Over the past year, we have been hard at work building a brand new version of the Nurture app for teachers and students. The new app still has all of the core aspects of formative assessment that made our old app great including learning outcomes on all tasks, collecting students' confidence on submission and withholding the students' grade until after they complete their reflection. Our new app also takes the Nurture Assistant, our AI for teachers to a new level, with new capabilities and improvements to make teachers' lives that bit easier.

Here is everything you need to know about what’s new, what’s improved and what’s different about the new Nurture app.

One of our most requested features of all time is now available, students no longer have to submit their work as an attachment, they can just complete it directly in our app!

For now, this is one large text box where students can type out all of their answers for the task, but we are working on making this more intuitive in the future so each question will have its own answer box and allow multiple choice selection functionality. This will come eventually but as of right now, your students can fully create their work in-app.

Students can still complete their work in a document or handwrite their answers and submit them as photos, the Nurture Assistant will still be able to provide feedback on them, but we recommend students type their answers into Nurture for the best responses from the assistant.

You can learn more about how this works here

Teachers can set custom instructions for the Nurture Assistant to follow on each student within a task, meaning you can instruct the assistant to behave however you want across all of your student submissions.

Why did we build this? One piece of feedback that we kept hearing from teachers was that they had to constantly give the assistant chat the same instructions over and over again when creating feedback for each student in their class. This reduces the back and forth prompting of the assistant required on every individual student.

You can now generate tasks using your existing materials such as worksheets and past exam questions. Simply upload a worksheet or past exam question and the Nurture Assistant will extract any text based sources, instructions and questions (without altering them) and then enhance this task with curriculum aligned learning outcomes.

Why did we build this? A common piece of feedback was that teachers were unsure what to put in the Topic/Description field when generating their first task on Nurture and that it would be helpful if they could just convert their existing worksheets to Nurture tasks. Well now you can!

We have now added the Nurture Assistant chat to the task creation page too. This allows teachers to use the assistant to edit and tweak the content of the tasks that it generates. Need a new question, learning outcome or tweak to the marking scheme? Just ask the assistant chat and it will provide suggestions that are aligned to your curriculum.

You will notice that when you install Nurture onto a new class it comes ready to go with a sample task containing sample student submissions. This is an area for new teachers to practice how to use the Nurture Assistant for feedback using fake student submissions before trying it for real with your own students.

This should make it easier to get new teachers in your school to experience the detail and quality of the feedback in Nurture before trying it for real with their students!

We have adjusted the format of the Nurture Assistant so you don't have to approve as many of its suggestions. In our old app it would follow this format :

… and with each step it would require approval from you, the teacher. Now we have flipped this format slightly to be more efficient. In our new app, the assistant will follow this format for each student :

This allows teachers to get straight into the students feedback from the very first message which is more important than the grade from a formative standpoint. We have also included a grade breakdown for each student. Just like the grade itself, we will hide this from the student until after they have completed their reflection.

The Nurture Assistant for feedback is much more powerful right out of the box and provides every student with very detailed feedback. By default, the assistant will provide all personal feedback comments in this format :

This feedback comment will also factor in the students confidence and anything they mentioned in their personal comment when submitting their work so the feedback is highly personalised.

When generating a Nurture task from scratch, teachers can now choose the style of questions they want the assistant to produce. You can choose from :

You may choose one or multiple styles of questions for the assistant to generate.

Please note : On the students side we do not yet support individual answer boxes for each question or multiple choice style ‘choose the right answer’ interactions. For now, students must complete their answers either by typing all of their answers together in the students work area on Nurture or else in an attachment.

However, it is our plan to make this more straightforward and intuitive for students so they can easily complete their Nurture tasks.

This is just a simple language change within the app, it does not impact any functionality. In the old app, we referred to everything as an assessment, but going forward these are tasks. This brings us more inline with teachers using Nurture every week for homework tasks beyond just providing one large assessment per term.

As part of our efforts to become more pedagogically aligned with formative best practices, we will be making more tweaks to the language used throughout the app over the coming months, but these should not impact the functionality of the app.

When creating a task with the Nurture Assistant, you can now choose which curriculum documents you want it to use. You can upload as many curriculum documents as you like into your Nurture account, there’s no limit on storage.

However, due to technical limits with our AI provider, the assistant can only process up to 10 attachments at a time when generating a task. This means you can select up to 10 documents each time you generate a task, but you no longer need to delete or swap out documents from your curriculum settings.

We have been working really hard over the past year to rebuild the app around the features and improvements that matter most to teachers. To deliver a simpler, more effective experience, some older features are not included in the new app. Where that’s the case, we’ve provided workarounds or alternative ways to achieve the same goal or else we may reintroduce the functionality again in the future.

Rubric Graded Tasks where teachers would select the cells on a rubric table that a student achieved and this would determine their grade is no longer supported. In the new app, we only have one grading type for now. You can still upload a rubric as an attachment for the assistant to use when grading students work, but this requires you to have a rubric available as an attachment. The assistant will provide a breakdown of the students grade according to the uploaded rubric.

With this, teachers cannot generate new rubrics in the new Nurture app. We may revisit this functionality in the future but we must consider how this will fit with the assistant for grading as well.

Watch this space, we will improve the experience of rubrics within Nurture again, but for now it has not been fully carried over from the old app.

Whilst we have been putting a lot of effort into making the Nurture Assistant really detailed for individual student feedback, we have not yet brought learning outcome / group feedback into the new app…. yet. We intend to bring this functionality back soon and improve the quality of group feedback the assistant can generate.

We will no longer support traditional assessment templates in our new app. Instead, every task comes with a unique shareable code that you can send to your subject department colleagues. When they go to create a task they simply enter that code and they can use the task exactly how you created it.

If you had any assessment templates from the old app you were hoping to use, you can still convert them to tasks on the new Nurture app by following these steps :

First, access the old app, following these steps :

Second, export the assessment template from the old app and create a task on the new app from it, following these steps :