SWIFT for Administrators

SWIFT went down for part of Sunday around late morning to around 4PM. A recent server update added a "feature" to IIS that prevented it from automatically recovering from an error. We've fixed the issue with the server and have added a redundant uptime checking service. We apologize for this inconvenience. 

In the past month or so the amount of spam postings on discussion and blog pages have significantly increased. Even pages with CAPTCHA enabled are being flooded with spam. We are currently using Google's reCAPTCHA system, which seems spambots are now able to read and bypass.

We've just implemented a couple of new measures to slow down spam being posted to SWIFT v2. Earlier this week we started checking IP addresses against a registry of known offenders. This has already significantly slowed down the rate of spam on SWIFT. We have different thresholds set up just in case there are false positives. This registry tells us how often an IP address has been reported. Above a certain number, posts will automatically be flagged for moderation (even if the SWIFT author has that disabled). Above another number posts are marked as spam and will not be displayed. SWIFT authors can see all posts marked as spam within the last 60 days from their discussion thread or blog post editor by filtering for spam under Status.


A user can also report a message as spam by clicking on the orange thumbs down button. If a SWIFT author sees a post marked as spam that shouldn't have been, they can click the green thumbs up icon to approve it.

If you notice all posts or threads from your school getting marked as spam, your IP address could be in this registry. Let us know and we'll work with the registry to remove your IP addresses.

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to email or call. This will not catch all the spam coming in, but it should help. As SWIFT authors report more spam, I'll be reporting these IP addressed to the registry. In the coming days I'll be updating SWIFT's documentation to reflect these updates.

We hear you: more and more teachers are discovering the power of integrating audio and video into their curriculum. Many want to post these clips to SWIFT, but unfortunately SWIFT isn't built for handling this kind of content. Fortunately, many other services are out there that are built to handle video and audio streaming. Once uploaded to these services, players can be embedded directly into SWIFT pages.

Audio

For audio, two great services are SoundCloud (*free lite version) and Mixcloud (*super free/unlimited).

SoundCloud

Mixcloud

Video

While YouTube is great for posting videos of your sleepwalking dog (poor dog), the ads, comments, and "suggested videos" make it less than ideal for a teacher to use. Vimeo, TeacherTube, and SchoolTube are alternatives to YouTube that provide a safer environment to post classroom videos. All three have similar players to YouTube and they all have a "free plan" that should be able to meet the needs of you average teacher.

Vimeo

Notice how I try to integrate the "yaaay" audio clip into everything I create. Thanks, GarageBand.

SWIFT Overview from SWIFT Classroom on Vimeo.

Districts who are doing a staggered migration from SWIFT v1 to v2 now have a new tool at their disposal. We'll begin to mass import users this June, but if you want more control over the process you can use the Migration Helper, found in the user administration.

From here you can batch migrate over users. You can migrate over both their user and site, just create their user account in the new SWIFT, or deactivate them in SWIFT v1. Some bits of information are displayed to help you make your decision, including their last log in date and the date the site was last modified.

We were getting some reports that users were accidentally deleting their pages. Once deleted, everything on that page would be gone forever. Users now have access to a Page Trash feature that will store deleted pages for 30 days. If pages are in the trash, users will see a link in the top-menu if their Site Dashboard. Clicking on that link will slide down the list of pages that have recently been deleted. If a user wants to clear up their disk quota by permanently deleting the content on that page, they can do so by clicking on Permanently Delete. Otherwise, Restore will bring the page back to life.

Now that users and sites have been separated in the new SWIFT to acomodate multiple sites per user, there are a few things to keep in mind when a staff member leaves your district. Removing the user account who is the sole author of a site doesn't disable or remove the site that they authored. If a site is left without any authors, it becomes an Orphaned Site. To manage orphaned sites, go to your SWIFT administration and click on Sites in the top-menu. Clicking on Active Sites and choosing Orphaned Sites will allow you to view which of your sites have no author assigned to them. Orphaned sites are accessible until you delete them from the site administration.

Like all other deleted sites, they will live in the Trashed Sites area for 30 days (inaccessible to the public) and then get archived. They will be available in the Archive section of the administration for an additional 30 days. You can download them there if you want to keep them for longer.