For Teachers: new campus grade book features

Available now for teachers….  a new redesigned grade book.  You’re not required to use the new grade book option.  In fact, you can even switch back and forth between the current grade book and this new “beta” grade book.  It can be found under INSTRUCTION -> GRADE BOOK (BETA)

Download the full details of the new Grade book (beta) from Infinite Campus (20 page pdf file)

What are the major highlights?

Java will no longer be used or required to run the grade book.  Instead, it will switch to using HTML5, meaning that more devices should be able to connect to the grade book, including iOS devices such as iPads.

Another highlight – lots of additional visual representations and quick stats that are available to teachers. The usage of built in visual graphs will make it easier to spot students who are struggling as well as see how the entire class did on a particular assignment.

Will this change how the grade book is viewed by parents?
No.  The new tools and graphs being added are only available to teachers and are not available on the parent portal.

Can we see some of the specifics?

This is a view of the new grade book that will available to teachers next summer. In this example, a specific student has been selected and additional visual queues are provided to assist with understanding the students progress.

This is known as a box and whisker chart, which display the four quartiles. The area between the top green line and the green box is the 1st quartile, the green box is the 2nd quartile, red box is 3rd quartile, and between red box and bottom red line is the last quartile. In this example, the specific student is the yellow circle, showing that they scored in the 1st quartile compared to the rest of the class.

Teachers will be able to see basic stats for each assignment, including: Mean, Median, Range, Std Dev

Teachers can also view these basic stats by scrolling the mouse over each assignment.

The process will be slightly different for posting grades – there is now a clearer process for deciding WHICH grade gets posted to WHERE.

Download the full details of the new Grade book (beta) from Infinite Campus (20 page pdf file)

Palo Alto, California is one of the beta test sites and they have posted a more detailed view of the new gradebook.  http://www.paly.net/stafflinks/IC_gradebook_beta.pdf

Update on email routing issues…

While I was out on vacation, several email carriers flagged @wdmcs.org emails and labeled us as a known spam source, which created issues for WDM staff members to use email to reach parents/community members using specific email carriers.

Short version is this:   After working on the issue for the past 4 days (most of the work/changes done to resolve the issue was done yesterday), we are down to having issues with @mchsi.com only.  As of this morning, we validated that the remaining carriers (aol and yahoo) were cleared up.

All the details… the story/status with each specific email carrier.

MediaCom @mchsi.com……………….
MediaCom received enough complaints from their users that they flagged us as a known spam source.  Tech support originally released the block on Tuesday, but we were added back on Thursday morning.  The current status is that none of our messages are getting through to @mchsi.com, but we do have another ticket open with them to see if we can resolve the issue again.

Aol.com……
Aol also received a large number of complaints from their users about our email, however, AOL was kind enough to share with me the exact emails that caused the problems.  Unfortunately, the emails were our Campus messenger blasts reminding families of upcoming registration, so it’s not really spam, but the families submitted to aol as spam.  I finished up working with AOL yesterday and the tests from this morning are showing that everything is cleared up with aol, however, we be monitoring it over the next few days.

Yahoo.com…..
Yahoo also labeled us a spam source based on the fact that other carriers did it as well.  They didn’t acknowledge any complaints from their users, it appears that they just followed suit since the other carriers did it.  Again, from testing this morning, the yahoo routing is testing out ok.

Will this be a problem again this year?
Potentially, yes, I believe it will.  It’s an issue of reputation.  Once your email domain (@wdmcs.org) has been flagged by major carriers as spam, they lower your email reputation (sort of like a credit rating). It’s likely that we’ll have to keep closer tabs on email routing, at least for the next several months.