As the year draws to a close, it's a good time to take a look at some of the latest from School Day Product Development and take a peek behind the curtain to see what's coming up in the near future. We have developed our service and our wellbeing model in many ways this year. However, the best is still yet to come. At the end of the year we will release some new features that we have been working with the whole year.

Let's take a look at our latest release first.

Our Latest Release

The latest updates for School Day were released November 8. They included numerous enhancements to our service.

​School Day Mobile App, used by students to answer our wellbeing questions 

• Our service now includes a Message Channel. We will publish messages about wellbeing in the channel. Later we will also send students positive updates on the wellbeing of their group, for example "Looks like you are all getting enough sleep in your group! Good for you! Research shows that you will learn more if you get enough sleep." These messages will be automatically and anonymously generated by our AI.
• Students get points for each questionnaire that they answer, and they will be able to reach a new level with a certain amount of points.
• We have also made many bug fixes and smaller improvements. We are very grateful for all the feedback from our users!

School Day Insights, used by school staff to followup on student wellbeing

• We have made improvements to the intervals in indicators and responses. In other words, it is now easier for you to select if you want to view the student data for the last weeks or months.
• We have improved the visual presentation of data. For example, now you can see also the number of answers in the charts.
• School districts are now able to see the data from all schools.
• We have also made many other smaller fixes and improvements.

What's Coming Up?

Even though latest improvements are interesting, it is even more exciting to wait for the new features that will be added to our service before the end of the year. Let's take a look what's coming next. 

We are currently working on a release that will be out during the holidays. That means that our users will be able to start a new term with an improved School Day Service!

Here's a sneak peek behind the curtain, to see what we are planning for 2020.

• ​A new question engine: We will have a new and improved way of distributing questions to the students. This means for example that we will be able to send a different number of daily questions to students of different age.
• New Insights interface: The user interface for the Insights service will be significantly revised. The indicators will be grouped according to the School Day model, which will make a big difference in viewing the student data. It will be easier to see at one glance which areas of wellbeing need work and which don't. We will also be showing key indicators in the front page of Insights that can be clicked open to view the underlying phenomena in each case. This will make it easier for you to dig deeper into different areas of wellbeing.
• Phenomena cards: We will be introducing phenomena cards that will inform teachers about current student wellbeing phenomena. They will be shown in the mobile app. This way teachers don't always have to log into Insights in order to keep up to date about their students' wellbeing. However, the most comprehensive data will always be visible in the Insights. Phenomena cards show only a small part of the available data.
• Web App: We will have a web-based tool for answering student questions. This is important for those students who don't have mobile devices and there are no shared devices available at school.

In addition to these, there is always a lot more interesting on our development list. However, I will not reveal everything quite yet, but will return to these more closely after the turn of the year!