21Classes relaunched with new Teacher Blog
Today we're happy to announce the relaunch of our 21Classes service.
With our new design, navigating the website becomes much easier. There is no separation between "Shop", "Product" and "Features" anymore, we simply have one "Product" section. Volume discounts now reflect our yearly subscriptions and are much easier to compare with our single offer.
Also, in extension of the changes we implemented last week, now all pages are SSL-encrypted. Whenever you or your students access any page on our system, you're always redirected to the corresponding secure page in case only http is entered.
Finally, we proudly announce the launch of our new "Teacher Blog" product. In contrast to our existing Classroom Blogportal, a "Teacher Blog" only allows the teacher to post stories, where students can only read and comment on them. Access restriction settings are the same as for Classroom BlogPortals, so if you only want to run a single blog and have your students comment, check out our new "Teacher Blog".
Of course all features of our Classroom BlogPortals stay untouched, you still have all multi-user blogging functionality available - just more secure.
If you have any questions about our new product, please contact our 21Classes Customer Service.
21Classes now fully SSL/TLS-encrypted
When browsing our service at 21classes.com, you'll now always get redirected to our SSL/TLS-encrypted pages at http://www.21classes.com. Although you could choose to use SSL before, it's simply not been the default setting. However, we decided to make 21Classes even more secure, and always use https instead of http.
You don't need to do anything, you can keep your previous bookmarks - we're simply redirecting you to the corresponding https page.
Although this is currently available only on www.21classes.com, we'll be extending this to all our 21Classes accounts (e.g. myschool.21classes.com etc) within the next few days.
Easily reset your 21Classes account
Since the new school year started, various teachers requested a functionality to easily wipe out all existing student accounts within their ClassroomBlogportal. And today we're happy to tell you this option is now available!
Simply log in to your account and go to "Student accounts -> More options -> Delete all student accounts". Please be careful when using this feature, since there is no way of recovering any deleted accounts.
Once deleted, you can start adding new students all over again.
Improvements at 21Classes
We're happy to announce further improvements at 21Classes.com: since many of our teachers indicated in our survey this year they'd like some spell checking functionality, we finally added it. Whenever a student now posts a new blog entry, she can click the new spell check icon on the top right of the editor window, and the whole story is checked for spelling mistakes. We're also working on a feature to suggest some potential correct spellings, though this is something for the (near) future.
And we're about to release a new design for both classroom homepages as well as student blogs. More news will follow soon.
Happy blogging
Your 21Classes Team
DNS problems
We're experiencing some DNS problems, caused by a complete DNS breakdown at our domain hoster which includes the secondary DNS server to be unavailable for almost 3 days now. Although the primary DNS server is still accessible, this might still be causing problems connecting to our site for some users.
We apologize for any inconvenience this is causing, and hope the secondary DNS server will come up soon as well.
For those of you being able to change their hosts-File, you can temporarily add our IP addresses in order to prevent this from affecting you as well (in case the problem should persist even longer):
Services at 21classes.com: 188.40.132.253
Services at 21publish.com: 188.40.132.252
Update: The problems have been resolved, you should not experience any further problems accessing our sites.