BCeSIS is the acronym for British Columbia enterprise Student Information System. So if you teach in BC you will be meeting this new software.
I believe that a central database for schools is an excellent idea. However the implementation of BCeSIS brings up many questions and the topic certainly generates heated debate. From listening to the complaints,I get the feeling that BCeSIS was not designed with teachers in mind. Data collection and the collection of student information is really the mission of the software and adapting it to fit the needs of a teacher is an after though. The software came from the USA and they are big on collecting data!
Why was BCeSIS introduced before the many glitches were ironed out? Why were the many recommendations of the committee of teachers ignored.The implementation phase has been painful to say the least.
Teachers report that the software is seriously out of date, difficult to manage and that it is too expensive for what you get Yes, you can make it work, but it is a step backwards costing a lot more than was budgeted for. Is cost no longer an issue once a price is negotiated? The charges have escalated and the ministry is passing this cost on to school districts.
The recommendation to the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services
from the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation – October 2006
“If a decision is made to continue with BCeSIS, the full total cost of ownership should be added to school district budgets so that this system does not continue to suck resources from the delivery of service to students.”
If you purchase into a system, surely it should work right away -and not take a year to fix glitches and frustrate educators.
The Grade book seems to be giving teachers the most problems – is a functioning grade book not regarded as an essential tool? Grades just happen to be important for teachers to document – it is a ministry requirement so this should have been investigated and if it was not up to par the software should have been dumped or the designers made to sort it out immediately.
A teacher commented “I hear there are up-grades coming but I’ll wait to see them before I try BCeSIS again. Another math teacher at our school used BCsSIS this past year but will probably use InteGrade next year. Yes you can make it work, but it is a step backwards.”
We recently started to use BCeSIS at my school. Most teachers wanted to get a head start on this before having to use it in Sept. Starting in June allowed support staff to come in and help us. Logging in the first day was a bit tricky for some. We all would miss important details needed to get started; i.e., the dreaded underscore needed in the password. For most, things went well, although I believe it took the K teacher about a week before she got the hang of things. We only used it for attendance at this point. I’d hate to see the process when we need to enter our reports through BCeSIS. Fortunately, that won’t be any time too soon in Richmond. As a way to do the attendance, it’s easy and quick, but not without its problems. The second day we used it the entire system was down. I’m afraid about what may happen in Sept. when the whole district is using it and all trying to do their attendance at the same time of the day. Good luck opening it if you have a newer version of Safari on your computer. The continual spinning circle is very annoying. Don’t forget to unblock your pop up windows on Firefox if you want to print. Don’t even bother trying to print on Safari. One of the techies in our district who has designed other database programs is very disappointed with the look of BCeSIS. Its functions are quite limited, particularly for reporting. Our district “ReportMaker” that he designed for writing reports in our district is much more user friendly and includes about 800 ready made comments, something missing in BCeSIS. Some of the other features are useful to the classroom teacher. I was recently able to print the mailing list for my class so I could send out thank you cards.