Your friends at Speak Agent are working hard this summer to deliver more improvements! In fact, today we released version 3.4.0, which adds many enhancements that teachers and students have put on their wish lists!
New Assignment Options (for Teachers)
- Choose a delivery date: This is the date and time when the lesson will show up on your students' dashboards. You can deliver the lesson "now" or at any point in the future.
- Choose a due date: This is optional. If you choose a due date, students will see on the lesson how many days left they have to complete it and will get a warning when they are overdue.
- Make activities optional: All activities are required unless you decide to make them optional. The effect of making an activity optional is that a student will not have to complete it in order to mark the lesson as done.
If you go to a lesson page, you can see on the right-hand sidebar whether you've assigned it to any classes. The image below tells you that the lesson has been assigned to two classes:
If you click on the Classes link, you can see more details about the assignments. Below we can see that this lesson was assigned to the Math 6 class on 5/29 and due on 6/9. Just click the pencil icon 
to make any changes to the delivery date, due date, or required activities.
Accessibility Settings (for Students)
Students now have more control over their learning experience. They can set preferences for the following items:
- Set a narration speed for all activities in one place. This is the speed for playing all sounds in Speak Agent. Students can override this setting while doing an activity (from the left sidebar).
- Choose from eight fonts, including the Open Dyslexic font, that will be displayed throughout Speak Agent.
- Reduce motion in the activities. This will turn off sliding animations and other motions if a particular student finds them disorienting or distracting.
- Turn off sounds everywhere in Speak Agent, including narration. Students can override this setting while doing an activity (from the left sidebar).
We also upgraded the Diagram It, Scrambled Sentences, and Scrambled Words activities to support click-and-click movement of puzzle pieces/labels. This improves usability for students who have trouble with click-and-drag.
Other Items
We made a long list of small fixes and performance improvements throughout the app. It's too much to list here, but we think you will notice a difference in how fast pages load, helpful new confirmation messages, etc.
As always, we'd love to from you if you'd like to share feedback on the new features or share your wishlist. So please don't hesitate to contact your support team!
Written by Katie Cunningham
Katie is CTO and Co-Founder of Speak Agent, Inc. A leading expert in the Python programming language, Katie designed the Speak Agent architecture and wrote the very first line of code for the current platform. She is an accomplished technical author and keynote speaker worldwide, as well as a leader of the Washington DC chapter of PyLadies, an organization dedicated to training women in Python.
