Why Skedula Still Sucks but Online Grading May Not

I'm on a UFT committee to study online grading. Since we're supposed to discuss it, I figured I'd better start doing it. It's something I've thought about, but put off. A lot of my colleagues do it. Many favor other programs. Some use spreadsheets, but most people I know who love it use Engrade. However, my school is set up to use Skedula. I don't have a whole lot of love for Skedula, as it's awkward, unreliable, and counter-intuitive, but I have to evaluate what my school uses, so that's what I did.

Skedula is enormously popular with administrators because it plays nice with STARS, the DOE record-keeping program they use. I'm told there is a process that very quickly uploads info from STARS onto Skedula. It used to take maybe a minute, but the geniuses at DOE found some way to inhibit it, so now it takes maybe five minutes. That's a big advantage for administrators who don't feel like sitting around uploading files.

Everyone in my school has an iPad, and Skedula has an iPad app that most of us have deemed unusable. I have a keyboard case, so that helps me with the web app, but it places a nag screen for the iPad app every time I open it. And while my keyboard works with everything, sometimes it simply does not work with Skedula. Also, Skedula forgets who I am on an almost daily basis, despite the fact that I ask it to remember my email. When I entered report card grades on my iPad, twice, Skedula failed to record them. I had to find a computer and enter them for the third time.

Another questionable feature of Skedula is that on the report cards, comments do not appear. I finally found out you have to hover over the grades to see them. You have to do so very deliberately, because if you don't do it just right, they don't appear. I had to ask my principal what happened to my comments. I have no idea how parents or students are going to know that, since there are no instructions whatsoever available. I'm very happy admin at my school decided to issue paper report cards this semester.

On the positive side, I love that my kids can see their grades so easily. I was being observed a few weeks ago, and a girl stood up for no particular reason and asked, "How come you only gave me 85 for participation?" Maybe I should have been upset, but I was thrilled. "Wow. You actually looked at it?" Now that this girl, and perhaps her dad, will know every time she misses the homework, I'm hopeful she'll miss less of it. It turns out she was right about her participation grade, and I raised it. I don't mind getting complaints about things I'm wrong about. It might be better if students would wait until I'm not being observed, but what can you do?

For me, I'm going to keep doing it. I like the back and forth about grades with my students who've decided to keep track, and I'll encourage others to do so as well. On parent-teacher night, I'll be able to pull up an online gradebook that shows grades of only the student in question. That will be good.

But there are a few things I've learned---one is it certainly takes longer than using a gradebook (which I still do, just in case). I cannot rely on Skedula not to crap out, and I'm not sure about reliance on school internet either.  If I'm not collecting homework, I can walk around and check it with a book. I can't count on Skedula and my iPad for that.

Here's what I really wonder--why can't a grading program that does not suck figure out a way to quickly and seamlessly hook up with STARS? That would give principals an incentive to offer a better program, and could possibly make a whole lot of profit for a company interested in helping out the largest school district in the US of A.

In Which I Observe Skedula's Expert Trainer

OBSERVATION REPORT

I observed your training lesson yesterday. The lesson was scheduled to begin at 12:30. You were present at that time, but otherwise occupied, and your lesson did not actually begin until 12:40. At 12:40, you apologized for the fact that many teachers had lost the grades they had entered in your system, blamed the school for it, and promised it would not happen again.

You proceeded to explain how the quarterly marking period grades could be cumulatively averaged. You explained how Skedula could average two numbers in great detail for approximately ten minutes until being stopped by the principal at 12:52. After the principal explained to you that quarterly grades were not to be averaged cumulatively, you dropped the subject.

You then began a lengthy explanation about the grading portal, which was not available. You explained when it would be available. You followed another long explanation about "valid grades:" and the various ways teachers could establish them. You offered to schedule monthly meetings on this topic. It was clear to me that no one was interested in attending these meetings.

After that, you stated that since we offered Castle Learning, we would probably not wish to use the DDC feature. You explained that you would come back to the DDC feature later, after having explained we would probably not wish to use it. You then continued to discuss the DDC feature.

When a teacher stood up and asked what DDC was, explaining that no one had ever heard of it before, you became visibly upset. You answered that DDC was a "data-driven classroom, and offered to come back and explain what DDC was. 

Positive aspects of your lesson:

You were well-dressed, for the most part. The SmartBoard technology was functional, and you displayed competence in its use. You seemed to know your content well.

Negative aspects of your lesson:

You failed to begin your lesson in a timely manner.

Your aim was to familiarize your audience with basic grading techniques of Skedula, and for the most part, your session was unrelated to the aim. You did not consider your audience, all of whom had signed up for basic instruction. You instead spent most of your time discussing administrative matters which did not apply to most of your audience.

As a result, I observed much if not most of your audience engaged in conversation, lesson-plan preparation, reading, and other unrelated activities. You did not seem at all aware you had lost your audience, and simply continued on regardless.

Your lecture on how to average two numbers not well received. I observed two of your audience members discussing the fact that they could calculate it faster than the program, with or without paper or pencil. The fact that the calculation itself was unnecessary to begin with rendered the entire exercise ridiculous, and highlighted your lack of preparation.

You brought up DDC, or "data driven classroom," despite your own verbal assertion that they probably would not need it. You continued to dwell on a subject you yourself had declared irrelevant to your audience. In fact, your audience did not even know what it was. Rather than encourage open discussion, you repeatedly declined to answer a question, until the questioner stood up and insisted you explain the term. You then offered to explain it further, for reasons that were clear to no one.

You had clearly not completed your goal when your time was up. Though you offered to remain and answer individual questions, not only did every member of your audience need to go to another session, but you yourself were scheduled to begin another one. If indeed you answered questions after this lesson, it would have caused your next lesson to begin late as well.

Despite the facts that months ago I heard you promise an iPad app within weeks, this app is still unavailable. Most of your audience members were using iPads even as you demonstrated on a PC. I understand that you are now promising the first iteration of the iPad app sometimes this month, but given your past failure to produce, I am wary.

Suggestions for improvement:

It is our policy to offer bell-to-bell instruction. Please begin promptly and be sure your audience is immediately engaged. One way to do that would be to remain on the stated topic, for which every member had signed on.

Try to be helpful and friendly when fielding questions. Do not show hostility when being questioned, particularly when you've brought up terms with which none of your audience is familiar. This will encourage participation, engagement, and learning. Nonetheless, should you determine such terms are not relevant to your audience, it's far better not to bring them up at all.

Please determine what your aim is and follow it. I strongly suggest you engage in planning. I saw no evidence whatsoever you had done so before this session, you had no written plan in evidence, and you clearly seemed to be improvising. While improvisation may be useful as a jumping-off point, you were mistaken in thinking it would sustain an entire lesson. This cost you the attention of your audience, and resulted in largely wasting their time.

In the future, please bring evidence of prior planning, and I will be happy to discuss and review it with you. In this way, you may better engage your audience and more efficiently use both their time and yours.

I strongly suggest you observe the young man who presented Apple iTunes U. Not only was he friendly, well-prepared, easy to understand and consistently on point, but the program he was demonstrating seemed intuitive, simple, and easy to use with little or no training. This is in marked contrast to Skedula, which after several months, still perplexes many who attempt to use it.

This lesson was UNSATISFACTORY.

It's Not Who You Know. It's Whom You Know

For several weeks now, I've been writing about the new program my school has been using to keep track of student data. It's called Skedula, and it's largely unpopular in my building. It just seems like you always need to do three things instead of one. Furthermore, though most of my colleagues use ipads, there is no ipad app. The rep came to our school several weeks ago, and assured us we'd have one in two weeks. Now I hear the real roll out date is sometime in December.

If that's the case, Skedula ought to refund half of whatever they charged us. If they knew their program wouldn't serve our needs and sold it to us based on an app that wasn't even out yet, shame on them.

But there are other questions I have. For one, I'm hearing schools Mayor Bloombucks tried to close were required to use Skedula. Perhaps this program was seen as having the ability to make ESL students speak English and special ed. students overcome any and all disabilities. Or perhaps someone thought it was a good idea for its parent company, Datacation, to make money. I mean, sure, it's not Eva Moskowitz, but it's always important for The Right People to make money. Of course I'm not talking about educators, the only city employees Mayor Bloomberg did not see fit to give an 8% raise for the 2008-2010 bargaining round.

Another thing I wonder, and this appears verified by Skedula itself, is how on earth they got access to STARS, the DOE database usually open only to administrators. I know for a fact that other programs do not have this access. At my school, in order to use Daedalus, administrators constantly had to do updates within the building. How did Skedula get an automatic connection?

So, with favored treatment, and a seriously flawed system, one wonders whether Skedula is the Next Big Thing. For example, I've read that ARIS, the 80-million dollar boondoggle our financial wizard of a mayor is about to trash in favor of a yet-undetermined state system. Is Skedula as crappy as ARIS? So far, I'd say yes. And were it to be imposed statewide, like an epidemic, I've no doubt Andrew Cuomo, the student lobbyist, and his merry band of hedge fund magnates/ education experts could endeavor to make it even worse.

Because when it comes to pointless nonsense, no one takes a back seat to Cuomo and Bloomberg. That's a good thing, because given their massive egos, there won't be room in the back seat of the largest, ugliest Hummer limo in the great state of New York.

Man vs. Machine--Further Adventures with Skedula

Yesterday I had a big problem contacting a student's home. A girl walked in 20 minutes late, like she owned the place, after having arrived just before the ending bell rang two days ago. She had a big smile, looking as though she was expecting to win a prize. At least two times I caught her fussing with makeup rather than paying attention. This was fairly easy for her to do as the only seat in my 34-person class was one in the back.

The girl had written a contact number on the card I gave her, but there was another one on Skedula. I went up to her and asked whether the number she gave me was her mom's number. She assured me it was. But it wasn't. And neither was the number on Skedula.

Personally, I hate when kids come late to my class. My feeling is this--if I have to be on time, so do they. So I went to her guidance counselor, hoping she might have the magic number to send this girl's behavior home with her. The counselor remembered seeing it somewhere, and opened up our old program Daedalus, where she found a note someone had written with the correct phone number.

I struggled on my iPad to make a similar note in Skedula. I clicked and prodded. After several false starts, I finally found the anecdotal, which, by default, is academic negative. I tried to change it, but it wasn't all that responsive. Is it negative to leave a current phone number? Well, it would be today. Unfortunately, no matter how many times I touched the window, my iPad keyboard would not appear. So that particular mission failed.

"It's the iPad," said the counselor. "It works better on my computer." So she made the note and then cursed herself because she'd forgotten to change the default academic negative category. Is that the most popular thing we do? Write negative things about kids? When I write about kids on venues like those I try to describe only behavior and let others decide whether it's negative or positive.

Then the counselor told me this girl has been having issues for a few years. I pushed several buttons on Skedula trying to pull up her previous report cards, but had no luck at all. It's very hard for me to fathom what is worthwhile about this program, though I will grant that one member of our faculty had nice things to say about it the other day. Still, the overwhelming number of comments I get are about time wasted trying to do things.

No one ever talked about Daedalus. I never wrote about it. We just used it. It was a handy tool. Teachers can always use handy tools. It's remarkable what we get are arcane, overblown, convoluted programs like Skedula--programs that cost schools up to 40 grand a year. To me, that's potentially the price of an additional teacher, and perhaps fewer classes of 34.

Skedula Still Sucks

It's funny. I put up a post saying Skedula sucks, and I got dozens of responses from people who'd never posted on the blog before, most of whom had never used Disqus, a very popular commenting platform. One person would say the technophobes love it, then an hour later someone would post saying, "I'm a technophobe, and I love it."

I got multiple posts calling me a liar, and characterizing those who criticize Skedula as Luddites or worse. I took them down, and I will continue to delete such posts, so please don't even bother.

I know many teachers, I know what teachers are passionate about, and I do not know one single teacher, not even a  tech-oriented teacher, who is passionate about a grading program, any grading program. I have read all the comments, and I do have a response.

Several posters insisted Skedula does not, by default, make posts public. They are wrong. When you write an anecdotal, the public box is checked by default, and you must uncheck it. I would not advise teachers to make negative posts open to all. If you've read Chancellor's Regulation A-421, you think twice about what you want people to hear. There's a prominent case of a teacher being fired for writing unsavory things about her students on Facebook. I'd think a school audience would put a teacher at even more risk.

I find it incredible there is no feature for a guidance referral, and thus far no poster, not even the ones saying they are from Skedula, has addressed this fundamental flaw. If you wish to send a message to a guidance counselor, you must then look up who the guidance counselor is, if you have not already done so, then check the name of the counselor. In a school like mine, with a dozen counselors, that's unnecessarily time-consuming. Daedalus selected the counselor automatically in one step.

Yes, I know, you need training, as many posters repeated. As a matter of fact, I've had it, and one of the reps from Skedula was in my school just last week. The first time I mentioned guidance referrals, the rep answered a question, but not the one I asked. When I repeated it again, he said the beauty of Skedula was that I could set it up to do it myself. That was akin to bringing my car in and having the mechanic tell me the beauty of his shop was that I could come in and do the repair myself. There was no discussion of adding this very basic and useful feature from this rep.

Let's look further at training. I'm using the Blogger platform right now. I've had zero training. I also had zero training in MS Word. Last week I edited a film using iMovie, with zero training, for the first time. The teachers using Engrade in my building did so with zero training. An intuitive program is user-friendly, and requires little training. I had zero training in Daedalus, and I've had zero training in any computer program I can think of. But let's go back to our experience with the Skedula rep.

A young tech teacher raised her hand and asked why a screen with our school name pops up every time we log in. She felt it was a waste of time. Could we bypass it? No, said the Skedula expert.
A young math teacher told me it was faster and more efficient to use a Delaney book to take attendance, and that using Skedula ate into valuable class time. In fact, several tech-oriented teachers had already told me they'd found taking attendance with Skedula was awkward, so I haven't even bothered.


Several issues came up about viewing students. Why were their faces blocked? That was because of the iPad. Why do we have scrolling issues? The iPad. But there will be an iPad app, said the rep, sometime soon, that will fix that. Pardon me if I believe it when I see it. Meanwhile, the teachers at my school, almost all of whom use iPads (on which they needed no training), can wait.

Other commenters on the blog were thrilled you don't have to write grades on Skedula. You don't have to use the EGG. Yet the rep was unable to demonstrate it, saying the grades were not up yet. The principal made sure to set up an EGG because our grades are due on Friday. I suppose he could've used Skedula and hoped for the best, but I thought it was a good idea when he bet on a sure thing. Still, maybe when Skedula works, it works. Again, I'll believe it when I see it.

Today I wanted to pull up a student schedule. I clicked "schedule" and got a choice of three schedules. I could view the student's test schedule, if I wished, and there was some other schedule, I don't recall which. Perhaps there is a school somewhere where people commonly need student test schedules, but with only 28 years teaching experience, I don't know where it is. So there I found an extra step, for no particular reason, when I was trying to find something very common--here there should be a default, and it should be the student schedule.

Now I know I will get another mountain of responses telling me how wonderful Skedula is, and how it's changed their school cultures, and their lives, and how birth control pills were a relatively unimportant invention compared to Skedula. But here's a fact. I talk to teachers and administrators all day at my school.

Not one single person has had anything good to say about it. We use it, because the school probably paid 40K for it, and is stuck with it for the year.  I use it every day because I have no choice. I find it counter-intuitive, and not user friendly.

In summary, please review the headline.

Skedula Sucks

In our school, we have a new system. It's new and very glitzy looking. And you can enter grades and attendance on it, if you dare. We used to have a system called Daedalus, with which we could look up student schedules, and phone numbers, and things like that. You can do that in Skedula too, with only a few more inconvenient steps.

Daedalus had a big calendar you could pull up and show to parents. All the cuts would show a sea of pink, if I recall correctly. It was a very dramatic thing to show a parent. Skedula does something, but not that. In my school, there are a lot of technophobic teachers. I expect them not to like new systems. This year, it's not them, but the young tech-oriented teachers who are complaining.

In Skedula, if you send a note, it is by default public. This is pretty inconvenient. Several people have written things they did not expect everyone in the building to have access to, but there you are. I like to send notes to guidance counselors. In Daedalus, you'd press a button, write a note, and it would go to the kid's counselor, whether or not you happened to know who the counselor was. That way, at the end of the year, when the principal asked me why the hell I failed that kid, I could point to this correspondence. In Skedula, you have to look up the counselor and do it yourself. You may as well use your email account.

After noting that, I found an option to send comments to Skedula. They don't seem to really want them, because a box that could not have been more than one square inch popped up. I dutifully wrote a complaint, but it didn't go through.

Skedula looks more professional than bare-bones Daedalus. But Daedalus was more simple, more intuitive, more user-friendly. I miss it. Teachers who've adopted their own online grading systems, like Engrade, swear they're better and easier, and lament being asked to swap.

We need not even mention ARIS here, a total waste of 80 million bucks, soon to be scrapped for a state system that will no doubt prove more costly and even worse.

Does your school have an online system? What is it? How do you like it? Is it free so we can use it instead of Skedula?