See what's new in NavEd. Product updates, new features, and improvements for micro school, co-op, and small school management.
The photo button no longer offers files that will be turned away.
Tapping "a photo" showed everything in the camera roll, including iPhone photos
in a format NavEd cannot read yet, and picking one failed after the fact. The
photo picker now shows only what will actually go through, including when you
have limited a step to particular file formats.
Lesson steps that asked for work but accepted nothing now work.
If a unit was built for you by Claude and a step asked students to turn
something in without saying what kind of file, students saw every option greyed
out and could not finish the step or the unit. Those steps now accept any kind
of work, which is what the rest of NavEd already assumed.
Lesson links behave the way teachers expect.
Starting a video part way through now works. If you copy a link from YouTube's
share button with a start time like 2:30, the video begins there instead of at
the beginning.
Pasting a link without the "https://" in front of it used to save and then do
nothing when a student clicked it. Those links work now.
Two ways a form could ask a question nobody could answer are closed.
A multiple choice question with no options added yet could be published. Families
then saw the question with nothing to pick, and the form could not be submitted
at all. Publishing now tells you which question still needs options.
A Yes/No question marked required was not actually required, and a form left
unanswered recorded a "No" the family never gave. Yes and No are now two clear
choices, a required one has to be answered before the form will send, and
leaving an optional one alone records nothing instead of inventing an answer.
Videos in a lesson play now.
A video attached to a lesson step was showing a grey error box instead of playing.
This was every video, and it was on the student's own page as well as the teacher
preview. Paste the link YouTube, Vimeo or Loom hands you and it plays. If a link
is one we cannot play in the page, the step now shows a button that opens it in a
new tab instead of a broken box.
There is now a "See it as a student" button in the lesson builder.
Opening the student view meant spotting a small eye icon on a step, with nothing
on it to say what it did. The bar at the bottom of the lesson builder now has a
button that says "See it as a student" and opens the first step of your unit the
way a student sees it, in a new tab. The button on each step says what it does
now too, and opens that step.
The step and graded counts at the top of the builder, and the ones in that same
bottom bar, were showing a row of dots instead of numbers. They show the real
counts now, and they keep up as you work.
On a tablet or phone, the bar at the bottom of the lesson builder was sitting
underneath the row of buttons along the bottom of the screen, which could put
Publish out of reach. It sits above it now.
You can now write down what students need to bring.
Every lesson step can carry a short list of materials, and students see it as a
"What You'll Need" card on the step. If a unit was built for you by Claude it may
already have these filled in, and until now there was no way to see or change
them. There is a "Students will need" line on each step in the lesson builder.
"See it as a student" now opens the real lesson page.
The preview panel beside the lesson builder was a narrow column that showed a
video as a line of text, an attached worksheet as grey text you could not click,
and nothing at all for how work gets turned in, which file types you allow, which
grades a step is for, or what materials students need. It also said it updated as
you typed, which it did not.
The eye button on each step now opens the actual student page in a new tab, at
full size. It is the same page a child sees, so a video is a real video, an
attached file is a real download, and if you switch off "video" as a way to turn
work in, you can see the greyed out tile the child will get. You can also choose
which grade to look through the eyes of, which matters when a step is set for
some grades and not others.
With the panel gone, the builder itself now uses the full width of the page.
Building a form now shows you what families will actually see.
The preview was leaving out signature and payment questions entirely. It now
renders the real form, and it waits for your last edit to save before it
opens, so it always shows what you just typed. Checkbox and radio questions
were also drawing one extra, empty control that nobody could use, on the
form families filled out as well as in the preview. That is gone. Editing a
question updates its card right away instead of looking unchanged, the field
count at the top keeps up, and there's an "All changes saved" line so you're
never guessing.
There's also a new Section question type: a heading with an optional
description, for breaking a long form into parts like student information and
emergency contacts. If you had built headings out of an empty checkbox
question, those were converted for you automatically.
You can also set a date and time for a form to stop accepting responses.
Leave it blank and nothing changes. Set it and anyone opening the link
afterwards sees a plain note saying the form closed, and on what date.
Exporting who filled out a form is easier to find. The roster download,
which gives you one row per child with their grade level, used to appear only
on forms that asked families to pick a student. It now shows on any form that
collects student information, including enrollment applications. You can also
choose which columns come out, and NavEd remembers your choice for that form.
A few smaller things: Yes/No questions now say which side means yes, each
choice type explains when to use it, switching a question between dropdown,
radio and checkbox keeps the answers you already typed, a new question lands
directly below the one you're working on instead of at the very bottom, and
the actions menu on the forms list no longer opens inside the table.
Turn a step into "turned in during class" right from the lesson builder.
Some work is collected in person instead of uploaded, like a paper handed
in during class. Every step in the lesson builder now starts with a simple
question: "How does this get turned in?" Leave it as "Uploaded to NavEd"
(the default, and how every step has always worked) or switch it to
"Turned in during class" to skip the file-type setup entirely. Students on
a "turned in during class" step see a plain note to hand their work to
their teacher instead of a file-upload button, with a small option to send
it in anyway if they're out sick.
Clearer explanation of grade levels, grading, and grading periods in NavEd Lessons.
The curriculum builder guide now explains the difference between a step's
grade level, the "Counts for a grade" toggle, and the grading period an
assignment lands in. It also covers what to do if grading a step fails
because your school hasn't set up a grading period yet.
Groundwork for marking work turned in during class in NavEd Lessons.
Some classes collect work in person instead of as an upload. Until now,
that work showed as "not submitted" forever, with no way for a teacher to
mark it received. NavEd Lessons can now track a lesson step as turned in
during class, with a simple checklist so a teacher can mark who has turned
work in. Nothing changes for any existing step, and this isn't self-serve
yet: reach out and we can turn it on for a class while we build the full
option into the unit builder.
If part of a page does not load, NavEd now tells you instead of leaving a button that quietly does nothing.
In the unit builder, a small hiccup loading one part of the page could
sometimes stop the rest of the page's controls from working, with no
warning shown. Now each part of the page loads on its own, so one hiccup
can't take down the others, and if anything does not load you'll see a
plain notice on the page. Refreshing usually fixes it.
Changing a student's sign-in email is now more reliable.
Setting or correcting a student's sign-in email from their profile no
longer shows a "something went wrong" error after the change actually
succeeded. The email address updates and a clear confirmation appears
every time.
Schools can now set a student's sign-in email themselves.
Open a student's profile, go to Settings, and you'll find Account Management.
From there you can add a sign-in email for a student who doesn't have one yet,
or correct one that was typed wrong. The change takes effect right away, and
the Send Password Reset button next to it gets the student into their account.
If the address is already in use somewhere, you'll see a clear message and
nothing changes.
If someone already made an account before you invited them, your invitation now works instead of being turned away.
Inviting a person whose email already had a NavEd account (for example, from
signing in with Google before ever being invited) used to be refused outright.
Now that account can be invited and simply adds your school once they accept.
See at a glance who hasn't signed in yet, and send them a sign-in link.
Parent and staff accounts now show when someone has never signed in, right on
the Parents and Staff lists. If they haven't, you can send them a sign-in link
from that same row. On the Parents list, a new "Never signed in" filter lets
you jump straight to that group instead of scanning the whole roster.
You can now print your student roster.
There's a new Print Roster button on the Students page, next to Export CSV. It
prints just the roster itself: no sidebar, no buttons, and the column headers
repeat at the top of every page. Whatever you have on screen is what prints, so
search for a grade level or turn columns on and off first and the printout
follows. Available to teachers and admins alike.
Clearer help for parents setting up a child's login
The help center now answers "how do I add or change my child's email address?" directly, with the
steps to find the Settings tab on the student's page, on a computer and on a phone. The parent
guides that pointed to the wrong place have been corrected.
Password reset now tells you the truth when a student has no email address.
If you asked us to send a password reset to a student who does not have an
email address saved yet, we used to say the email had been sent. Now we say
plainly that there is no address on file, so you know to add one first.
Assignments created between school terms now file into the upcoming term instead of the end of the year.
When a teacher marked a lesson step as graded during a break between terms, the assignment it created could land in the wrong grading period: the last one of the school year instead of the one about to start. It now files into the upcoming term.
In NavEd Lessons, the grade level picker is now clearly labelled, and if saving a grade setting fails you now see why.
The button for choosing which grade levels a lesson step is for used to say
"add a grade," which was easy to mix up with the separate control for
attaching a step to the gradebook. It now says "add a grade level." Separately,
if a grade-related save fails, the error message is now visible instead of
being shown in a spot that stayed hidden.
Parents can now see the account settings for their child, including updating a login email and sending a password reset.
On some student pages, a few cards further down the page weren't showing up at all, including a child's contact information and a parent's account options. They're all visible now.
You can now email families straight from the gradebook on any class page.
The "Email" button next to the grade matrix, the envelope next to each
student's name, and the envelope on each assignment column now show up
everywhere you view a class gradebook. Message the whole class or one family
at a time, even before you have entered any grades. Once a class has
assignments, you can also message just the families missing that work or
falling below passing.
Correcting a student's email address now keeps their sign-in working.
When a parent updated their child's login email, the change saved but the account
could be left unable to sign in or reset a password at the new address. The new
address now works right away. If the address is already used by another account,
you get a clear message instead of a silent failure.
Deactivated students no longer count against your free limit, and reactivating one now checks that you have room first.
Deactivating a student was still counting against your school's 5 free students everywhere it showed up: the free-limit check, your billing page, and the sidebar counter. Now only active students count. Reactivating a student checks for an open slot first, so your school can't end up over its limit; if there isn't room, you'll be told plainly and can deactivate someone else to make space.
Teachers can now read every lesson unit their school is building.
Before, you only saw the units for the classes you are assigned to teach, so a
department lead could not open a colleague's unit to look at it. Now every
teacher can read all of the school's units, while editing a unit stays with the
teacher assigned to that class.
Parents see what they can do on their child's page instead of a read-only notice.
The note at the side of a child's profile told parents the page was read-only and
to contact the school, even though the buttons to update their child's login email
and send a password reset were right below it. It now says what a parent can
actually change there.
Email confirmation links are now tied to the exact request they were sent for.
A link that confirms a student's new email address now works only for the request
it was issued for, and stops working once that request expires. Nothing changes
for a parent using the link they were emailed.
Student billing now keeps up with your roster after you pass the free student allowance.
In some cases the student count used for billing could stay behind your actual roster, so the amount billed did not match the number of students enrolled. Counts now stay in step. Schools on a flat yearly plan are billed their yearly rate and are never charged per student.
Accepting an enrollment application no longer mixes up a student's own account with a parent's.
In a rare case, accepting an application could relabel a student's own account as a parent account, showing them an empty parent view instead of their grades. Accepting an application now checks for this first, and if a family's setup would cause a mix-up, the application is held so the school's admin can sort it out instead of the accounts getting tangled.
The duplicate-student warning now checks again if you change the name.
When adding a student whose name already exists, you see a heads up before a second record is created. If you then edit the name to a different student who also already exists, you will now see a fresh warning for that name too, instead of it being skipped.
Switching someone from a parent account to a student account now works cleanly.
If a family member was invited as a parent and later needed to be corrected to a student, the old parent listing could stick around and confuse sign-in. Changing someone's role in the Users page now clears out the outdated listing so their account matches their actual role.
Your school's records are now locked to your school.
School records were already separated, but a few pages relied on that separation happening indirectly rather than checking it outright. Every one of those pages now confirms that the person asking is a member of the school they are looking at, before anything is read or changed. Nothing changes for anyone using NavEd normally.
Deleting a student is easier to find and finish.
You can now delete more than one student at a time from the students list, not just one at a time from a student's own menu. The confirmation now accepts a name typed either way ("Last, First" or "First Last") and tells you right away if it doesn't match, and deleting a student now also removes their ability to sign back in at your school.
Every guardian's contact details now show right on a student's profile, without leaving the page.
Clicking "+N more guardians" now opens the rest of the family's contact details in place, each with working Call and Email buttons. The full guardian list further down the page also got working email and phone links, instead of plain text you couldn't tap or click.
Profile pictures for staff and admin accounts now stay visible for good.
A profile photo used to stop displaying about an hour after it was uploaded. New photos now keep working. A photo added before this may need to be added again. Photos are also now kept separate per school, so two schools using the same account name can no longer end up sharing one.
A missing image or file now shows a normal "not found" page instead of an error page.
Routine strengthening of how NavEd hands out uploaded files. Nothing changes for schools on nav.education, and no file, photo, or record was affected.
Internal code cleanup: removed unused code behind the scenes.
Nothing changed in how your school uses NavEd.
Exported student lists now contain the full text of long fields.
Allergies, medications, pickup authorization, medical history, and IEP/504 notes are shortened on screen so the table stays readable. The CSV export was copying that shortened version, trailing dots and all, so long entries came out cut off. The export now gives you the complete entry.
Adding a student now checks if that name is already on your roster.
If you add a student whose name matches someone already on file, NavEd lets you know before creating a new record, so fixing a spelling doesn't accidentally leave you with two records for the same child. You can open the existing student instead, or add the new one anyway if it's genuinely a different child who shares a name.
Profile photos are now filed under the account they belong to.
A person's profile photo used to be stored under whatever their username happened to be, so renaming someone left their photo filed under the old name. Photos are now filed under the account itself, which does not change when a name does. Photos already uploaded are untouched and keep working. Usernames containing a slash are now turned down with a short message instead of being saved.
Some schools couldn't save their settings page at all.
If a school's logo or banner had been uploaded years ago in a file type NavEd no longer accepts for new uploads, saving anything on the settings page, even just the school's name or colors, failed with a confusing error. Existing logos and banners are now left alone; only a genuinely new upload is checked against the accepted photo formats.
The grade picker in NavEd Lessons now stays open while you scroll it.
When a step's grade list was long enough to need scrolling, scrolling it could close the picker and jump the page instead. It now scrolls on its own, and reopening it starts back at the top so "Everyone in this class" is always the first thing you see.
"Add a grade" and grading toggles in NavEd Lessons now work the way they look like they should.
Clicking "add a grade" on a lesson step now opens the grade-level picker instead of doing nothing, and turning a step's grading toggle on or off now actually shows or hides its points field. Both were silently broken for every school using NavEd Lessons; nothing you set up or graded was ever affected.
The free transcript generator now supports courses your student is currently taking.
You can now mark a course as "In Progress" instead of leaving it off the transcript, so a senior's current-year classes show up like colleges expect. In-progress courses are shown clearly on the page and in the PDF, and don't count toward GPA or credits earned until a final grade is entered.
Some totals and labels that were hard to read in dark mode are now clearly visible.
A payout's totals summary and a few status labels on forms and widgets could show up as light text on a light background when a school was using dark mode. These now display with proper contrast.
Some internal developer notes were also showing on the form response page and no longer do.
A security tightening on where NavEd sends you when a page can't take you where you expected.
We closed a gap where certain redirects could have sent you to an outside site instead of staying on NavEd. Links like these now always keep you inside your school's own site. This same fix now covers a few more pages, including school settings, where an error message could also show more than it should have.
Payout details now explain more clearly why a family name is missing on a line.
On a deposit worksheet, a payment with no family name now says why: whether it looks like it was taken directly in Stripe rather than through NavEd, or whether it came through NavEd but couldn't be linked to a family. Either way, the money was always counted correctly in your totals; only the explanation was unclear.
Withdrawing a student's photo and video permission now always sticks, and submitting an enrollment application twice no longer creates two students.
Turning off a family's photo and video permission for a student could quietly get undone if someone else saved a different change to that same student around the same time. Withdrawing that permission now always sticks, no matter what else is being saved on the student at the same time.
Submitting an enrollment application twice, like from a double click or a slow connection, could also create two student records once the application was approved. NavEd now recognizes a repeat submission of the same application and creates only one.
Parents at a school that hasn't set up grading periods yet can now see their children's page instead of an error.
If a school hadn't yet set up its grading periods for the year, parents landed on an error message instead of their kids' dashboard. Now the dashboard shows normally, with a plain note that grade trends will appear once grading periods are set up.
Community service entries no longer lose what you typed if they don't save.
If a service hours entry didn't save because of a mistake, like a typo in a date, NavEd now keeps what you typed instead of clearing the form, so you can just fix the problem and save.
Photo uploads now work the same way everywhere: school logo, banners, and profile pictures.
Uploading a school logo, a banner, a class banner, or a profile picture now follows the same rules in NavEd. Photos saved by Windows in formats like ".jfif" are now accepted on all four, each with a clear 5 MB size limit and a helpful message if a file is too large.
Cancelling and retrying a paid form now works the way it looks like it should.
If a family started filling out a paid form, backed out before paying, and came back to try again, NavEd used to quietly throw away everything they just retyped and re-signed, and charge them against their first, abandoned attempt instead. That's fixed: cancelling closes out the old attempt for good, so starting over creates a clean new one with exactly what was just entered.
A club payment link sent to more than one guardian can no longer be paid twice.
When a club fee's payment link went out to more than one parent or guardian on a student, each could complete payment separately, so a family could end up paying for the same club registration twice. Sending the link to every guardian is still fine; only one payment for that fee goes through now.
A club payment link sent to more than one guardian can no longer be paid twice.
When a club fee's payment link went out to more than one parent or guardian on a student, each could complete payment separately, so a family could end up paying for the same club registration twice. Sending the link to every guardian is still fine; only one payment for that fee goes through now.
Forms can now collect a real electronic signature.
Some agreements need more than a checkbox. Enrollment agreements, permission slips, and other forms in NavEd Forms can now include a signature field: the signer reads the agreement text, types their full legal name to sign it, and checks a box confirming they're agreeing to sign electronically. That works whether the person filling it out has a NavEd login or is signing from a public link a school shares on its own website.
Every signature keeps a record of what was actually agreed to: the exact wording at the moment it was signed, the name typed, and when and how it was signed. If a school edits the agreement text later, past signatures still point at what was actually signed, not the new wording.
This feature records what was signed and when. It is not legal advice, and for agreements with real consequences, a school should confirm with its own counsel.
A behind-the-scenes reliability pass on where NavEd sends you after you save something.
Saving a student's edits when your session had quietly expired could bounce you through an extra, unnecessary step before landing back on your student list. That extra step is gone. We also went through the rest of NavEd's internal links and made them sturdier against this same kind of drift, so a future update is far less likely to leave anyone on a broken page after saving.
A behind-the-scenes privacy improvement to how account activity is recorded internally.
A behind-the-scenes privacy improvement to how account activity is recorded internally.
Student photos now save, and you can add one to a student you already have.
Adding a photo to a student appeared to work, but the picture was never stored where NavEd looks for it, so it showed as broken or missing afterwards. Photos added from now on save correctly and stay put.
Until now a photo could only be attached while creating a student, so an existing student could never be given one. A student's edit page now has a photo field, showing the current picture if there is one.
Photos added before today cannot be recovered, and those students now show their initials rather than a broken picture. If a student's photo is missing, open that student and add it again.
A behind-the-scenes security improvement to how signing in works across your school's web address.
We tightened the way your sign-in carries over between your school's web address and the main NavEd site. Nothing changes about how you log in, and you do not need to do anything.
Printed pages no longer cut off the right edge of a table.
When you printed a transcript, a student's profile, or a class schedule, the last column of the table could be cut off the page. These pages now print with every column fully visible.
Keep a record of community service hours.
A student can now keep a record of community service hours right alongside their grades: the date, the organization, how long, and what they did. It groups by organization, adds up a total, and prints as its own sheet to send with a scholarship application. You can export it as a spreadsheet too. Each entry can name a supervisor and contact so the organization can vouch for it. It is separate from the transcript and never touches grades or credits.
Applications now collect a way to reach the family, and approving several kids from one family only asks for their guardian once.
Filling out your enrollment application now asks for the guardian's name, email, and phone up front, once per application, not once per child. That means when you approve, that contact information is already there for you to confirm instead of typing it in from memory. A family applying with more than one child now shows one guardian box and a checkbox for each child, so approving all of them creates one guardian account, not several.
We also fixed a case where a typo in one child's information used to clear out everything else the family had typed for their other children. Now only the field that needs fixing is empty; everything else stays exactly as they entered it.
You can now actually create an enrollment application, right from the Forms page.
Application forms have worked behind the scenes for a while, but there was no way to start one: the "New Form" page never asked whether you wanted a regular form or an enrollment application. Now it does, with a plain choice between the two and a note that it's a one-time decision. Enrollment applications stay free on every plan, and the New Form page is reachable on every plan too, so a free-tier school never has to hit a paywall just to see the choice.
A couple of small builder cleanups ride along: leaving the confirmation message blank now gives an application a message that fits ("Thank you for applying!") instead of club-sign-up wording, and the "Applicant (New Child)" field option only shows up on application forms, not on every ordinary form you build.
Approving an application now respects your plan's student limit.
Approving a new application creates the child's enrollment right away, and now it checks your plan's student limit first, the same way adding a student directly already does. If approving would put you over your free limit, you'll see a clear message telling you to add a payment method, and nothing is created until you do. Families are never shown anything about this. It's between you and your plan.
A family can now fill out your enrollment application, not just start one.
Application forms were shareable on every plan, but the part where a family actually enters their child's information was missing. That gap is closed: your application, whether opened in NavEd or from the public link you share on your own site, now has a place for a child's name, date of birth, and grade. A family with more than one child applying can add each one to the same application with a single click.
We also tightened up the details: a name or date of birth left blank is caught with a clear message instead of a confusing error, a birth date can't be entered in the future, and submitting the same application twice, whether from a slow connection or an itchy back button, still only creates one.
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