Wednesday, May 26, 2021

The Worst Timing

Last Friday I related the crash of Google Classroom. I wrote, "Hopefully, they'll get things fixed by Monday." 

via GIPHY

I really should have known.

Actually, come to think of it, it's rather amazing that we haven't had a catastrophic failure like this all year. Things have been working pretty well up until now. But, of course, if the system is going to crash, the system has to crash at the worst possible time... 

There are three weeks left of school. It's time for things like final projects to be due. It's time for all make up work to be due. And the eighth graders have their finals a week before the seventh graders so they can participate in end-of-the-year activities. (Well, in a normal year...) 

By Monday, things hadn't been restored. All of the students' work from the entire semester was gone. 

Now, this wasn't too terrible as the gradebook software was unaffected. And I had been really good about grading things and getting them recorded immediately. So, while they lost access to the work they did, they still had credit for it.

But, this did present a problem for the current work. When all of your work is online, how do you run a class when the online component is not functioning? And, what do you do when you're just covering for another teacher who left all of the work for the classes with the assumption that the online stuff would be working? 

It was a bit of a scramble.

And it's almost all sorted as of this writing. Almost. 

I am learning so much. I have no idea if the kiddos are.

11 comments:

  1. Oh no. Thank goodness you were so on top of the grading & recording those grades.

    I hope the problem is resolved soon (or always has been)!

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  2. There is the quandary of digital gradebooks. A computer I had inherited almost blew up (literally), taking so much of student work. I did bring a hard copy to record at my home gradebook on my iMac. But, oh, the sadness.

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    1. Yeah, and it's online, so presumably it's backed up in the cloud somewhere... I suspect most teachers keep paper copies of things somewhere. I would, but it was just a temp assignment.

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  3. An entire semester's worth of work... right at the end of the semester, too. It makes me wonder if anyone hasn't been as diligent as you.

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  4. Good grief. I'm sorry you had to scramble.

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    1. I believe scrambling is part of the job description. Alas, I thought I had done the scrambling part of this assignment weeks ago.

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  5. This is a nightmare! Why don’t they have back-ups? This reminds me of my best friend who has also been dealing with computer nightmares but her employers still believe she and the other teachers should have everything done in 2 days despite the computer breakdowns.

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