The Source/Fusion: Likes, Dislikes, Confusion?
I noted that at the strategic plan community meeting I attended at Hale, several parents said they (and some teachers) have frustrations with using The Source/Fusion.
One reader replied:
As an SPS teacher I would love to hear what parents like/dislike about the Source & Fusion. Is it limitations in the tool (and if so exactly what aspects)? Is it that teachers don't update the Source? With Fusion is it particular tools not working, limited teacher usage, inconsistent styles of teacher usage, errors in posts, etc? Some families may be able to make comparisons to tools in districts they've moved from and/or private schools they have their children in.
At least the Source allows grades to be posted more timely than the traditional gradebooks. What else do parents want/need to see in the Source (this could help those of us who read the blog some be more aware of changes to lobby for in the future... well, if teachers ever truly had any input into district technology decisions of this magnitude). Similarly with Fusion, what specifically is the good, the bad and the ugly?
The "good" is important to note so those of us teachers who read this can maybe implement more of the suggestions as we're apparently contracted with Fusion for 2 more years.
Readers?
One reader replied:
As an SPS teacher I would love to hear what parents like/dislike about the Source & Fusion. Is it limitations in the tool (and if so exactly what aspects)? Is it that teachers don't update the Source? With Fusion is it particular tools not working, limited teacher usage, inconsistent styles of teacher usage, errors in posts, etc? Some families may be able to make comparisons to tools in districts they've moved from and/or private schools they have their children in.
At least the Source allows grades to be posted more timely than the traditional gradebooks. What else do parents want/need to see in the Source (this could help those of us who read the blog some be more aware of changes to lobby for in the future... well, if teachers ever truly had any input into district technology decisions of this magnitude). Similarly with Fusion, what specifically is the good, the bad and the ugly?
The "good" is important to note so those of us teachers who read this can maybe implement more of the suggestions as we're apparently contracted with Fusion for 2 more years.
Readers?
Comments
The public deserves to be able to see what our kids are working on and producing in our schools. Please, please, please do not trot out the privacy song and dance thingy. So old.
Students and families should be able to easily review updated course curricula, materials, and homework assignments on the Fusion pages, and to see frequently updated grades on the Source.
I'm 9 years into SPS, and precious few teachers are committed to using either tool. Some only use the Source at semester's end. That's not helpful.
The union shouldn't bend to all of the MBA widget factory ideas that motivate reformers, but it really needs to embrace this technology and fast.
Grouchy
Plus, as another person noted, teachers really don't have enough time to do a great deal of file management, or anything else. I definitely could use a secretary. Some few of my colleagues use the Fusion page for more (online quizzes, etc, etc), but I'm already working 10 hours a day without a break, so I don't feel a great motivation to add more to my day. I have plenty of to-dos that provide better value to my students.
As far as grades posting - as a parent and a teacher - I remain very frustrated with those of my colleagues who do not post grades regularly. I consider it a bare minimum requirement of the job of teaching. And it frankly helps a lot with managing students and parents. It's all pretty crystal clear, no surprises.
Current common practice presents teachers to parents as disorganized, and it undermines the parent/teacher partnership. It is baffling to me that district administration has not partnered with SEA to make a push for this. It would only make teachers look like pros. But who among us hasn't seen this in their work? Roll out a shiny new software toy, do a short training, and then essentially forget about it: no "How's it going?", no "Let's get together and share best practices."
The Source is great for communicating between teachers and parents, if used as intended.
Why buy this technology if the district is not going to support teachers in its use? Why buy this technology if teachers won't do the bare bone minimum so that parents can see how their student is doing?
The info that teachers put on their pages IS data but I guess data is only for district headquarters staff.
For example,the old Source would display a red bar across Late/Missing assignments. The new Source is supposed to display small icons for collected, missing, late - but so far, they are not used so I have to scan every entry to see if it is late or missing. I also see an error on Assessments, for one of my students. It shows passing an EOC exam (level 4!!!) but I know that test has not been taken.
So my complaint is why did we have to spend money on a new Source, when the old one seemed to work just fine. Maybe it is easier now for teachers to use, so if that is the case, then the money was well spent.
Fusion baffles me - I was getting emails with HW assignments, then they stopped after the break, do I have to resign up?
There was one situation where one of my kid's teachers adamantly refused to use the source. It was terrible. Like groping blindly in the dark. Fortunately with pressure from parents and the principal, the teacher came around and began posting grades there.
I think reasonable teachers realize that support at home is the best method to get kids to excel and the source can be a huge aid to parents.
-parent
I rarely check out the Fusion pages. It was an incredible hassle to get the emails to work (notifications about upcoming homework assignments) - and then they suddenly stopped. I decided it wasn't worth trying to figure out how to get the homework notifications - in large part because my kid stays on top of her homework. When my younger kid (who's not as organized) hits middle school, I may need to use the Fusion page more.
Jane
Gen Ed Mom
Question for teachers: Is it harder to post assignments online than to create, print, and hand out a document? If so, that is a major problem with the software that should be addressed.
HIMS had some sort of web site failure towards the end of the semester, so most of your settings could have been wiped out. I got the opposite and ended up with administrator access. Check your settings and then email the PTSA Communications person to fix your settings if you can't do it yourself. That's what my kid ended up doing.
Now that being said, I agree with Robin. The disconnect between teacher usage of the Source and Fusion pages and parents' ability to keep track of their kids' assignments is enough to drive us crazy. If it's not mandated and enforced, it's the wild west out there. And, heaven forbid your child should have an issue/learning disability. No one is accountable, but your child's grades will suffer.
In middle school, having two separate sites, accessed different ways and with the need to sign in separately, is a big pain. Teacher use is inconsistent, and we even have one teacher who apparently never got a Fusion page so created a separate website for tracking the course--meaning a whole other website to check. Why does a teacher have to resort to that? And how many parents even know about it? Crazy.
Personally, I rarely use the Fusion pages, and only occasionally access the Source to make sure things are on track.
Granted it's probably not a Source-related issue, but one of my biggest gripes is that when I do log in to look at grades the assignments and grading seem to be pretty easy. Kids often get points for turning in permission slips, not speaking English in their advanced world language class, etc. Getting 100% (or higher) on an assignment is the norm. On the surface, it doesn't look very rigorous. I'd expect that even the strongest students would show room for improvement, but grading doesn't seem to reflect that.
In terms of wishes, ideally I'd like to see the Fusion pages provide an outline of the course overall, not just a record of what's already been done. Are teachers working on a day-by-day basis, without a curriculum plan? Assuming they know the units planned for the year, it would be great if the Fusion pages showed it. We are so in-the-dark re: the haphazard curriculum in this district, that having a general sense of what will be covered in each class would be great. (Then again, folks might share them, and discrepancies would be highlighted--probably NOT something teacher's/schools want to happen).
HIMSmom
I don't understand why Fusion and the Source need to be separate. Neither of them is a shining example of what software should be.
Fusion pages are used pretty rarely. Half the teachers don't use them at all, the other half only put assignments on them once in a while.
A good software package should be saving the teachers work, so that they want to use it. If the software is so bad that it makes extra work, the teachers who aren't using it are probably wise to spend their time doing lesson planning and grading with feedback for the students and other things that actually help the students.
I was talking to a counselor last week, and I was surprised that she couldn't easily access my student's assessments - I logged in and showed her the necessary information through my Source account.
I was told 2 years ago that there was some software/online site that SPS had bought for college planning/applications, but I never saw mention of it again. I wonder how much it cost, and why it was never rolled out.
tami
But yeah, let's GET on that issue: how useful can fusion pages be for families who have spotty access to the web? It's simply not equitable to expect students to have access to it, and so you can't use it to the exclusion of other supports.
I do not use the Source directly, but when I put grades into the in-house gradebook (the usual Pearson junk), it automatically updates the Source. That's it. I find it useful to automatically mark missing assignments as zeros: it sure energizes kids to find those missing papers!
Putting stuff up on Fusion is a time sink if you only do it now and then, but once you get used to it, I have found that since I already HAVE all my powerpoints and worksheets and such in a directory, I just take thirty seconds and drag it all into the class fusion page. It seems to work fine, and before I was so assiduous about it, my students complained that the powerpoints didn't get put up for TWO DAYS after the class! Now I put 'em up before class even starts.
I guess my point is, it CAN be useful, but it is yet another little thing that teachers are supposed to take care of, another ball to keep in the air. I can see why it'd be difficult for some teachers, and in some disciplines.
Grouchy
you said: I don’t have any preference for either Source or Fusion, but for crying out loud could we just have one system.
This seems to be the most common complaint I've seen from many parents, as well as some staff. The problem is that instead of using a single system that does everything the district wants, they have attempted to glom on a completely different system (Fusion), from a completely different vendor (Blackboard/Edline), and make it kinda sorta look like the grading system (PowerSchool).
The reason they require different logins is that they are completely different systems, unrelated to each other and managed by different organizations!
The Source (PowerSchool) supports grades and assignment management. It's run by our district, though it is a Pearson product, so it's possible Pearson has access to the data (can any insider verify this?)
Fusion is a service hosted and managed by Blackboard/Edline Inc., in Washington D.C. When your kid signs onto Fusion, they are signing into a 3rd party server managed by Blackboard Inc. Any information your kid posts on Fusion goes to Blackboard Inc. Conversations or messages through Fusion are being shared through and with Blackboard, Inc.
If you'd like to know a little more about Blackboard, Inc., you should check out this link: Blackboard For Military - Learning transformed for today's generation of warfighters. (current lead article, so may change). These are the folks that SPS has connected our kids with, via Fusion. Not cool.
Huge Gripe:
Teachers, please make sure that assignments and data are available to your students without requiring them to use a 3rd party web site (Fusion)! As a backup or second source, fine, but it should NEVER be the only place for any material or information. You might just as well be forcing them to create Facebook or Twitter accounts and requiring them to sign in to get their assignments! This doesn't even touch on the fact that there are still many kids without easy online access from home.
I have to say that I have found the fusion pages to have some value. I have a SmartBoard, so all my class notes can be posted to the Fusion page. I also post all the assignment, notes templates, answers and whatever else I hand out. This the students have access to it if they miss class or misplace something (What??? A teenager unorganized????? Not possible!)
I only update grades once or twice a week. I don't like grading, but one thing I try very hard to do, is grade any quiz or exam the day I give it. Kids (and parents) want to know how they did, and I take that seriously. I will admit that I don't take recording homework grades quite as seriously.
That said, Fusion folders are still pretty handy and I do use them a great deal to get maps, worksheets, etc. to students.
The gradebook side of Fusion is a disaster. Any history on the site after any data change of a student becomes suspect. As a teacher, I can only get to my gradebook from home through bizarre work-arounds (running an old version of Java, installing certificates, using Firefox, etc.). Since I don't bother fixing home grade book every couple of weeks, this makes communicating with parents difficult. I can't even see my own students grades while I am talking to parents.
I'm also a parent of a student at Hale, so I can see how lame "The Source" looks from the parent end as well. Thankfully, I know as a teacher where it is misleading and how it works.
I did make some youtube videos to explain the various workings for Fusion and The Source for parents of my students. Perhaps they will be helpful. They were some of my first youtubes, so forgive the amateurism:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJV20dnGqzI
and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBaflxlWcKQ
- James Couture
I skimmed the Blackboard for Military whitepaper you linked, and I'm having a hard time understanding your 'not coolness' with it.
Perhaps you could elucidate.
--FremontDad
Perhaps that link was pandering a bit to the anti-war crowd (though "warfighters" is certainly not a target audience you'd expect to see on a site where student data is held!).
However, the main point is that this is a 3rd party site that is disguised to look like a Seattle Schools web site. Most people don't understand this, and both parents and kids use the site as if it was part of SPS. There is a LOT of confusion about this throughout the district - HamiltonMS even has a fairly detailed announcement about it on their web site, but even their article says "are two separate software applications", rather than pointing out that the Fusion pages, data and conversations are managed and hosted by a separate company.
There is so much student data sharing happening right now, including the fiasco mirmac1 recently unearthed with ConnectEdu, and I think it's important that everyone understands more about where our kids' data is going when they do anything online, especially when it's happening in a somewhat covert fashion, like Fusion. Make sense?
I plan on passing ALL these comments onto the Board and staff.
I just this morning have come to your same conclusion. Here is the ConnectEDU agreement.
I was expecting to see a data-sharing agreement that would require the mandatory clauses required by FERPA (data destruction, audit etc) but since it just "hosts" data, there may not be one.
You can see in the agreement that the student-data is prepopulated. All that is required is activation. Although I saw certain items uploaded in my child's account, what other eSIS info do they have? How does CDU "customize each user experience", particularly "those in underrepresented populations and within large urban districts"?
grounded
I haven't read through the entire contract yet, but what I've read is not comforting, and gives me a lot of questions.
Just quickly, ConnectEdu has options for districts to run their systems "in-house". Do you know for sure that SPS is not doing this in-house?
Whether it's ConnectEdu, Fusion, RoadMap or whatever else, it seems the district is happy to send our kids' personal information to any company that has interest or can at least fein some kind of "educational value". Just because a company can make data management easier for some district staff doesn't mean we should be allowing our kids' data to be shared with all these organizations. Where does it stop?
It sounds like you are thinking watching a student fail a class and not intervening might be a good learning experience. I see it as a lost opportunity to teach a student how to ask for help and figure out how to minimize damage. Surprisingly, quite a few kids don't know how to ask for help from a teacher.
I know kids who didn't have an IEP or weren't SpecEd, whose learning curve for time management was very long, and if their parents had not spent the seven years of MS and HS saying - "hey, i notice you have a big project assigned, what's the plan?" those kids might not have learned the planning skills they needed. Some kids really do not know how to calculate how long it will take do an assignment and figure out when they should start work, some kids really don't recognize that they can't do 2 things at once. Some kids need to hear, "A movie on Saturday afternoon? Wasn't that when you were going to finish that report?" And a lot of those kids take several years to develop those skills.
tami
dw, I'm not sure it is in-house. Let me know what you find. I'm still trying to get my child's account de-activated.
grounded
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