Efofex News

Our FX Equation tool has been around for a lot of years and, over time, the toolbars became cramped. Now, with our equation tool being built into FX Manifest, we have been finding that there are far more teachers using FX Equation – and having trouble navigating the toolbars.

Enter our new ribbon bar.

The new ribbon bar allows us to give more space to the things that are important, but that new users were just not seeing – like the Align Equals option.

All of of the same features, just more organised and with better access to assistance.

We have been experimenting with the new Golden Gate release of MacOS and our current recommendation is that you wait a while before upgrading your computer.

The first reason we are making this recommendation is that Golden Gate is likely to cause issues with some older applications you are running on your Mac. Apple is removing support for software compiled for their old Intel chips and this meant that a number of the tools we regularly use became more problematic. This wasn’t a “deal-breaker” but we anticipate that most teachers will have some old, much-loved app on their computers that might be more work to get running, or might not run at all. It will just be an annoyance for many teachers.

The second reason is more to do with our products and how they interact with Word.

The way Efofex products interact with Word is a little unusual and has required special “permissions” be given to FX Equation and FX Draw in order to be used from the Word toolbar. Golden Gate takes this to another level and just blocks our products entirely until you, or your IT people go through a number of steps. There is nothing that we can do to change these processes and they could easily prevent you from using FX Equation and FX Draw as they are designed to be used. We have no idea if these changes will be rolled back by Apple but we are recommending that you wait as long as possible before updating (assuming you have that choice).

Please note that the Golden Gate issues do NOT affect our new product FX Manifest. Yet another reason to consider using FX Manifest to create your materials!

You may have noticed that we announced spell checking in FX Manifest about a month ago but quickly had to remove it. Not going to lie – spell checking with equations involved proved more complicated that we initially thought.

The good news is the spell checking is back and is now included in FX Manifest, FX Equation and FX Draw!

We recently added two new tools to FX Draw – a partially dotted line and a partially dotted ellipse.

These two new features were inspired by Kim McLaughlin in Florida (thanks Kim!) and make drawing 3D situations much simpler.

Make sure that you download and use the latest version from our downloads page (http://www.efofex.com/Downloads.php) to access the new features!

It appears that some teachers are mandated to use half marks in their marking keys. To address their needs, we have added the ability to allocate half marks in questions and solutions. The new feature is available in the July 29th release.

Half-Marks ([3.5] and hk)

Use the hk code in equations or text to allocate a half mark. Everything else is automatic.

Working Space/Lines

If you are creating a “write-on” paper, one of the many jobs you have to do is allow for working space/lines for your students. The early versions of FX Manifest allowed you to all “working lines” to your questions which you could either include in your published document, or not, depending on a switch.

This system works well but YOU had to decide how much working space to include. The latest version of FX Manifest can do this automatically for you!

If AutoSpace is turned on, FX Manifest will now look at your solution to the question,

and automatically include a suitable amount of space if you include Working Space when publishing. Initial testing shows that this is easy to use and intuitive, and usually “about right”

But What If I Want More Control?

No problem! The old system still works – just manually add as many lines as you wish using the working lines button or Ctrl+W.

Whatever you choose will override FX Manifest’s automatic setting. You retain full control, whilst being able to leave most of the decisions with FX Manifest.

New Mini Videos

Our FX Manifest video training page has had some short, mini videos added which explain some of the more important features of FX Manifest. They are all about two minutes long and fully captioned, so you can check your understanding with minimal effort.

FX Manifest Videos

We have now presented FX Manifest to over forty schools and the response has been amazing. Teachers are excited and have told us again and again how much time this is going to save them. FX Manifest is clearly an important addition to teachers’ toolkits and we want every teacher to hear about it.

Free Professional Development

Most of the people who read this post will already have access to FX Manifest – it has been included in our subscriptions for just over four months. All you really need is to “see” FX Manifest in action so you can understand why it is worth investigating further. We want to help you get started.

While we prefer to offer professional development “in person”, current events mean that most of our PD will have to be done via Teams meetings. It’s still a real person running the session, and we can answer questions and dynamically adjust what we are talking about. We just cannot be in the room (most of the time). We guarantee that it will still be one of the most productive PD sessions you will have during the year!

To help you get started, we are currently offering FX Manifest training at no charge. We are not trying to “sell you anything”, we are just really excited by what this new product can offer busy teachers and we REALLY want you to know about it.

We want to offer as much PD as we can, but we will undoubtably not be able to satisfy everyone’s needs. All you have to do to book YOUR slot is to email us at info@efofex.com with a few times and dates and we will see what we can organise.

Don’t miss out on this opportunity. FX Manifest has already left hundreds of teachers literally speechless (at least initially) with what it offers school mathematics departments. Your school can join in at no charge, so why wouldn’t you?

Sharing Is Caring

One of the major benefits of FX Manifest is that it makes the sharing of high-quality, regeneratable resources much simpler and we have already had a number of requests to “set up a sharing portal”.

We would love to… but we can’t!

The basic problem is copyright… and lawyers.

Most teachers are already aware but, in general, the copyright to any materials you produce within the normal course of your employment belongs to your employer. This creates a potential copyright nightmare for us. Combine this with the fact that we provide tools to teachers all over the world, in hundreds or thousands of different school systems, and we simply cannot offer the service.

But you can, particularly if you restrict membership to teachers employed by the same employer.

What we can do is advertise your group. If you start up a sharing group, tell us and we will add a link to our website or mention it in a post. Sharing resources with teachers in your area can save you, and them, hundreds of hours every year so help yourself by helping others!

We have just uploaded a new version of FX Manifest that includes significant new features – many of which have come directly from the comments and requests of teachers.

Alternative Solutions Detection

Some of your questions will have multiple possible solutions. The latest version of FX Manifest lets you include those alternative solutions directly into your manifest. The best thing is that you do not need to remember to do anything “special”.

If you solution contains marks which are a multiple of the number of marks in the question, FX Manifest will automatically flag the solution as containing alternatives.

Better Template Management

Our old template management system restricted you to nine different templates. This proved to be too restrictive for many schools. Our new system allows you to nominate a folder on your computer (or a network share) which holds your templates. You can now have as many templates as you wish – just put them into the folder and give them a name which makes sense to your staff.

Better Curriculum Management (And More Options)

We now have some extra curriculum files available on our website and we will add more as teachers request them. At the time of writing this post, there are specific files for Western Australia and New South Wales.

Download and install the curriculum files to add them to your copy of FX Manifest. As you do this, you will find that you have far more control over which curriculum files are included and you can add or delete curricula on one screen.

Option For Four Difficulty Levels

You can now (optionally) set FX Manifest to track four difficulty levels for questions, as well as change the tags given to each level. You can now exactly match your local systems.

Another Marks Option – mk

We have added another code to add checkmarks – mk. The advantage of this code is that you can use it within the normal text of your solution. You no longer have to add an equation just to use a checkmark.

Create Settings Files and Get Everyone Doing the Same Thing

This one is for all of the heads of department out there!

One of FX Manifest’s greatest benefits is its ability to enforce consistency across your whole department. Everyone uses the same templates and the same output settings and you can get everything “just right”. All you have to do is to get everyone’s copy of FX Manifest set up consistently…

Settings files allow you to do exactly that. Export a settings file from your copy of FX Manifest and send it to your colleagues. All THEY have to do is to double-click on the file and THEIR copy of FX Manifest will be set up in exactly the same way as yours. Settings files make gaining consistency easier for everyone.

Keep ‘Em Coming!

A lot of these changes are in direct response to requests from people just like you. There are thousands of different “systems” around the world. We can only address YOUR needs if we know about them!

This is an important post if you use our products on a Mac machine.

Users recently started complaining that the Efofex Word toolbar was no longer available on their Mac machines and our troubleshooting options were not being successful.

The problem turned out to be an issue with the Adobe Acrobat add-in and, once it had occurred, could not be easily reversed.

We now completely understand what has been happening and have just released new versions of our products that will reliably add the Efofex toolbar to Word, regardless of whether you are using Adobe Acrobat.

If you are using our products in Word on a Mac, we strongly recommend that you download and install a new version from our downloads page (http://www.efofex.com/Downloads.php).

FX Manifest is currently in what we call the “It would be really nice if…” stage of development. We are showing people the software and, after we get past the initial excitement, we start getting the “It would be really nice if” comments.

What makes Efofex different to most software companies is we listen and we act. Sometimes within days. Obviously not every suggestion is fantastic, but many are. FX Manifest just keeps getting better because of them.

Yesterday we released the latest version of FX Manifest that contains quite a few of these changes.

User Created Template Codes

One of the schools that is getting really excited by FX Manifest wanted a way of adding a template code which would be replaced by the teachers currently teaching the course. This led us to allow you to create your own, user template codes. This means that you can create whatever template codes YOU need to satisfy your local situation.

You can manage your user codes via a new button on the Advanced tab, or when you publish to Word.

You can use your User Codes in your templates or even directly within your questions or solutions. It is completely up to you as to how and where you use them.

Which brings us to the next new “IWBRNI”…

Using Codes in Questions and Solutions

We have now enabled questions and solutions to use many of the template codes. This means that a question can dynamically refer to things outside of the question. You could, for example, use this year’s teachers’ names inside your question.

This has prompted the creation of some new codes designed to be used ONLY within the questions and solutions. In particular:

• _FXREF_ which will be replaced by the curriculum reference you have allocated to the question.
• _FXREFEX_ which will be replaced by the explanation of the curriculum reference.
• _FXNOTE_ which will soon be replaceable by a note that you have added to the question (not yet implemented).

Attaching More Than One Curriculum Reference To A Question

We have upgraded the curriculum reference system so you can now attach more than one curriculum reference to each question/question part. This particular “IWBRNI” came from a comment from an International Baccalaureate school that needed to track communication marks for every question, separately to marks for content.

If you attach more than one reference to a question, you need to tell FX Manifest how to divide up the marks. You do this within the question by entering your marks as [2,3] (or [2;3] if you normally use a comma as a decimal place). FX Manifest will automatically allocate the marks to the two (or more) attached references.

But Wait, There’s More!

This is just a few of the many changes we are making to FX Manifest at the moment – all due to the infamous “IWBRNI” process! We want FX Manifest to be a complete, comprehensive and incredibly flexible solution to the problems teachers have managing assessments. “IWBRNI” is an important part of that process, so make sure that you get yours in!