Last year it was replaced. This year it’s a disgrace. When you get to class most teachers are sitting at their computers trying to figure out grades and attendance from the last class on the latest version of “gradespeed.”
Last year gradespeed was replaced by “TEAMS,” a program that featured everything necessary for teachers, parents, the principal, the counselors, etc. TEAMS sounded like a reasonable change, made things easier and more efficient, but things have been almost the opposite for us. Logging on as a user at home half the time grades aren’t up or the account is unreachable, making it difficult to impossible to view grades. How are students supposed to keep up grades grades, if they don’t even know what they’re making?
It isn’t easy for teachers either. Putting your grades in over and over, due to the program rejecting them makes it difficult. So the next time your teachers get on, the grades they just put in are gone.
“It seems to go down much more than our last grading program,” Pollyahna Birkhead Coach and pre-AP English teacher said. “There were other things that made it a much more difficult program to use, but they have worked on a lot of those.”
Alan Sizemore the Chief Information Officer in tech support for the WFISD said the problems can be explained.
“TEAMS is made up of a database server, two application servers and a crystal reports server,” Sizemore said. “The database server has not had to be rebooted since school started other than weekend maintenance. The Apps servers have had some good runs IE months at a time with no problems, but they have went for two weeks at a time with problems twice. TEAMS sends a new version of the software every two weeks or so, if we get a buggy one, then we have problems as do the other 25 or so school districts on the product. The crystal server is overloaded and will be replaced in a week or so, it has needed to be restarted about once a week for about six weeks. It affects reports only. So to summarize, no hardware problems this year. Only one capacity issue and lots of buggy software from the vendor has caused the majority of the problems.”
Principal Judy McDonald said the change to TEAMS was essential.
“We switched to TEAMS because our previous system was being phased out of usage,” McDonald said. “If we continued using the old system, there would be little or no technical support in the future.”
Choosing TEAMS was a decision made to benefit the school, and others, it appeared to make things much easier and much more unified.
“We chose TEAMS specifically because it is designed to work across all areas: finance, payroll, student support, purchasing, etc, it is also provided by a Texas based company,” McDonald said.
Payroll is another problem the faculty at Rider have been facing, being overpaid, underpaid, all so confusing but getting better.
“I have been overpaid and the process to get all of it straightened out has been a hassle,” Birkhead said. “I still have yet to see if it was taken care of correctly. I will find out next week with my December check, which means this has been a two month process.”
Being such a new program of course we will face problems, making things easier comes with a price but they are working on it.
“I believe that our previous program (gradespeed) was a much better program,” Birkhead said. “But at least some changes have been made to TEAMS to make the program more user-friendly.”