What's new in WiseBoard

Three areas got meaningful upgrades: the comment bank is now much faster to navigate by subject or skill, school admins have new visibility into class setup gaps, and Pip's safety layer runs automatically every night across all four of its protection checks.

Gradebook comment bank

• Clicking any tag on a bank comment now instantly filters the list to only comments with that tag — no search box required.
• As you type a new tag while saving a comment, WiseBoard suggests tags you've already used so you can stay consistent across entries without remembering exact names.
• The dashboard quick-access tiles and the offline cache now link to the correct Performance Tracker URL. They were still pointing at the old /gradebook path, which returned a 404 for some teachers.

Admin class tools

• School and district admins can now see exactly which classes in their school haven't been linked to a school record yet. The count and the list of unbound classes appear on the admin dashboard.
• After every deployment, WiseBoard automatically backfills any classes that were created before the school-binding requirement was in place, so the dashboard count stays accurate without manual intervention.

Pip safety suite

• All four of Pip's protection checks — distress detection, sensitive topic filtering, parent escalation, and session flagging — now run automatically on a nightly schedule. Previously they were triggered only by real-time events; the nightly pass catches anything that slipped through during the day.
• Pip's safety responses are now translated into additional languages, matching the locales already supported for parent communications. Families interacting with Pip in Spanish, French, or Mandarin now receive safety messages in their own language.
• School admins can download a filtered CSV of safety events directly from the admin Safety tab, making it straightforward to fulfill a compliance review or share a record with a district coordinator.

Bug fixes

• A middleware ordering mistake caused valid student requests to receive a 401 "unauthorized" error on several endpoints. The root cause is fixed and covered by a cross-school access test to prevent recurrence.

A focused pass on two things that matter before the end of the school year: making Jeopardy genuinely playable by every teacher regardless of how they interact with a screen, and hardening the plumbing that keeps parent emails and reports accurate.

Jeopardy accessibility

• The 3D Jeopardy board no longer narrates its decorative tiles to screen readers — the clean keyboard overlay is the single voice now, which means a screen-reader user hears each clue once instead of twice.
• The moment a student hits the buzzer, a polite announcement reads "{name} buzzed in" aloud. A blind teacher can now run a full Jeopardy round without watching the screen.
• A new automated test proves a teacher can load the board, open a clue, and skip it using only the keyboard — so this path will never silently regress.

Reduce-motion improvements

• Toggling the OS-level "Reduce Motion" preference while a Railroad session is already running now takes effect instantly; teachers no longer need to reload the page.
• The Boss Battle's calm still-pose under Reduce Motion is locked in with a regression test, matching the existing coverage for Pip's Railroad and Pip's Quest.

Reliability

• A broken database query in a parent email or parent-facing report used to fail silently — the email would go out with a blank section and no one would know. Those failures now surface as a clear server error, making them observable and actionable.
• A linting rule now prevents the shorthand (table as any).column pattern from sneaking back into API routes. It caused subtle runtime mismatches and was the source of several quiet data bugs; the rule catches it at commit time instead.

A wide-ranging release covering safety transparency for parents, accessibility for screen-reader users, and offline reliability for the tools teachers reach for in the middle of a lesson.

Parent safety badges

• The little safety badges in a parent's view of their child's chat with Pip now have an inline "What do these badges mean?" explainer, so a parent seeing one for the first time isn't left guessing.
• Each badge now reads aloud in a way that makes sense to a screen reader, including the reason for the flag — not just the visual color.
• When Pip declines a sensitive topic, parents now see a clearer, human reason instead of a generic decline.
• The Safety events feed for school administrators picked up filters and pagination so a busy district can drill into a specific window or category without scrolling forever.
• Behind the scenes, the system now keeps an audit record of which safety badges each parent actually saw, and the 120-second window during which a flagged moment stays pinned at the top of the parent view is now formally documented and locked in by tests.

Accessibility

• The 3D Jeopardy board no longer reads its decorative tiles to screen readers — the cleaner, single-source keyboard overlay does the talking, with a regression test in place to keep it that way.
• A polite live region now announces "{name} buzzed in" the moment a player hits the buzzer, so a blind teacher can run a Jeopardy game by ear.
• A new browser-driven test proves a teacher can reach the Jeopardy board, open a clue, and skip it using only the keyboard.
• The remaining 3D arcade scenes now honor the OS-level "reduce motion" preference, matching what Pip's Quest and Pip's Railroad already did.

Offline resilience

• Awarding behavior points now works even when the classroom Wi-Fi drops. Points queue locally, replay safely once connectivity is back, and never double-count.
• Direct messages to families behave the same way — drafts queue offline and send exactly once when the network returns.

Polish & fixes

• Hosted Survivor rooms no longer fail to let a student rejoin from the same class.
• The hosted-room lobby's invisible-white-text bug is fixed; the room code is now readable at a glance.
• Every WiseBoard contact path now leads to one consolidated email address, so parents and admins always reach the right inbox.

A small but visible glow-up across both arcade games.

Pip's Railroad

• Major cities now wear a soft amber halo so they pop against the map.
• City labels picked up a clean white text-stroke so they stay legible even when a train is sitting right on top of them.
• Active trains leave a fading three-puff steam trail behind them in the direction of travel.

Pip's Quest

• Pip now has a gentle idle bob — a small reminder he's actually a living owl, not a sticker on the screen.
• Opening a chest triggers an eight-direction golden sparkle burst at the tile where Pip is standing.
• Both new animations honor the OS-level "reduce motion" preference. Pip stops bobbing and the chest sparkle becomes a single soft flash for anyone who's asked their device for less motion.

WiseBoard now publishes a public acknowledgments page at /acknowledgments listing every open-source library shipped in the production build, along with each library's license, author, and link.

The page is regenerated from the workspace's actual installed packages on every build, so it stays accurate without anyone having to remember to update it. A THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md file at the project root mirrors the same data for procurement reviewers who prefer a download.

Districts no longer have to wait for the 5-minute polling sweep to bring in new students or class changes overnight. A new nightly sweep runs at 03:00 UTC against every district that has roster sync enabled, and each run is recorded in the district sync history with success/failure counts. Failed runs surface in the district console exactly as manually-triggered runs do today.

This change requires no action from district admins — if your sync was already wired up, nightly refresh starts automatically.

WiseBoard is built to serve a school district, not just a single classroom. Phase B is the multi-tenant infrastructure that makes that real:

• Organizations and roles — districts, schools, and classrooms with proper hierarchy and role-based permissions.
• Org-scoped data — every student, class, lesson, and roster lives under an organization, with strict isolation between them.
• District admin console — manage users, schools, and seats.
• Audit-ready event logging — sensitive admin actions write to a structured log for compliance.
• Per-tier billing model — individual, school, and district pricing, with the ability to seat-license at the district level.

This is the unsexy plumbing that lets the rest of WiseBoard scale to a 50,000-student deployment without compromising data isolation or admin oversight.

Three foundational improvements that make the next year of work faster and safer:

• Sentry error tracking — every uncaught error in production surfaces in a single dashboard with stack trace, user context, and route.
• Spanish translations — the entire teacher-facing interface ships with es-US strings, with the framework in place for more languages next.
• Shared UI library — every artifact (web app, mobile, slides, videos) now pulls common components from a single library, so a fix in one place lands everywhere.
• Component testing framework — visual and behavioral regression tests, including a dedicated suite for the Pip owl rendering pipeline.
• Robust safety nets — performance budgets, error boundaries, and route-specific loading indicators.

Phase C makes WiseBoard ready to go through any district's procurement and IT review.

• WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility pass across the application: keyboard navigation, focus traps, ARIA labels, color contrast, prefers-reduced-motion respect, page titles per route.
• FERPA documentation — written, published, and linked.
• Data Processing Agreement — public DPA template, ready to countersign.
• VPAT — Voluntary Product Accessibility Template, published.
• Privacy policy and terms of service — current, theme- matched, and reachable from every public footer.
• Subprocessor list — published and kept current.
• Security overview — written for IT teams who need to know how data is stored, encrypted, backed up, and deleted.

Phase D ships everything a district sales conversation needs:

• District landing page at /for-districts — pricing tiers, pilot offer, and the full feature pitch.
• Sales hub — a curated set of public sales documents (one-pager, security and privacy summary, pilot agreement, pilot success rubric, outreach email template, case study template).
• Sales doc viewer — every sales doc renders as a public page with a clean reading experience and a print-friendly layout.
• District demo video — a dedicated, district-focused video walkthrough.
• Pitch deck — a slide deck for in-person pitches, also available as a public artifact.
• District pricing sheet — published, with tier breakdowns and per-student rates.

Phase E covers the work that protects the WiseBoard name and the Pip mascot.

• Trademark notices in the marketing footer.
• Legal pages — terms, privacy, accessibility statement, and trademark notice — all linked from the public footer.
• IP inventory — internal tracking of every protectable mark, asset, and registration status.
• Sensitive figures removed from public surfaces — internal pricing and insurance specifics no longer leak through public pages.

A whole new player-facing layer of the arcade. Every student gets their own pocket owl that lives, learns, and grows with them.

• Pip personalities and idle behaviors — owls bob, blink, and react to attention.
• Neglect and recovery — leave your owl too long and they droop; come back and they perk up.
• Daily owl quiz — a quick daily question that earns currency and keeps your owl happy.
• Gifting between classmates — students can send small gifts to each other's owls.
• Visual flair — pulse glows, ambient particles, and 3D previews on the quest game.
• Ambient music and sound effects in Pip's Quest.
• Procedurally generated worlds in Pip's Kingdom.
• Character customization and class-based building for cooperative class kingdoms.

WiseUp grows up. The Student Arcade is a full gamification system that wraps every review game with rewards, seasons, and a persistent student identity.

• Pip's Quest — a tile-based RPG with combat, daily quests, and a treasure-hunting owl protagonist.
• Pip's Kingdom — a class-based building game where students collaborate on a shared kingdom.
• Pip's Railroad — a map-based geography game.
• Multiplayer board game — competitive, two-team, real-time.
• Capture the Flag and Boss Battle — full-class cooperative play.
• Rewards store — students spend earned currency on cosmetics, pets, and avatar upgrades.
• Seasons — periodic content drops with new themes and goals.
• Streak saver — protects long answer streaks from a single bad day.
• Real-time matchmaking — students get paired into games quickly.
• AI-generated 3D graphics across every game for a unified, premium look.

The /status page used to show approximate numbers. It now shows real ones. A lightweight in-app monitor probes four critical surfaces every sixty seconds — the API, the auth service, the billing webhook, and the classroom frontend — and stores the results so the page can render genuine uptime percentages, the most recent incident, and rolling latency.

The same monitor underpins our own internal dashboards, so what you see on /status is what we see internally.

Lessons, quizzes, and gradebook all stop being separate worlds:

• Quizzes embedded in lesson plans — no more bouncing between tools.
• Share quizzes with classes and Google Classroom — push a quiz out and pull results back.
• Export quizzes as PDFs — for paper days and substitute days.
• Automated quiz grading — grades flow straight into the gradebook.
• Performance dashboard — at-a-glance student and quiz analytics.
• Auto-generate unit tests — pull from your saved quizzes to build a unit test in one click.
• Real-time game performance tracking — every WiseUp game reports back into the gradebook.
• Google Classroom roster import — with privacy options for what data to bring across.

The Student Data Privacy Consortium's Resource Registry only accepts vendors after a member district has signed a DPA with them, so we cannot list WiseBoard until our first district contract is in place.

To make that step painless when it arrives, the full submission packet is drafted and styled at /sales/doc/sdpc-submission-package. It maps every SDPC application field to the corresponding piece of WiseBoard documentation we already publish — privacy policy, DPA, VPAT, subprocessor list, and security overview — so the registry submission can be assembled in one sitting the day the first district DPA closes.

A new way to bring history into any classroom:

• Hundreds of historical events, organized chronologically by era and date.
• "This day in history" — point to any date and see what happened.
• Search — look up any person, event, or year.
• Random event — surface something unexpected for a do-now or bell-ringer.
• Era dropdown — jump straight to ancient, medieval, modern, contemporary.

The Time Machine works as a standalone exploration tool and feeds into bell-ringers, exit tickets, and lesson plans across subjects.

Several rounds of teacher feedback in one update — the sidebar got long and the toolbox needed real organization.

• My Toolbox — a dedicated home for the tools that don't belong in the main navigation: focus music, countdown, classroom economy, word wall, achievement badges, observations, certifications, grant trackers, expense logs, and more.
• Sidebar simplification — category headings removed, link spacing tightened, related sections grouped.
• Wikipedia search in the sidebar — one click, custom logo, cleaner overlay.
• Inbox in the dashboard nav — with an unread count.
• Unified calendar view — all calendar pages consolidated.
• Search history clearing — clear recent searches across every search bar from one control.

The "virtual assistant" is dead. Long live Pip — the WiseBoard owl who lives in your sidebar and helps with anything from drafting a parent email to brainstorming a do-now.

• Pip is everywhere — assistant panel, lesson generation screen, dashboard greeting, and arcade games.
• Personality — Pip has a voice, a look, and idle behaviors. No more cold "Virtual Assistant" copy.
• Broader AI scope — Pip can help any teacher in any subject, not just history.
• Pip's logo — refreshed across the application interface.

Individual class pages get a top-to-bottom rework:

• Tabbed interface — overview, students, gradebook, parent feed, and tools all in one place.
• Parent Feed — a per-class stream parents can follow.
• Mobile-friendly — class navigation collapses into a clean dropdown on small screens.
• Getting started checklist — first-time setup walks teachers through the half-dozen things to do on day one.
• Calendar consolidation — daily, weekly, and monthly views all live on a single calendar page now.
• Login first-name preservation — corrects how your first name is captured and stored at sign-up.
• Real brand logos on integrations — every connector shows the real logo, not a generic icon.

The community side of WiseBoard fills in:

• Detailed teacher profiles — show your subjects, grade bands, experience, and a little personality.
• Unified inbox — forum replies, parent messages, and notifications all in one feed.
• Custom user statuses — clearer indicators for teachers who are out, on break, or in conferences.
• Admin forum tools — moderation and post editing.
• Multi-playlist Spotify — switch focus playlists without leaving the page.
• Humorous autocorrects — small joke. "AF" becomes "As Fudge." Teacher humor.

A second wave of WiseUp games and a polish pass on the in-class tools:

• Two-Minute Drill — a football-themed review game with progressive yardage gains based on question difficulty.
• Horse Race — real-time galloping animation, students compete on accuracy and speed.
• Choose-Your-Own-Adventure escape room — branching paths and Wikipedia images on questions.
• Two-player football — head-to-head review play.
• Unified review games hub — every WiseUp game lives on one page.
• Dry erase board polish — clear button in the header, more realistic chalk and marker effects.
• Chalkboard surface — looks like a real slate, not a CSS rectangle.

The biggest single ship since launch. WiseUp turns any lesson into an interactive, projector-ready review game.

• Live Lesson Mode — a teacher view and a student view that stay in sync across devices.
• Three game modes on launch day: Survivor, Jeopardy, and Escape Room.
• AI review quiz generator — paste a lesson, get a quiz, launch a game.
• Persistent student profiles — students keep their name, avatar, and history across games.
• Achievement badges — earn badges for streaks, accuracy, participation.
• Loads of avatars — animal and fantasy characters to pick from.
• Projector launch — launch any WiseUp game with a one-click projector display.

A big jump in how WiseBoard pulls in outside content for your lessons:

• AI resource finder — point it at a lesson topic and it searches the open web, returns working links, and lets you embed them in seconds.
• PBS Learning — search and embed PBS resources directly into lesson plans.
• YouTube — find and embed videos without leaving the lesson.
• Inline lesson editing — edit lesson content cards and sections in place rather than re-opening modals.
• Two-way parent messaging — message families and receive replies from inside WiseBoard.
• Attendance tracking — daily attendance, with AI-powered feedback tools for trend recognition.
• File uploads everywhere — attach files to entries, expense receipts, and observation logs.

Teach Mode picks up a richer set of front-of-room tools:

• Wheel of Names refinements — automatically excludes absent students and won't pick the same student twice in a row.
• Noise meter and timer — both available without leaving Teach Mode.
• SEL check-in — quick social-emotional pulse check during a live lesson.
• Classroom economy on per-class pages — give and spend classroom currency from inside any class.
• Certifications and observations — upload PDFs and meeting notes for both.

A polish day across the dashboard:

• Theme gallery — pick from a set of color themes to personalize WiseBoard.
• Daily inspirational quote — a small thing, but a nice greeting on the dashboard.
• Improved dashboard widgets — better empty states and clearer error handling on the at-a-glance cards.
• Noise meter — adjustable sensitivity and threshold controls for the live classroom volume meter.
• Sub-portal seating chart — your seating chart is now visible to substitute teachers from the sub portal.

A single page to connect WiseBoard to the rest of your stack:

• Google Classroom — roster import and assignment export.
• Schoology — student information system sync.
• Rediker — student information system sync.
• PowerSchool — branding and roster handshake.

The integrations page uses each service's actual logo so it's obvious at a glance what's connected and what isn't.

Behind-the-scenes plumbing and one teacher-facing addition:

• Admin interface — internal panel for managing users, viewing site analytics, and adjusting account status.
• Searchable standards library — look up state and Common Core standards from inside any lesson plan.
• FAQ + Contact — a single combined help page on the marketing site so questions don't get lost in inboxes.
• Automated trial emails — welcome and trial-ending emails fire on the right schedule.

Three features that made the request list early and shipped together:

• Classroom economy — give students a currency, let them earn and spend it, and run a classroom store.
• Professional development log — keep a running log of your PD hours, certifications, and supporting documents in one place.
• Awards — issue student awards and certificates with a printable, shareable design.

A real gradebook lands, with the reporting tools that make it actually useful:

• Gradebook — log scores, average across categories, export.
• Analytics — class-level performance trends across time.
• Interventions — flag students who need extra support so nothing slips through the cracks.
• Projection view — display the gradebook in front-of-class mode for grade conferences and progress check-ins.

Three smaller quality-of-life features:

• Pinboard — drag-and-drop tiles, free-form placement, image uploads, and link previews. Save snippets, ideas, and references.
• Spotify focus music — a built-in player with multiple classroom-appropriate playlists.
• Social sharing — LinkedIn share buttons on lessons and a proper Open Graph preview image when WiseBoard links are pasted into social media.

A wave of foundational features for the day-to-day grind:

• Behavior management — track behavior in-class with quick taps.
• Seating chart — multiple layouts, drag-and-drop students, rotation, print, and PDF export.
• Homework assignments — attach homework to lesson plans.
• AI slide generation — generate full presentations for any lesson plan, embedded right into the lesson view.
• Student notes generator — produce printable student note packets from any lesson, with adjustable line counts so they fill the page.
• Reading-level adjuster — paste any passage, pick a grade band, and get a level-appropriate version.
• State-specific curriculum — pick your state and the AI tailors outputs to your standards.
• Settings page — profile, theme, and feature visibility.

Pricing and access controls arrive: paid subscriptions, promo code support, and a subscription gate that protects premium features behind your plan. The pricing page is updated to reflect the production rates ($15/month or $150/year for individual teachers, with school and district tiers above that).

The very first version of WiseBoard goes live. The goal: one dashboard that replaces the dozen tabs a teacher juggles every period.

What ships on day one:

• Lesson planning — full lesson plans, unit plans, and a syllabus builder, all printable as PDFs.
• Pacing plans — automated pacing across a year of instruction.
• AI assistant — generate lesson plans, draft tasks, and answer curriculum questions.
• Big Fat Notebook — a digital, searchable copy of the US History Big Fat Notebook with an ePub reader.
• Complete US History curriculum — pre-loaded for any teacher who doesn't want to start from a blank page.
• Wheel of Names — pick a student at random.
• Kahoot review creator — generate review quizzes from any source.
• Daily automated backups — your data is yours, every night.

User accounts arrive on day one. Sign up, log in, and your lessons, schedule, classes, and notes follow you across devices. The login flow remembers your first name so the dashboard can greet you properly, and your daily schedule, big fat notebook, and reference library all live under your account from here forward.