee payment page and closes it part way through,
the roster now shows that a payment is still open and when it was started,
instead of the same "Pending" label that every unpaid fee used to get.
Anyone on your staff who manages the roster can then reset that payment so the
family can start again straight away, instead of waiting for it to clear on its
own. A fee that has already been paid cannot be reset.
Importing a roster can no longer move a student who is already on it.
If a CSV row used the email address of someone already at your school, the
import quietly re-filed that person into whatever grade and school year the row
named, and then told you it had created a new student. Re-uploading a corrected
roster mid-year was enough to move a real child into the wrong grade.
Those rows are now left alone. The student stays exactly where you put them,
and the import tells you the row was skipped because that person is already
here. The results screen now lists every row that was skipped and every row
that could not be imported, alongside the ones that were created, so the
numbers add up to what actually happened.
Uploading your roster again to fill in guardian addresses still works: a
guardian on a skipped row is added to the student that row matched. When one
cannot be added, the results screen now says which row and why, instead of
leaving you to find out later.
Saving a student whose sign-in account was removed now works.
If a student's sign-in account had been removed, saving changes to that student
failed with a generic error, and so did setting them a new sign-in email or
using a mailed email-change link. Those now go through, or say plainly what is
missing and who to email, and nothing already on file for the student is
erased. Separately, a parent whose dashboard cannot load now sees plain
language instead of technical wording.
New assignments start with a weight of 1.
The weight box on a new assignment in the gradebook now arrives already filled
in with 1, which is what most assignments use. Change it whenever an assignment
should count for more or less, and if you leave it alone you no longer have to
type the same number every time.
Closing the club fee payment page no longer locks you out of paying.
If you started paying a club fee and then closed the tab without finishing, the
payment link stopped working for the rest of the day and told you a payment was
already being processed, even though nothing had been paid. Clicking the link
now takes you straight back to the payment you started so you can finish it.
A club fee still cannot be paid twice. When two parents open the same payment
link they land on the same single payment, and whoever is holding the card can
complete it.
You can edit a form after you publish it.
Publishing a form used to freeze it for good. A typo spotted after the first
family replied could never be fixed, and the only way out was to build the form
again and send everyone a new link. You can now reword questions, add new ones,
reorder them and change the settings on a form that is already live.
What we hold onto is the answers families have already given. A question that
has answers can be reworded but not deleted, and its type cannot be swapped,
because that would make an answer on file mean something it never meant. Prices
work the same way: they stay editable right up until a family actually pays.
Three smaller fixes from a sweep through every question type.
A number question now refuses a negative answer and an impossibly long one.
Nobody can accidentally record minus three adults on a field trip.
Students can no longer turn in a program disguised as a document, so a teacher
opening a child's work always gets the work.
"Applicant Details" now has its own button in the form builder on application
forms. It always worked, but you had to find it by changing another question's
type, which nobody would guess.
Changing a payment question into a different kind of question no longer
leaves its prices behind.
Switching a payment question to another type kept the amounts you had set up,
attached to a question that could no longer show them. The form could then end
up with two sets of prices, one of them invisible.
Exported spreadsheets show the right answers.
If a form had two questions with the same name, only one of the answers made it
into the download and the other was missing entirely, with no sign anything was
wrong. Both answers are there now, in two columns you can tell apart.
An "&" in a question or an answer choice showed up as a jumble of characters on
the form and in the download. It reads as "&" again.
When a family ticked several boxes and one of the choices had a comma in it,
the download ran the answers together so you could not tell where one ended.
Those answers are now readable.
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