Aspen...take 1

I led the first session with my World Language Department today. We are attempting to understand and utilize ASPEN, our new course management system, and all that it has to offer. It has been down most of the week, and we are not even sure if it will be working when school starts next week. This is our new gradebook and attendance manager, student/parent communication portal, class information connection, schedule designer, and parent/student information database.

My staff has been SO unbelievably frustrated with ASPEN, which is now being called the Parent Portal or the official gradebook. Apparently, parents will not know what we mean if we call it ASPEN! The county is not rolling out all of the options for this program, so we will only have access this year to enter grades, take attendance, check student information, email parents, and make course recommendations for the following school year.

We were supposed to hold this session in our newly renovated and relocated language office, however, the wireless Internet is not functioning in the entire building yet. We relocated our meeting to an older classroom that had the wireless installed last year.

For this session, I walked my department through how to access ASPEN at home since the link and log-on are different. I helped them add it as a bookmark to their laptops as well. Then, we set up the general ASPEN preferences again since they reset themselves each year. After setting the preferences, we discussed the student view options as well as the new attendance views. We only used this CMS last year for attendance, so many of the features are new to us. I could have created a presentation for this session and future ASPEN sessions, but I did not feel that this would be helpful because I would need to switch back and forth between ASPEN and a presentation. Instead, I connected my laptop to the LCD and walked the department through each step of today's session.

Before everyone left, I showed them the various reports that can be viewed and printed for student data, schedules, grades, and attendance. While many will forget these options, I plan to remind them about them as we go through the other sessions.

The mixed ability levels during these sessions blows me away! I am doing my best to remain calm and answer all questions, no matter how crazy they may be! After the session, I emailed my department the internship blog with resources and question answers as well as the survey for today's session. Here's to a great first week of school!