Maplewood

In an effort to provide as much information as possible to parents and students, we use Maplewood.  Parents and students have access to marks whenever and wherever they are by going to Maplewood and typing in their usernames and passwords.  So, I suppose, in a way, Maplewood is a type of social media; people are sharing information with one another.

When things work well, everything is great, but when they don't work do well...oh...my...goodness...is it frustrating!  The Maplewood server often crashes, sometimes when a teacher is doing class attendance, entering marks, or doing report cards.  Yes, all of the above have happened this year.  Sometimes the server times out, which means all of the unsaved data is gone.  Sometimes parents cannot log-in to see their child's marks, either because they entered the password incorrectly and were locked out of Maplewood, or because, yet again, the server crashed.  Over the last few years Maplewood has gotten better and better, so we are experiencing these type of situations less and less, but they still do happen.

There is another aspect to social media.  Because it is social, there has to be two-way communication.  Teachers have to make sure that they are routinely posting marks.  Just before IEP meetings in October, I printed progress reports for the students that are on my caseload.  Out of fourteen students, only one had any marks on their progress report, and that report only had marks for one class (out of nine).  I know how busy that we as teachers are, but if we choose to use social media to report to parents, we had better be using it.