Teacher comments

Published on July 2, 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

The way the program operates now is a HUGE improvement from what it started as. My high school has been using it faithfully since the beginning. It caused us such grief the first year… on top of the strike and everything else going, our superintendent would show up with bottles of whiskey and offer us a day “OFF” (like there is such a thing for teachers). We were the “guinea pigs”, you would be appalled if you knew some of the “problems” we encountered. In any other business such a program would be totally unacceptable as it eliminates professional dignity. My favourite “issue” was when we were unable to use words that contained “he” “she” “his” “her” in our comments because words like “the” would automatically become “tshe” if the student was a female…. even sadder there was no way of printing any verifications or seeing the comment as a whole. We had to print the entire report cards to catch the mistakes. We actually had a competition to see who had the most outrageous comment…. Cshemistry won with several creative words that gave completely new meanings to their course!!

It apparently has a few positive aspects, but we have yet to discover them compared to what we had before!!

Teacher comments

Published on July 2, 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

Navigating the maze of entering term marks has been a challenge. I have found more than once that I have typed over marks already entered because I used the return key rather than a down arrow.
I have continued to use an old gradebook program to keep track of my marks. Some staff members have returned to paper and calculator rather than use the BCeSIS gradebook. I do, however, like the ease of entering personal report card comments.
It should be interesting next year when the Vancouver schools start using the system. There have been some difficulties over the last two years when too many users are attempting to access the system at the same time. What will happen when these schools are added to the list of users?

Teacher comment

Published on July 2, 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

I tried it for a class I had. Took 3 hours with technical help to set up
a class of 2 students. Not sure that is worth it over having to enter a
mark for a report card at all.

Teacher comments

Published on July 2, 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

1) Attendance on eSIS. Not bad, but could certainly be improved. What would really be nice is a simple screen that shows classes chronologically missed/attended for a given day, to track down potential skippers.

2) Marks on eSIS. Great idea, horrible implementation. I was a teacher-trainer for eSIS and gave it an honest effort before teachers saw it. Nope, no dice. I’m not interested in tripling my data entry time for an end-product which is half as effective. I used to be a fan of CSL Marks (MacSchool), but have now moved over to Easy Grade Pro. I enter my marks into eSIS only come report card time. I’m no longer a teacher-trainer.

There’s a ton of things that eSIS should do well, but doesn’t. Informative screens for adjudication meetings, pre-report card confirmation lists for teachers (have you ever tried to get work habits, %’s, absences, comments and upcoming course on one report? — good luck). Ironically, there is no easy way for eSIS to produce a list of passport-to-education eligible students (a gov’t initiative — you’d think that’d work well, at least). Can you effectively email all teachers of a given student? Nope. Things such as these we’ve had to supplement using third-party solutions.

What Really Counts: Rethinking Accountability

Published on July 2, 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

This article by Lynette Harper questions accountability and the introduction and the use odf BCeSIS.

Teacher J-L – My 2c worth on BCeSIS

Published on July 2, 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: .

Well I am probably going to caught a bit of flack for this but for those of you have not experience the Marks part of BCeSIS, are you in for a treat. Our district started it this year and everyone in the province will be using it next year. I don’t think you HAVE to use the marks part of BCeSIS. For those of you who are using it, I would love to hear what others think of the “marks” part of BCeSIS.

Attendance – works great – far better than the old way we did attendance.

Gradebook: — first big problem is that it is a data base not a spreadsheet

If this gradebook came out 20 years ago it would have been considered “poor” then. The old MacSchool CSL Marks (20 to 25 years old) is (was) far superior to the BCeSIS gradebook now. The more recent “InteGrade” is much more flexible and actually meets the needs of the teacher.

You really get the feeling this was not designed for teachers. It is more about data collection.

It is not intuitive. The “pathways” and words for action buttons are not obvious and often misleading.

Do they treat the term grades as “cumulative” marks or “discrete” reports on that term?

It is not easy to manipulate if your needs are slightly different.

I tried a class with the BCeSIS gradebook — ugg. It was cumbersome and really didn’t do what I wanted it to do. It wasn’t worth the time to learn how to make your marks fit “its” structure when Integrade does everything I want.

There is no spell-check, you are limited to the number of characters in your comments, and you loose your data from year to year (although I hear there is a way to save this data at the school).

It is better than no gradebook at all but it is definitely a step backwards in tabulating your marks.

There are many more “idiosyncrasies” that I’m sure we could get use to, but why?

My recommendation: use your “old” marks program and manually post your marks into BCeSIS.

I hear there are up-grades coming but I’ll wait to see them before I try BCeSIS again. Another math teacher here used BCsSIS this past year but will probably use InteGrade next year. Yes you can make it work, but it is a step backwards.

Well, this has been my experience with it and this is my 2 cents.

BCeSIS: What’s wrong with this picture?

Published on July 2, 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments


Larry Kuehn is director of the BCTF’s Research and Technology Division.
He writes a hard hitting article on the implementation of BCeSIS.

BCTF Recommendation 6—Fully fund the real costs of BCeSIS—or eliminate it

Published on July 2, 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

A Brief to the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services

This is an excellent article presented in October 2006

Recommendation 6—Fully fund the real costs of BCeSIS—or eliminate it

http://bctf.ca/uploadedFiles/Publications/Briefs_Position_papers/EducationFunding.pdf
EDUCATION FUNDING

Why the Blog on BCeSIS

Published on June 28, 2008 in Uncategorized. 1 Comment Tags: .

As part of my studies through SFU I have developed an interested in looking at the software being sold and used in schools – why it is being used, who chose it and is it what teachers and students need?

I have watched with interest as teachers add comments to list servers about their end of year experiences around the use of BCeSIS.
The teacher comments are all pretty negative so I have decided to create a blog in the hopes that this will generate open discussion and that these will possibly be looked at by the creators of the program.
So if you have some insights or suggestions I would value your comments.
I would like to thank the teachers from the BCAMT teachers list for prompting this discussion.