Joe's Blog : Firefly gets more personalised and social in Firefly 429/09/2011

We're currently putting the finishing touches to our major release of Firefly, and we're all really excited by the new version.  Here is just a summary of some of the big changes and new features.

As schools' Firefly sites continue to grow, one of our key focuses this release was on navigation - how to make it easy for people to get to the content that is most relevant to them.  So we have made big changes to both the ways people can personalise their Firefly experience, but also made Firefly a lot more social - allowing editors or others to recommend content to you, as well as allowing you to follow changes to content or discussions more easily.

More personalised and social for teachers and pupils

• All new dashboard

  Building on My Feed, all logged in users now get a personalised home page showing them targeted information - messages, bookmarks, tasks, feedback on work and more.  Users will also see a user bar at the top of each page, allowing them to jump back to the dashboard, their tasks, etc easily.
  

• Bookmarks

  Bookmark pages on the site that are useful to you for quick access from your dashboard or bookmarks page.  You can also recommend bookmarks to others - for example if you have just built a revision sheet for your GCSE set, you can recommend the page to them and it will appear on their dashboard.

• Tasks

  Now you can easily create tasks for your students, with work collected either offline or online.  Keep tabs on how many have been completed and mark online if appropriate.  Students can sort and colour their tasks to keep them organised.
  

• Redesigned profiles

  We have updated profiles to bring together even more information on individuals and groups, including pulling through profile pictures from the MIS where available.

• Improved notifications

  Now you can choose whether to follow a page or follow its comments, or follow the posts on a forum.

Easier to edit and share for content editors

• Pasting just got a lot easier

  Choose whether to maintain or strip formatting when you paste so that your documents look great on the web with minimum fuss.

• Sharing your content

  You can now recommend your content to groups or individuals.  Even better, the system knows which groups you work with most often.

Example templates provide inspiration for site owners and designers

• New example templates

  We're building more and more example templates so that you can use them immediately on your site, or use them as a starting point if you like to get your hands dirty with HTML & CSS.

More flexible and pluggable log in options for system administrators

• Deeper integration with MISs

  Last year's live MIS integration was just a start.  We have built a framework to pull 'relationship' information from MISs so Firefly will know who teaches whom and so on.  This allows Firefly to display more relevant information to different people.  We are also working on pulling student and teacher timetables from a number of MISs.
  

• More flexible login system

  Enable Active Directory and database user accounts simultaneously to avoid creating accounts in the AD for parents, governors or alumni.  Alternatively, we or you can use our expanded API to write your own login/single sign on integrations.