POST: Power.Grade and Infinite.Campus

I am so happy to have found I am not alone in thinking that
Infinite.Campus is a lousy program. There have been good
programs that parents and students can use to check grades.
I have no idea why a school would get Infinite.Campus. I
think my school got it just because it allows parents to
keep tabs on their child's progress. It was probably cheap,
but I don't get involved in what we buy - don't have time to
think about money. It might be good for parents and
students, but it�s time-consuming on the teacher. I agree -
it is not streamlined. Let me list the things that I can
think of off the top of my head - stuff that happens over
and over and over and I just have to accept it without
complaint and try to get my job done so I don't have to go
off to Siberia. Maybe the IC people will hear my complaints
and be able to make some money if they can improve it.
For one thing it takes up a lot of real-estate on the
screen. My screen setting only goes to 1280 by 800 pixels.
If they would just get that fancy title out of the way,
that would help a lot. Is that supposed to advertise? To
enter one set of grades, IC takes up more than 1/3 of the
width of the screen and well over 100% of the screen if the
class is more than probably about 18 students.
I also use Excel to keep my grades. Excel is so much easier
and helps me find mistakes - usually the wrong possible
points or wrong date for an assign. I try to align the
rosters of Excel along side the Infinite Campus roster so
that I can key grades in all lined up. But it is difficult
to line things up because you can not make the IC.window
small enough. Today I was entering two classes of grades.
One class was 19 students and one was 16. It took me five
times as long to enter the 19 students just because I had to
keep moving the window for Excel around to line up with the
IC roster, and I had to scroll the IC.roster. With my small
16 student class, the whole roster fit in the IC.window and
I could key the grades in rapidly, line for line without
having to move either roster. With Excel I can fit class
sizes of 25 to 30 on one screen. I figured out that if
there are more than 15 students (I think it was), because of
the limits on the IC window, I have to keep moving my Excel
window to align with the IC roster so the Excel scroll bar
disappears off the bottom of the screen. Then I have to
keep adjusting the position of the Excel window around the
IC window to line up the Excel roster up with the IC roster.
IC really is hard to work around in so many ways.
There's really not time to enter grades every day with IC,
and then it takes even longer if you don't because you have
to change the date due each time.
If you are on the phone with a parent and trying to switch
from attendance to grades, the IC program takes a long time
to switch and a lot of times you have to log in again. That
is another reason I use Excel. I use Excel as a back up for
attendance and grades. I always refer to my Excel back up
as I communicate student�s progress over the phone or in
meetings.
Well, I hope the IC programmers hear these complaints and
come up with a quick update. I don�t know if I can stand
much more of this. I think I was able to do grades faster
by hand back in the day.
One more thing, I don�t know if it is the infinite campus or
what. With all the problems since getting IC, it might well
be related since I didn�t have this problem before. My
cursor scroll slows to a snail�s pace. When I scroll about
in Excel it goes slow and choppy. I managed to correct it
just once by going to control panel, but then the next day
it was slow again. Then I managed to report it to
Microsoft. The next day it was fast again in the morning,
but by the afternoon it was slow and choppy again. Like I
say, I don�t know if this is caused by IC, but the timing
does seems suspicious.