If your teachers or students report that new note items are taking a while to update on each other's devices or are not updating at all, they may be experiencing syncing issues. These issues could be related to several factors, including:
- Either the Student or Teacher's app not queuing new changes for upload
- The internet connection itself
- A particular Workbook
- A mismatch in the app version between Students and/or Teacher
- The P2P connection that Classroom and Goodnotes usesto share a document for live collaboration
- Our Goodnotes Cloud Servers
Before continuing your troubleshooting, make sure you have read How Syncing Works in Classroom to understand our systems.
First Checks
Before coming to you, your Teachers and Students should first try the following quick checks to make sure that they can't resolve the issue themselves.
- In the settings of your device, turn Wi-Fi off, wait 30 seconds and turn it back on.
- Check that your device is able to load web pages at a normal speed.
- Force Quit Classroom/Goodnotes 6 (Teacher and Student scenarios) and reopen. Make a change on the Workbook and see if this now syncs. If changes haven't been synced, they may be lost in this process.
- Log out of Classroom/Goodnotes 6 and log back in again. If changes haven't been synced, they may be lost in this process.
- Delete and reinstall the app. This will reset any cache and also make sure that all apps are on the latest version and so running on the same schema.
If, after all of these checks, your Teacher and/or Student are experiencing the same issues then you should move on to the next steps in troubleshooting.
Connectivity Status Check
As an Admin, you will have access to our Connectivity Status check tool. This tool will help you determine if any connectivity or server issues may be affecting your Teachers and Students. To use this, please make sure you are set up as an Admin by making sure you can log in to the Admin Portal. If you are not an Admin, please contact your Admin directly.
Once you have access to your Admin Portal:
- Head to the Connectivity Status Tab in the Sidebar
- You will see a set of results already populated showing the last known status
- Choose Refresh at the top of these results
- Wait for the test to finish
- When completed you will see all failures at the top of the page
Failures
Any failures the test finds will be shown at the top of the results so you don't need to scroll through and find them! To understand more about a particular failure, you can choose Read More to understand what has failed and its impact if available.
Understand your results
Connectivity Check will test multiple different servers and connections. To understand more about what these are, please refer back to How Syncing Works in Classroom.
The Connectivity Status Check checks the status of the following systems:
- Cloud Connection
- Signalling Connection: This ensures that WebSockets connect to our signalling servers.
- WebRTC Data Channels: Tests local connectivity permissions like firewalls aren't blocking any connections to Goodnotes TURN Servers.
If anything outside of your internal systems are failing, please contact Support for more guidance.
Check your Firewall Settings
If your school network uses web filters/firewalls, you will need to add Goodnotes' domains to the whitelist so that your school can use Goodnotes without any issues. Here is the current list of domains to whitelist:
- .apple.com
- .goodnotes.com
- .goodnotescloud.com
Diagnostic Data
Both Classroom and Goodnotes 6 keep logs during use, which can be useful in identifying the cause of an issue or simply acknowledging that an issue is occurring. These logs are referred to as diagnostic data.
Collecting Diagnostic Data
Before you get started, please make sure you have familiarized yourself with how to properly collect this data: Collecting Diagnostic Data from Classroom and Goodnotes 6
Analyzing Diagnostic Data
Once you have collected the Diagnostic Data from all the relevant users, please save this data in a folder and send to our Support Team when you contact Support.