STATUS PAGE: Classkick Scaling 2020

Last updated 2020–10–27

Hi Classkick Community! Please check out our latest blog here: https://blog.classkick.com/who-is-classkick-f1c349a9efa2 and see our status page here: https://classkick.statuscast.com/#!/

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Hi Classkickers!

Thank you for your patience as our team worked to fix the loading and performance issues many students and teachers have experienced. We appreciate your support and commitment to Classkick!

Our team has been hard at work improving the performance of Classkick. We are excited to share that we have made some adjustments that will improve performance and loading issues. This includes student assignments loading more quickly, the student location border on the view class working properly, and faster load times on the web and in the app. In order to experience the improved version, please complete the following:

Web users:

1. Log out of all Classkick accounts
2. Quit Chrome completely
3. Open Chrome and log back in to enjoy the latest version of Classkick

For iPad users:

1. Update all Classkick apps to the latest version 4.14.0

• Please note that students and teachers must update

We have created this blog to be a resource for all of our users as our team continues to work on improving app performance during a high growth period. Want more context for the issue? Check out our first blog here, or for a bigger picture perspective read about Pinterest’s scaling history here.

What can teachers expect from Classkick moving forward?

Team Classkick is diligently working to scale our app to match our constantly growing user base. Scaling is a funny process. The more successful you are at it, the more people use your product, and then you have more scaling work to do. The good news is that all this usage is causing us to build for scale very quickly. In the future, this will mean even faster speeds and more realiable features than in the past, even if in the short term, it means you may experience issues. For context, scaling is like buying new clothes for a growing child, only in our case, the child is growing in days, not months or years. This process takes time and is being consistently, but carefully and gradually, improved over the course of many weeks.

While we are targeting every day to be an improvement to your Classkick experience, it is possible that students and teachers experience some slow loading and potentially other unforeseen issues.

What are the current issues we are aware of and working on fixing?

Pro User Tab loads forever, and teachers cannot be verified

• Workarounds: email the emails of the users in question support@classkick.com and we will help verify them
• Status: work in progress

What has recently been Improved?

• Student work loading speeds
• Notification loading improvements are now in real time (black border where student is working is live, hand raises, etc).
• Teachers assignments sharing
• Duplicating assignments
• Duplicating slides
• Manipulatives, fill-in-the-blank and multiple choice questions save properly to the slides

Improved in September 2020

• Graded work showing up as zero before a teacher actually grades the work
• Clear all lines on iPad — students cannot clear a teacher’s feedback anymore
• Teachers can now see when students last logged in
• Toggles on the Assign tab are now fixed
• Rosters are properly assigned to the correct classes
• Basic students are now able to enter their names when signing in

What are some troubleshooting tips in the meantime?

• Close all of your Chrome tabs and reload Classkick
• Refresh your page — keep refreshing until it loads.
• Go to a different section in your account and back — for example, if the Assignments page doesn’t load, go to your Rosters, and then back to Assignments.
• Close out of the app and try again.
• Make sure you are running the latest version of the Classkick app (4.13.0)
• Make sure that you are using a Google Chrome browser on Web for optimal experience — sometimes incognito might also run faster.
• Try to have minimal tabs open, especially if on Zoom or Google Meet (any video conferencing tool will drastically slow down your device/experience, especially if you are sharing your screen).
• If possible use separate devices — one for Classkick and one for video conferencing.

What’s helpful for our team?

• Screenshots of your console when you receive error messages — these provide specific error codes so that our engineering team can get to the root of the problem.

To take a screenshot of the console:

• When an error message pops up, right-click on your screen
• Choose “inspect”
• Make sure you click “Console” (image below)
• Take a screenshot and email that to support@classkick.com