The Wonders of Technology

Oh, yes. Technology is so much fun (I'm serious), especially when it doesn't work (okay, now I'm sarcastic).

I set up this interactive assignment on Edline, the site our school uses for students and parents to connect with teachers, classes, and happenings at the school. I only want students to respond on the assignment, so I set it for only students to be able to view and respond. Well, apparently many of my students only ever log in under their parents' account because I got many e-mails the first couple days asking me why they couldn't see the assignment. I had no idea what was going wrong until I had a student log in at school today. It took me a minute of looking at the pages to realize that she had logged in using her parents' account. Once I noticed that, the puzzle pieces fell into place and that's when I figured out that all the kids who couldn't see the assignment were logged in with their parents' account instead of their own. Ugh.

So I had one of my other students who couldn't see the assignment log in with their own username. Of course, I had to look up their username because they couldn't remember it. And obviously they couldn't remember their password either. Most of the kids hadn't set up a security question or an active e-mail account so they couldn't get a new password for their account e-mailed to them either. The media center is closed to students this week due to text book distribution happening there all of this first week. I plan on sending the kids down during my classes next week to get all of that stuff sorted out for them. In the meantime, the assignment is due for the kids at the beginning of next week, so the ones who can't get into their student accounts have to either e-mail me the answers or write them down and hand them in. Oh, the flexibility needed for a teacher.

I also got to register five of my students for a new student account on Edline today. Those weren't difficult once I had done the first one. It just takes a bit of time for each one. I can handle that.

And to think I get to go through all of this same stuff again tomorrow!