I’m with Commissioner Huffman on this decision by the state. Delaying the PARCC assessment and putting the state assessment out to bid can only hurt our students in the long run. It seems that the general response I hear from a lot of school districts is drowning out what should be heard. Our kids can handle a push to comprehend more, to work harder and to be held to a higher standard.
I filled in for Frasier Speirs on this week’s episode of Out of School with Bradley Chambers aptly titled “How Do We Get This On A Chromebook?”.
We discussed PowerSchool, the pending upgrade to Casper 9 and the recent deployment of Chromebooks that we implemented at work. It was a good time as always talking with Bradley about IT in education.
Part of what I do involves managing Pearson PowerSchool, our Student Information System (SIS). One of the common annoyances teachers have had in years past with PowerSchool is opening it’s gradebook. The gradebook is a Java application that requires logging into PowerTeacher and downloading a JNLP file every time you want to open it up if you’re on a Mac (as all of our staff are).
Exactly a year ago I was halfway through the most insane summer of my life (thus far but hopefully forever). Courtney and I had been living with my in-laws for a month and a half while our house was being built (FWP, I know). I was working 7 days a week at a minimum of 12 hours a day and driving an hour each way to and from work. I felt like there was no end in sight and we were barely going to be able to open school with any of the necessary technology on time. I was doing so much that I’d never done before thus the work was the learning and the learning was the work. There was an abundance of frustration trying to make things work that I didn’t know how to make work and advising vendors on things I had little to no expertise with all while thinking about the next ten things that I needed to get to. And yet I perservered and somehow was able to only use a minimal amount of shoestring and duct tape to get it all done.