Show My Homework....

[rad]

Our previous version was more reliable.... it came in the form of Student Organisers.

 

We had parents complain too, surely though, the kids are using this as an excuse. Most have 200 odd numbers on their phone contacts, one of them will know the homework and have done it, but wont bother and blame the website for the lack of information.

[6Foot2]

Thanks for that DaveP, any other issues a new subscriber of SMHW should be made aware of?

@BFCIT: Sorry for the late reply. Nothing I can think of at the moment. It's early days for us with Show My Homework. I am sure that there will be plenty more gripes in this thread soon...

[BFCIT]

No problem at all DaveP - we are also new adopters of Show My Homework - so far its appeared slow, doesn't work in IE 11, so Chrome has been deployed across the network. It looks good when its working and teachers/parents have been quite keen to give it a go. Just hope there is no more down time as it is very easy for people to get put off unreliable services.

[timbo343]

We have a training session this afternoon and to go live with it for teachers tomorrow, Students will be live next week / week after.

 

i'd be interested to know about the problems on IE11, so i can brace myself with what's to come! One of our teachers managed to set homework last week without any problems via IE11.

[Achandler]

We are still having problems with it, i'm getting to the opinion that is more trouble then it is worth now. We still ahve students not being assigned homework depsite beign in classes, loads of classes without teachers. The list goes on and I think their support has jsut given up trying to solve the problems now.

[BFCIT]

Timbo343 - we have not been able to get to the bottom of it yet, we have one or two exceptions where show my homework worked fine on IE; for everybody else the website just would not load ie. it looked like it was attempting to connect to the website and then returned a blank page. The quickest solution was to put Chrome on every machine, something I intended to do anyway and this resolved the problem and the page loaded fine. Every computer/laptop is using IE11 Version - 11.0.9600.18426 which was rolled out centrally. It is possibly a configuration issue at our side, it would be interesting however to see if anybody else is having problems with Internet Explorer 11 and accessing SMHW. Perhaps its a flash/html5 issue.

[Steve21]

In regards to your IE issues, you may find it's Smart Ink if it's an old one you use The plugin breaks a LOT of websites nowadays, SMHW, Kerboodle, Class Charts etc. And disabling it on those machines works fine.

 

It works in Chrome normally as the plugin doesn't run for it

 

Steve

[BFCIT]

Thanks Steve - didn't realise SmartInk impacted viewing websites. Definitely something for me to try. Cheers!

[jonnykewell1]

We finally got all our year 7's into the system but manually. I've been trying to get them to import the emails from SIMS but I was told it couldn't be done. Anyway on Friday they sent me an email of all students information in a CSV and an email address I had placed into SIMS was in their database but wasn't being entered into the email field in SMH. So the link obviously does work and they have our data it just doesn't link into the user's account. Frustrating as I'm sure it's just a tick box at their end but the support is useless.

[Steve21]

Thanks Steve - didn't realise SmartInk impacted viewing websites. Definitely something for me to try. Cheers!

 

It's my 1st thing to test on any "It's not working in IE" nowadays No idea why, but seems something to do with the way it's intercepting it for writing on it. Breaks most new websites we've subscribed to in the last year.

 

Yet as soon as you disable it and reload IE works 100% (on a side note, if you got Smart Ink on but it's not enabled (e.g. the lil silver bar top right) it won't affect it)

 

Steve

[simpsonj]

Glad we're not the only school having issues with SMHW this year, though previous years haven't been anywhere near as bad.

 

Our particular issue was that they changed the login details for students from a Pin# to enforcing use of our RM Unify, which would be fine, if we could change the login page that's printed to indicate they needed to add the school email address to the end of their username... Or if they had told us they were going to do that. Or if they had just left well enough alone. Or if they could have let us download a .csv file of students and pin# so we could do our own login page, which we did last year. Combined with numerous calls from parents saying that their pin# didn't work has meant I've had to hand create a fair few usernames and passwords for SMHW this year, and still getting them now.

 

Thankfully our link to SIMS seems to have worked well enough, though we are now getting duplicate parents, which is causing one or two headaches.

[Markopolo]

@gaz350b

 

We are in the same boat as you, CMIS tell you that is the best way of doing it. We did it like that last year, this year SMHW aren't capable of using the data. They will tell you no other schools have the same problem despite them havign atleast 80 of them using the system and clearly it isn't true.

 

Think yourself lucky that you have 1 teacher assigned, we have class/ teaching groups with identical names but the same teacher attached twice (for example Science, then Physics, Biology, Chemistry) and SMHW doesn't assign any teachers at all! We also have shared groups that have no teachers assigned not the "last" teacher. Unique groups that they also can't/ won't assign a teacher to but yet can't tell me why it won't work and jsut keep avoiding the issue.

 

You also have to manaully remove leavers... for data retention reasons apparently... Ridiculous it starts to make a mockery of the Data Protection Act because we have personal data on an online system for no valid reason in my opinion, a homework record is not good enough.

 

We are a CMIS school and have had exactly the same problem. SMHW insisting that it is us at fault.

[Achandler]

They have almost certainly changed something at their end and are denying it. I don't actually know what we can do because we seem to be such a small proportion of schools and they either don't actually care or aren't interested in helping.

 

I suggest you "kick off" with your account manager and get the complaints escalated.

Edited September 26, 2016 by Achandler

[timbo343]

So we had our training today with SMHW and from a technical point of view, i had a few questions.

 

1. Who owns the data once we upload our resources to their site.

 

2. Whats happens to our data if we leave SMHW?

 

3. We are AD linked. Our users have 10 login attempts and locked out for 30 mins there after. Clicking forgot password and changing password on SMHW doesnt reset the password as they dont write back to AD so users are going to be a bit confused here. Of course users dont need to login to see homework set though.

 

4. The app on ios doesnt work great and its very basic. The one on android is better.

 

5. If staff favour classes, everyone sees these classes.

 

6. Trying to make a teacher an admin doesnt work. I reported this back to the trainer.

 

I didnt realise how new this company was and how small they were.

 

If there's any other problems that we find ill post back.

 

One good thing, IE11 worked fine for us.

Edited September 26, 2016 by timbo343

[Markopolo]

They have almost certainly changed something at their end and are denying it. I don't actually know what we can do because we seem to be such a small proportion of schools and they either don't actually care or aren't interested in helping.

 

I suggest you "kick off" with your account manager and get the complaints escalated.

 

We will be calling them today. Have you spoken to them?

[Achandler]

Spoken to Account Managers, Support Managers, Normal Support staff.

[mullet_man]

Had no problems here with IE11.

 

Make sure you sign up to their support alert emails, they've had some issues in the last few weeks and they email out notifications on fixes and timescales etc. Good to pass onto SLT if people query why they can't access it etc.

[sammy42]

Help please

 

Can anyone help please. I have been asked to set up a whole load of supply teacher accounts on SMHW. We use SIMS to pull through the teachers. I have spoken to their support and they are as helpful as a chocolate fire guard.

The issue I am having is as the supply staff are not members of staff SHMW have said just give the supply account teacher rights not user rights. I have done this, giving them the same access rights as a normal teacher.

It is still not being pulled through from SIMS. Has anyone set up dedicated supply accounts on this website using SIMS.

According to their support this is done by loads of schools. however every time I go back to them I get no help in setting this up or even documentation on how to achieve this.

[jonnykewell1]

So according to a SMH phone call, email addresses will only be carried over into show my homework if they are in SIMS at the time of account creation. If you add the email addresses into SIMS afterwards then they won't carry over into the system.

[timbo343]

Ha!!! another problem with SMHW!!!

 

Im doing a dummy run for parents so i can understand what parents need to do and it turns out ive found a flaw.

 

So, ive got a PIN for a member of staff / parent who ive asked to test with. The admin side of SMHW shows there isn't an email set for this parent - that's fine so when i login with this pin it populates the First Name and Surname and shows no email address. Clicking the I do not have an email address changes the email address box to username.

 

I've asked the member of staff / parent for their email address which i put in. SMHW tells me this email address is already taken. HOW!?!? how is this email already taken if SMHW doesn't have an email address associated with an account!!

 

As I'm starting to understand more... sorry.... be more confused about this system, im starting to think like most who have posted on here that parents may be confused about how to login. Yes they can login with a pin, but i guess they can also login with an email address and password. Why cant the pin be given out as a last resort or even a back door in!!!!

 

Just found another problem.

 

So, the parent gets to the almost there screen where they need to confirm their email address / username & password etc. At this screen, they can close the browser and reopen it. Jump back to SMHW and login, The parent will automatically be logged into their account without needing to confirm any details. Is it me or is this site really insecure!?

Edited September 29, 2016 by timbo343

[timbo343]

So according to a SMH phone call, email addresses will only be carried over into show my homework if they are in SIMS at the time of account creation. If you add the email addresses into SIMS afterwards then they won't carry over into the system.

 

That's bad practice, so they are telling you if you add or update any email addresses in SIMS, these changes aren't copied over to SMHW?? Lets hope there isn't a mass change of email addresses!!

[timbo343]

Another problem... a user clicking on forgot my password whilst AD linked.

 

So, I'm going to go through the process of a student trying to reset a password for SMHW whilst AD linked.

 

They click on Forgot My Password > They enter their school email address > a reset link is emailed to them which states reset password. They click this link and they are taken to a Reset password screen HOWEVER this has already logged them into their SMHW account and setting a new password doesn't actually do anything as SMHW doesn't write back to AD.

 

I've just thought, our student emails are linked to AD too so if they cant get on to SMHW they cant get on to their emails to click the so called "Reset Password" link.

 

Closing a browser doesn't log the user off their account either!

Edited September 29, 2016 by timbo343

[Markopolo]

Thought I would share an update from SMHW for any other CMIS schools:

 

For some reason they insist on calling me Martin, but I don't mind that too much.

 

Hi Martin,

Thanks again for calling in this afternoon and walking me through the issues your school is currently experiencing.

I have followed up with our support and development teams on the issues you raised as still ongoing at the school to date. I can confirm that you are right and that the data sync issue is affecting other CMIS schools also. Our development team is sure they have not made any changes to data imports on our end this academic year but for some reason the issue with the way data is importing through on to SMHW is the root of most of the issues you mentioned.

This is being treated with up most priority across both the support and engineering teams with our CTO personally leading on the fix for this issue. Unfortunately, this is a critical bug and is requiring the engineering team to remodel the method by which the system pulls data. The required fix will affect not just CMIS schools but all our 1,500 schools currently onboard. The work required for this is not easy or a quick fix and one that requires meticulous planning and implementation. We are working through this as speedily as possible but must ensure not to cause disruption to the mass.

Once this issue is resolved we will look into ensuring no time was lost on your license due to lack of proper access to the system. I have also informed my line manager of your school's current status and we are both staying on top of this issue, to ensure you are fully updated on progress as often as possible.

Teachers can continue setting homework, as they all have access to all classes from the 'Set Homework' page and can assign homework to any class, even though it is not linked to their individual account in CMIS. I will update you when I have more information, but please feel free to get in touch if you have any queries at all.

Kind regards,

 

$SMHWSTAFF

[simpsonj]

Ha!!! another problem with SMHW!!!

 

Im doing a dummy run for parents so i can understand what parents need to do and it turns out ive found a flaw.

 

So, ive got a PIN for a member of staff / parent who ive asked to test with. The admin side of SMHW shows there isn't an email set for this parent - that's fine so when i login with this pin it populates the First Name and Surname and shows no email address. Clicking the I do not have an email address changes the email address box to username.

 

I've asked the member of staff / parent for their email address which i put in. SMHW tells me this email address is already taken. HOW!?!? how is this email already taken if SMHW doesn't have an email address associated with an account!!

 

 

The only reason I can think of for a parent address already being in the system is if they are still active on another school's SMHW. We've had that with primary schools that use SMHW, or if a student has transferred from another school which uses SMHW, and then tries to register here. It's a rarity, but could explain it. Otherwise I have no idea!

[timbo343]

The only reason I can think of for a parent address already being in the system is if they are still active on another school's SMHW. We've had that with primary schools that use SMHW, or if a student has transferred from another school which uses SMHW, and then tries to register here. It's a rarity, but could explain it. Otherwise I have no idea!

 

Im waiting for SMHW support to get back to me but the parent's children were originally at a local primary school that don't use SMHW (a quick postcode check on the SMHW app confirmed this).

 

I'm not sure what their support is going to suggest to be honest.