This week we released a checklist view for Scope & Sequence in the PYP, so that schools can now track what is being covered in each subject for each year.
To see the new view, click on your Inquiry tab to begin. We now provide a Scope and Sequence tab on the right. Please note you can filter the Scope & Sequence by Subject, and see which expectations, understandings, and outcomes are being addressed.
To see which unit addresses that part of the Scope and Sequence, please hover over the (i) icon.
You can then go to the unit and update the Scope and Sequence.
Thank you for your patience as we completed the ManageBac server upgrade. All systems were back up as of 5:36 pm HKT (after ~3.5 hours) of downtime.
During this server upgrade, we made several important security updates and moved ManageBac behind a stronger hardware firewall that is designed to mitigate (stronger, more intense) DDoS attacks.
As we described in our prior blog post roughly two weeks ago, ManageBac was hit by several DDoS attacks. Our security consultants traced these attacks back to a school in Abu Dhabi, U.A.E. whose servers may have been compromised.
We contacted the school earlier this week and the matter is now being dealt with internally. The subsequent DDoS attempts have been stopped and have not caused any further downtime to ManageBac.
As most of you know, the ManageBac API allows Diploma Coordinators to bulk register their students’ exam information. We’re pleased to announce that bulk registration on IBIS is now open for 2014.
If you’ve never used ManageBac to register students on IBIS, it is a simple three-step process:
1) Students fill out their Plan worksheets.
2) The coordinator reviews the plans and then Locks All Worksheets, which prevents students from making further changes.
3) The coordinator clicks Register via IBIS, and the student information is automatically entered onto IBIS.
We also offer PDF exports of the students’ information.
For more information on registering students on IBIS, please refer to our support tutorials.
We will be doing a server upgrade on Saturday, May 11 from 2 pm HKT to 6 pm HKT.
ManageBac will be unavailable during this 4-hour window. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your understanding.
We’ve updated our demo account so that usernames and passwords are no longer required.
The account will automatically reset after the time indicated in the upper right, so please feel free to add, delete, or edit data. We’ve built it so you can experiment.
A few tips on navigation:
1) The demo account automatically opens up in the IB Coordinator view of a student’s CAS worksheet. You can use the links at the top to navigate into other areas of the Diploma Programme, or go directly into the Middle Years or Primary Years.
2) If you would like to view ManageBac as a Student, Parent, or Teacher, click on Select User at the top.
We will continue display links at the top for easy navigation, but please feel free to explore any additional areas on your own.
We’re proud to announce that ManageBac will be supporting schools in Australia from May 6 – May 31, 2013.
The more detailed itinerary:
May 6-May 10: Sydney and Canberra
May 13-May 17: Melbourne
May 20-May 31: Adelaide
Planned highlights include presenting at a regional PYP network meeting on May 9 in Canberra, and presenting at the South Australia MYP network meeting on May 23 in Adelaide.
We look forward to meeting with old and new customers next month. Please drop us a line if you’d like us to visit your school or present at your regional meeting.
Under the Users tab > Import Students, we now include an option to Import Student Photos. This allows you to bulk upload student photos to your ManageBac account, and will overwrite any existing student profile pictures.
Please ensure that your photos are saved in PNG, JPEG or GIF format with the photo name matching the student ID (e.g. 89012.png). Student IDs can easily be bulk updated via Users > Update Profiles.
For best results, we recommend portrait photos with the dimensions 300px by 300px. Please ensure that each photo is less than 1 Mb.
For schools using our Reports feature, we now provide the option of displaying the student photo on the report cover sheet. Please edit the cover sheet for an existing template, and check the Student Photo option.
Once the report is generated, a photo will display next to the student name along with any additional information.
ManageBac was hit by two distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks at 5:32 pm EST on Wednesday, April 24 and again 6:57 pm EST. The total downtime was just over 2 hours and 26 minutes. There was no data loss, but users were unable to connect during much of the evening.
A DDoS attack occurs when there is a flood of Internet traffic targeting a server and consuming all resources, thereby blocking legitimate traffic.
As a precaution, our hosting provider RackspaceCloud null routed our servers at 7:22 pm EST i.e. all external traffic was blocked, so we setup a load balancer within the RackspaceCloud network and routed all traffic back in two phases: HTTPS traffic was restored at 8:41 pm, and HTTP traffic was back at 8:56 pm.
We apologize for this and our team was working to return systems to normal immediately after receiving the first downtime alert via Pingdom. We have added traffic filters and an additional load balancer, so if this re-occurs we will immediately route traffic again to minimize any disruption.
We apologize for the ManageBac server downtime today. Our team is investigating and we will have an update for you shortly.
[Edit: We are back! Apologies for the two hours of downtime. We will post a complete update within the next hour.]
