ExamWritePad

[Garacesh]

Wouldn't be of any help for us as we run it on non-networked laptops so it would require us to copy to the files over each time =/

 

Yarp.

 

All candidates using laptops here are given either a physical or a digital copy of the paper (subject to their access arrangements) so it shouldn't be too difficult for them to put in the correct information.

[Cthulhu]

Hey,

 

We started our Mocks this week and things have been going well with the software. Just a few bits of feedback from the invigilators

- It doesn't appear to always be printing a cover sheet. I know I tested printing on the older version and this was fine, maybe a bug on the latest version?

- It takes a few minutes for the file path to appear on the bottom bar, could this be changed so it's instant? This way Invigilators can check that it's saved to the right place straight away and help the exam department when they're printing off multiple documents at a time

- Would it also be possible to have the student's name appear on the screen somehow, such as a pop-up window? This would be a nice to have when there's a seating plan in the room and getting students in the correct place.

- Is it possible to have spell check working as soon as the document is opened? It seemed to confuse a few people, thinking it would mark the spelling straight away

 

 

Thanks.

[ass17]

Hey,

 

We started our Mocks this week and things have been going well with the software. Just a few bits of feedback from the invigilators

- It doesn't appear to always be printing a cover sheet. I know I tested printing on the older version and this was fine, maybe a bug on the latest version?

- It takes a few minutes for the file path to appear on the bottom bar, could this be changed so it's instant? This way Invigilators can check that it's saved to the right place straight away and help the exam department when they're printing off multiple documents at a time

- Would it also be possible to have the student's name appear on the screen somehow, such as a pop-up window? This would be a nice to have when there's a seating plan in the room and getting students in the correct place.

- Is it possible to have spell check working as soon as the document is opened? It seemed to confuse a few people, thinking it would mark the spelling straight away

 

 

Thanks.

 

Thanks for the feedback, my own school has been experiencing the first issue regarding the cover sheet printing. At the moment it’s seems like it has been in since the time I had to split between Cambridge and Jcq coversheets.

 

I initially put it down to running EWP from a network location so we are planning in January to run it on each laptop locally, as I’m out of ideas as to why it fails now and again. I could not get it to fail but did happen to some students in the summer.

 

How do you run EWP, local or network?

 

With regards your second point, I will take a look and see what you are referring to. My initial guess is the path will only display once a file has been saved. So are you saying this is the case for you but takes a while for s path to appear after saving or opening a file?

 

 

With regards point 3, I can do this but if someone launches EWP first and fills in the name on the candidate screen, this answers your query.

 

Point 4, i will set a config option to start spell check on launch, consider this one done for the next release....

 

 

Regards

Andy

[GarethDale]

Andy,

 

We've just implemented EWP for our upcoming exam season, thanks for writing a free program for this purpose.

 

Do you think it's possible to include the %REMOVABLE% variable (taken from AppLocker) when setting default save paths? I've currently set it to D:\, but that relies on the lack of a CD-ROM drive in the exams PCs. Most of the time the system will assign it to D and it works seamlessly, the other times the user gets hit with a couple of C drive restriction pop-ups and then has to browse to the right drive.

 

Regards,

 

Gareth

[ass17]

Hi Gareth,

 

I will have a read up on this and see what I can do

 

Regards

Andy

[ass17]

Andy,

 

We've just implemented EWP for our upcoming exam season, thanks for writing a free program for this purpose.

 

Do you think it's possible to include the %REMOVABLE% variable (taken from AppLocker) when setting default save paths? I've currently set it to D:\, but that relies on the lack of a CD-ROM drive in the exams PCs. Most of the time the system will assign it to D and it works seamlessly, the other times the user gets hit with a couple of C drive restriction pop-ups and then has to browse to the right drive.

 

Regards,

 

Gareth

From what I can gather VB.Net doesn't interface with/cant interpret applocker paths so I would have do is to fudge the variable in somehow...

 

What If i was to detect the first plugged in USB drive if the variable %REMOVABLE% was used? would that be enough for you?

[RLR]

We had been running the software via a network location but kept getting random crashes. We now have a login script to copy the software to a local folder and then run it locally. Works all the time now.

[ass17]

We had been running the software via a network location but kept getting random crashes. We now have a login script to copy the software to a local folder and then run it locally. Works all the time now.

 

I've never been a fan of in-depth .net programs running over the network, since the early days of .net v1.1 and v2

 

We also do the same and have scripted to copy EWP from network and launch from local machine.

[Cthulhu]

It's running on the network for student exam accounts, however I have it running locally on the staff machines in the exam department and the issue is still present.

 

When you creat a new document, the file path changes to the message, 'Use a right mouse click inside the textarea to UNDO, CUT, COPY, PASTE or SELECT ALL'. It does appear to go away when the file next saves, but would be better if this didn't happen. Maybe a setting to disable the help message?

 

The problem I was having was with inviliglators filling the information in and then clicking OK so it goes onto the blank page. I suppose it's just a user issue.

 

Thanks.

[GarethDale]

Andy,

 

That sounds fantastic, thank you.

 

Regards,

 

Gareth

[ass17]

It's running on the network for student exam accounts, however I have it running locally on the staff machines in the exam department and the issue is still present.

 

When you creat a new document, the file path changes to the message, 'Use a right mouse click inside the textarea to UNDO, CUT, COPY, PASTE or SELECT ALL'. It does appear to go away when the file next saves, but would be better if this didn't happen. Maybe a setting to disable the help message?

 

The problem I was having was with inviliglators filling the information in and then clicking OK so it goes onto the blank page. I suppose it's just a user issue.

 

Thanks.

ok thanks for the info

 

The statusbar message appear as a tooltip until a file has a physical path, done by design. I did find that if you open a saved file, the path didnt display so I have fixed this issue.

 

I can put the users name on the main window no problem.

[ass17]

Andy,

 

We've just implemented EWP for our upcoming exam season, thanks for writing a free program for this purpose.

 

Do you think it's possible to include the %REMOVABLE% variable (taken from AppLocker) when setting default save paths? I've currently set it to D:\, but that relies on the lack of a CD-ROM drive in the exams PCs. Most of the time the system will assign it to D and it works seamlessly, the other times the user gets hit with a couple of C drive restriction pop-ups and then has to browse to the right drive.

 

Regards,

 

Gareth

I have now added in a new applocker variables for %REMOVABLE% or %HOT% and it will detect the FIRST available removable USB drive that has more than 1000 bytes available space to the user.

[Cthulhu]

In that case, I think there's an bug when you have it set to prompt a save after a new document is created, as the statusbar does not update until the document is saved after that prompt.

[ass17]

In that case, I think there's an bug when you have it set to prompt a save after a new document is created, as the statusbar does not update until the document is saved after that prompt.

 

No worries, I will sort this out also :-)

[ass17]

I think I’m going to change the approach to printing the coversheet which currently sits in the same print process as the printing for the document.

 

The only way I think I might be able to fix it is to offer two menu options:

 

Print Document

And

Print Coversheet

 

This way the print processes are independent of each other. I will trial it out over the next few weeks and report back so hopefully you can test it for yourselves.

[Cthulhu]

This might work better for us to be honest.

 

With our print system, you get a prompt to confirm each print after it is sent. With the current approach that means the invigilators get two prompts when they click print (One for the document and one for the cover sheet) and in some cases, they were closing the second prompt not realising what it was for.

[RLR]

What's the latest version, 2.1.8.5?

[ass17]

What's the latest version, 2.1.8.5?

 

For now yes, but version 2.1.9.0 or version 2.2 will be out next week [emoji1303]

[smarties11]

@ass17

Hi - I was wondering if I could make a feature request please?

We have recently purchased TextHelp Read&Write computer reader software, that students will be using in mock exams next week instead of a human reader.

It seems to work alongside Exam WritePad quite well, however one issue is that the students, in their normal way of working, usually split their screen so that their source document is on the left hand side of the screen, and their written work is on the right hand side of the screen. So in an exam, they'd want the exam paper on the left, and Exam WritePad on the right - that way they can use Read&Write to read aloud their exam paper and their written answers. This isn't currently possible, because you can't resize the WritePad window; it's either full screen on minimized.

Do you think this would be possible? We'd find it very useful here. We will have to use MS Word for our mocks next week instead of WritePad but I'd love it if we can use WritePad again in the summer series, with the split screen functionality.

 

Thanks for all your efforts with WritePad; we love it here and have been using it for a couple of years now. I'm dreading moving back to Word next week!

[ass17]

@ass17

Hi - I was wondering if I could make a feature request please?

We have recently purchased TextHelp Read&Write computer reader software, that students will be using in mock exams next week instead of a human reader.

It seems to work alongside Exam WritePad quite well, however one issue is that the students, in their normal way of working, usually split their screen so that their source document is on the left hand side of the screen, and their written work is on the right hand side of the screen. So in an exam, they'd want the exam paper on the left, and Exam WritePad on the right - that way they can use Read&Write to read aloud their exam paper and their written answers. This isn't currently possible, because you can't resize the WritePad window; it's either full screen on minimized.

Do you think this would be possible? We'd find it very useful here. We will have to use MS Word for our mocks next week instead of WritePad but I'd love it if we can use WritePad again in the summer series, with the split screen functionality.

 

Thanks for all your efforts with WritePad; we love it here and have been using it for a couple of years now. I'm dreading moving back to Word next week!

 

Thanks for the info, are you saying that EWP always opens full screen on the left (primary monitor) and you actually want to be able to move it to the right on the secondary monitor?

 

Regads

Andy

[smarties11]

Thanks for the info, are you saying that EWP always opens full screen on the left (primary monitor) and you actually want to be able to move it to the right on the secondary monitor?

 

Regads

Andy

 

@ass17

Hi Andy,

 

No, sorry. We only have one monitor on the exams computers. I want to be able to move EWP so that it occupies only either the left half of the screen, or the right half of the screen. In Win7 and Win10 you can do this with other apps by dragging the app to the far left or right edge of the screen. But we can't do this with EWP because it doesn't have a header bar at the top, so it's either full screen or minimised by using the button you added on the toolbar.

 

Example attached using Word instead of EWP....

 

[ass17]

@ass17

Hi Andy,

 

No, sorry. We only have one monitor on the exams computers. I want to be able to move EWP so that it occupies only either the left half of the screen, or the right half of the screen. In Win7 and Win10 you can do this with other apps by dragging the app to the far left or right edge of the screen. But we can't do this with EWP because it doesn't have a header bar at the top, so it's either full screen or minimised by using the button you added on the toolbar.

 

Example attached using Word instead of EWP....

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]51080[/ATTACH]

 

Ah I see the snap to left/right screen feature.

 

This is something I would have to play with simply because there is no scale ability/zoom of the actual page size like you can in word.

 

Might take a few weeks to investigate but we have time :-)

[smarties11]

@ass17

Awesome, thank you very much! For us, the scaling wouldn't be an issue as our IT suite computers have 23" screens and run in 1920x1080, and we run EWP with the StartPageWidth setting at 1. But I can see what you mean.

 

If working with the snap to left/right isn't possible, even the ability to manually resize the EWP window would help.

 

Thanks!

[mavhc]

@ass17

Hi - I was wondering if I could make a feature request please?

We have recently purchased TextHelp Read&Write computer reader software, that students will be using in mock exams next week instead of a human reader.

It seems to work alongside Exam WritePad quite well, however one issue is that the students, in their normal way of working, usually split their screen so that their source document is on the left hand side of the screen, and their written work is on the right hand side of the screen. So in an exam, they'd want the exam paper on the left, and Exam WritePad on the right - that way they can use Read&Write to read aloud their exam paper and their written answers. This isn't currently possible, because you can't resize the WritePad window; it's either full screen on minimized.

Do you think this would be possible? We'd find it very useful here. We will have to use MS Word for our mocks next week instead of WritePad but I'd love it if we can use WritePad again in the summer series, with the split screen functionality.

 

Thanks for all your efforts with WritePad; we love it here and have been using it for a couple of years now. I'm dreading moving back to Word next week!

 

Can you get PDFs of actual exams on the day then, for computers to read out loud?

[smarties11]

Can you get PDFs of actual exams on the day then, for computers to read out loud?

 

Yes, if you request them. Exam boards say they make them available 90 minutes prior to the exam, however in practice they're often not available until closer to 60 or 45 mins prior. Our exams office request PDFs and then use these for students who require them printed on a particular colour paper etc.

 

This year we will be using Read&Write to read them aloud (through headphones) for those students who in the past had human readers.

 

Worst case scenario if the exam boards don't provide the PDF in enough time, the exams staff can scan an original exam paper from the sealed bag and Read&Write has built in OCR functionality and can then read that. But obviously it is better to have an original.

 

I just wish the exam boards would allow us to have the PDFs sooner. Schools with a high proportion of SEN students with access arrangements must really struggle!