During the summer of 2014, AISD switched over from Grade Speed to a new program called TEAMS on the AISD cloud.

Even the savviest teachers are having a hard time figuring out how to do things on the program like adding comments on students for parents to see. Some teachers have resorted to printing out student grades because students are not able to login and get the latest reports. And while the teachers even went to a training on TEAMS, most say it wasn’t helpful.

While this was supposed to save the district up to $82,000 a year, and provide a way for parents to find all the information they need, the new program is turning out to be more hassle than it’s worth. With no major announcement made about the switch, it made it really hard for us and our parents to know where to find our grades.

Some teachers reported that the TEAMS training was minimal at best. They described it as one person from the district showing a PowerPoint in the theater on a screen that was hard to see. There was not much opportunity for questions or teachers to set up their grade books with an instructor.

To be able to check our grades, students or parents need to login in to two different places. First we need to log into the cloud, then find the “student self-serve” and login again into that. Some of the complaints are that we can’t even log in, even when we’re doing exactly what our teachers told us to.

Just as the second six weeks is starting, today they’ll be having a public seminar on the new program .

How are were we expected to do our best in school, the first six weeks? How are we supposed to see what to improve on and plan for tutoring, if we can’t see what areas we’re lack- ing in? Students are struggling right now, especially the junior class in their hardest year of high school.

Other issues are that the grades sometimes don’t display correctly and are not current when parents login to check on their kids. So while teachers have updated a student’s grades, the program may not reflect that change right away, causing students to stress about their grades.

Some students do not realize that the “report cards” tab contain the most updated grades, and the grades under “progress reports” are out of date.

Some may say that we should go to tutoring if we’re struggling in a class, but sometimes we think we get it, and don’t realize that we may be doing it wrong. We could ask our teachers every day what our grades are, but many of our teachers are busy doing their job and teaching the class.

Of course, that makes sense after we figured that out, but not knowing which one to look under was very frustrating. Report cards are usually connected to a student’s final grades at the end of the six weeks, not the current grade. Not only students are having issues.

The school district needs to get its act together and clean up this TEAMS mess. We need to be able to check their grades at out- side of school. Hopefully this seminar will help us better navigate the program, and not be a repeat of the teacher training