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Renaissance Place™ has an updated look and feel throughout. In addition to several user-interface improvements, all reports have been updated to promote consistency in reports across all products, making it easier to use reports because the time invested in understanding one report carries over to others.
We have moved from Microsoft .Net 1.1 to Microsoft .Net 2.0.
Several user-requested enhancements have been added throughout the management software.
Alerts
Additional alerts have been added to the Home page depending on the state of your software:
- License Agreement - An alert will appear for administrators immediately after an upgrade or new install to view and agree to the software license.
- Updates - An alert will appear for administrators anytime we have a cumulative patch or high-priority fix available (only if connected to the Internet).
- Parent Requests - An alert will appear for the administrator anytime one or more parents have requested access to Renaissance Place; these alerts are updated nightly.
- Subscription - An alert will appear for all school- and district-level users once an active subscription is within 90, 60, 30, 15 and 0 days from a subscription end date.
Usability
The following enhancements were added to streamline setup and give you additional security options:
- New school years can now be set by the district admin for all schools, not requiring each school to log in and set it separately.
- Additional security options have been added for students and parents, allowing administrators to show or hide the parent login link from the Welcome page, and show or hide the simplified student login link Did you forget your username... from the student login page.
- Streamlined setup allowing you to assign products to multiple classes simultaneously.
- Search results will now show up to 50 items per page so there are less pages to click through.
The most exciting addition to Dashboard this year is the teacher-level drill down. This will allow administrators to view their implementation and success data at a teacher level. Teachers will be able to see this information as well; however, they will only see that information about themselves, not other teachers.
Many of the new features in Home Connect™ are specific to math and reading and have been covered in those sections. However, there are benefits to the way Home Connect is managed. Home Connect was designed with the teacher and school in mind:
- No additional password management required by the school or teacher. The students' Renaissance Place login and password are used for Home Connect.
- Any written correspondence to the parent is readily available. Simply print it out and send it home.
- Easy setup. Most anyone in the district can set up in a matter of minutes.
- Email notifications to parents or guardians required by Home Connect are handled via Renaissance Learning™ mail servers.
Consolidation
Consolidation was reviewed and has been updated to provide optimal performance.
Reports
In addition to consistent report styles throughout for improved readability, a new Engaged Time score is available on Math and Reading reports.
RDT 4.0 will provide a more intuitive wizard for the end user. This release will include updated text throughout the wizard to better describe the options available, online help available throughout the wizard, and an option to import Accelerated Reader™ content only from a desktop application database. In addition, RDT 4.0 includes all the updates from the RDT 3.2 patch, including reduced import time, improved data management and the ability to import MathFacts in a Flash™ data from a desktop application database.
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