K12 Woe

NOTE: This post does not reflect the official position of OCPS or any of its subsidiaries. It's all my opinion, and therefore, fault.

NOTE NOTE: It should be working! Please let me know. Mr. Fitz came in and worked on it for a significant period of time today (Tuesday.)

I hate K12 Planet. The idea is terrific, but the execution is less than desirable. At this time last year, 22% of our school's classes were up and running on the program. This year, I suspect it's even worse. We are segueing into ProgressBook in January, I believe, and that program is much more user-friendly and easier to navigate. This is how much I hate K12 Planet: last year, all but one of my classes exported automatically to the K12 portal, with no problems. That one class was just left out in the cold. It caused endless amounts of grief and worry about the inequity of one little class, ostracized by bits and bytes.

This year, our tech people dutifully worked on it and worked on it, and none of the faculty realized that we had to go in manually to the eClass grades program and set up K12 since we'd never, ever done it before.

Flash forward to today during third period. Now, I am the first to admit that I am imperfect. In fact, I'm so stunningly imperfect that if I get through a day without hitting a squirrel with my car or without going completely bonkers it's a personal victory. But I am quite computer-literate, and I dutifully followed the entire prescribed protocol, line by line, for uploading this wretched program to my eClass gradebook. And it failed, repeatedly.

An administrator is coming to my room (for the fifth intervention visit, btw) to "fix" the bugs tomorrow. My prognosis? Not good. So. . .peeps, as always, if you want to see how you're doing gradewise, ask and I will A) print out a grade slip, B) e-mail your parental unit with a version of the gradebook in Courier 10 typeface, C) tell you, or D) write it on one of our classy yellow progress report forms from Student Services. Really.

I have tremendous faith in technology, but K12 Planet is only good if it works. Please be patient with me. I am trying by hook or by crook to be a Team Player, a Tech Wizard, a Grade Guru. I'm all about cooperation, but I need tools that actually work.