A New Look for SmartSite
At last week's DOLCE meeting, Constance Fuller (ATS’s project manager for SmartSite) gave us a sneak preview of the upcoming update to SmartSite’s user interface.
A major goal of the update is to make the site more mobile-friendly, so the current three top bars will be collapsed into one—this will create more space on the page so that you can more easily view the site on smaller devices.
Additionally, there will be a new organization to the site tabs that will allow you to directly navigate to a tool—instead of clicking on your course site, then clicking on Gradebook in the navigation menu, you’ll be able to directly click on Gradebook via a dropdown box from the title of your course.
There will also be a dropdown box associated with what is currently “My Active Sites”; this dropdown will allow you to quickly navigate to any of your course or project sites.
In response to faculty complaints about the number of clicks it takes to publish a site, the programmers have also added a button at the top of the left navigation menu that will allow you to directly publish the site without having to go through Site Editor.
Finally, SmartSite is also getting a new color scheme that looks much cleaner.
Assuming all of the quality assurance checks go smoothly, these updates should go through during winter break.
For more details (including screenshots), check out this informative PDF.
A major goal of the update is to make the site more mobile-friendly, so the current three top bars will be collapsed into one—this will create more space on the page so that you can more easily view the site on smaller devices.
Additionally, there will be a new organization to the site tabs that will allow you to directly navigate to a tool—instead of clicking on your course site, then clicking on Gradebook in the navigation menu, you’ll be able to directly click on Gradebook via a dropdown box from the title of your course.
There will also be a dropdown box associated with what is currently “My Active Sites”; this dropdown will allow you to quickly navigate to any of your course or project sites.
In response to faculty complaints about the number of clicks it takes to publish a site, the programmers have also added a button at the top of the left navigation menu that will allow you to directly publish the site without having to go through Site Editor.
Finally, SmartSite is also getting a new color scheme that looks much cleaner.
Assuming all of the quality assurance checks go smoothly, these updates should go through during winter break.
For more details (including screenshots), check out this informative PDF.