Show My Homework....

[timbo343]

Another huge problem..

 

Teacher sets a test (quiz or spelling), student navigates to https://[schoolname].showmyhomework.co.uk and looks at the school calendar. The student clicks on the quiz or spelling test and they are asked to Sign in and start the activity. Now comes the flaw.. the link takes the student to http://www.showmyhomework.co.uk/login rather than the subdomain which is required for the active directory linked accounts to work. Students are unable to login to take the test.

[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!

 

So i found the issue with this. The staff member already had their personal email address under their staff account rather than their work email. After entering the correct details it works.

[gaz350b]

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!?

 

The unique email address issue is a pain in the ass, this can be down to a few issues as I see it.

 

1) Bad parental contact data in the MIS database, Duplicate entries creating separate contact info for the same person across multiple children. Unique email address per "Contact". works fine if its a single contact assigned to multiple children.

2) As far as I can see it the email address can not be assigned to multiple schools, just like UPN data for students.

3) Parent email address has been assigned as an email address at the school for a teacher(most likely this is what you are seeing)

4) same as above but the other way round, we have 3 separate schools in the same town (primary, secondary, sixform) member of staff at the college logged into their account using the office 365 SSO and it actually signed them into their parent account at the primary school.

 

As for the staying logged in part, I don't mind this, if anything its taught a lot of families here that they need separate accounts on a shared computer at home!!!

[gaz350b]

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!

 

This is setting a password in SMHK end users can customise their logins to something shorter than their normal account if they so wish.

[ITGuyWestMidlands]

Get them to send you a csv where you can set staff school email addresses. They're having a rough time this term but things are slowly improving.l

[rad]

 

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!?

 

This also happens as a student.

[saggu]

MY experience is same like steve 21. We face all that issues. The site has too many snags. There is always something not working. Compared with Firefly and we are thinking of moving on to it.

[timbo343]

I've had a few questions answered by SMHW..

 

What happens when students leave the schooll? Is their data removed from SMHW? I’m still seeing data for students that have left in summer on Show My Homework. Does the Group Call Exporter sync not remove students from SMHW?

 

We do not automatically delete any users from your Show My Homework account but instead provide you with a list of presumed leavers in the manager users tab in the admin section. The leavers tab lists all of the current users that no longer appear in the nightly data sync, we use the MIS ID to make this connection and list the users who we are no longer receiving an MIS ID from the school. The school can then use this list to delete any leavers from the account.

 

It seems the answer means its going to be a administration nightmare.

 

What happens if email addresses or other data is updated in SIMS. Do the changes replicate over to SMHW?

 

Once we have created a user account we will no longer update any personal information through the data link. This means that any future changes to these personal details, such as names and emails, will need to be done on Show My Homework from the manage users tab, located through the Admin option on the homepage menu.

 

 

Teacher sets a test (quiz or spelling), student navigates to https://[schoolname].showmyhomework.co.uk and looks at the school calendar. The student clicks on the quiz or spelling test and they are asked to Sign in and start the activity. Now comes the flaw.. the link takes the student to http://www.showmyhomework.co.uk/login rather than the subdomain which is required for the active directory linked accounts to work. Students are unable to login to take the test. This will no doubt generate so many problems for us.

 

Thank you for raising this issue and I have passed this on to our Product Development team to investigate how this can be improved. Please do advise that all students are logging in as their primary method of accessing there homework and we apologies for the inconvenience this may cause the school currently.

[mullet_man]

We've got the parent/guardian issue with Y7s. Has anyone had an update on this matter as I remember seeing it mentioned here.

 

Also got parents listed as "--" too.

[mrbios]

Oh dear.

 

All these online services we've taken on this year, show my homework included, and all of a sudden I'm now being contacted by parents directly. It appears tutors are directing their issues towards me and handing out my email.....need to nip this one in the bud!

[6Foot2]

Oh dear.

 

All these online services we've taken on this year, show my homework included, and all of a sudden I'm now being contacted by parents directly. It appears tutors are directing their issues towards me and handing out my email.....need to nip this one in the bud!

 

Create a [email protected] E-Mail address for staff to give out? That way there is no reason for them to continue to hand it out.

[SteveB_NI]

We started using SMH in August here. Not too bad so far but you are right administration headache at times.

 

One thing though - our teacher unions are grumbling (quite rightly I suppose) about teachers receiving emails from students via this out of hours sometimes quite late at night.

 

Is this an issue in any of your schools and what's the solution?

 

Staff like the notifications feature for other things so blanket turning them off isn't an answer nor do they want to turn emails off at night

[Steve21]

Is this an issue in any of your schools and what's the solution?

 

Don't read them? What's the difference between that or a staff member sending an email out? Should be signed up under their work email surely.

 

Steve

[timbo343]

I've asked for a copy of our data in excel format so i can create our own parent letters with the parent pin.

 

Looking down the list i see

1. About 10% of parents haven't got an email address associated with with account even in SIMS there clearly is an email present.

2. Why have a few parents got different PINs for each child? For example, Mrs Smith should have the same PIN for each child as she is the mother of these children, however she has got A123456789 for child 1 and A987654321 for child 2 - it doesnt make sense.

3. Child 1 has a parent email address associated with them however child 2 doesn't

 

If i hadn't had spotted this, we could have had a fair few parents ringing up about this.

 

Im now waiting for an email from support about this. Why oh why can they not ring me? Why does it have to be done via email?

[imullings]

Different pins/accounts for each child!

You need to check in sims that a new parent is not created for the second clild. We had this with another system that used sims and found out that our admin did not look for a match with an existing parent when creating an new student.

[timbo343]

Well, this hideous site gets worse!

 

Ive had a reply from SMHW about different PINs for different children with same parent:

 

Thanks for getting back in touch. ParentA is showing up twice in the data import, once as the primary parent for ChildA and once as the primary parent for ChildB. This means an account was created for her for each student. However, if you link one of ParentA’s accounts to both children in Show My Homework, she will be able to use one login for both children.

To link a parent account, please

1. Go to Admin > Manage Users >Parent tab

2. Search for the parent and click the pencil icon

3. Select a student from the drop-down list

4. Click save

I do hope this helps! If you have any further queries, or if I can be of any further assistance, please don’t hesitate to get back in touch.

Kind regards,

 

And a reply regarding updates to data in SIMS.

 

Thank you for getting in touch. Emails are only pulled into a parent’s Show My Homework account if they have an email address in the primary email address field in SIMS before their account is created. Unfortunately, once the account has been created, any emails added into SIMS will not be pulled across into their accounts and we cannot bulk update parent emails.

When parents login with their PIN, they will be prompted to add an email address to their account. Alternatively, you can update any parent accounts with emails individually by going to Admin>Manage Users>Parents and clicking on the pencil icon next to their name.

If you have any other questions, please don’t hesitate to ask.

Best regards,

 

 

Can this site get any worse? It turns out it can. We cannot delete Parents or Students who are no longer here or on role in SIMS!!!

 

Any Changes made to an account takes you back to the start! Crying out loud!!!!!!!! :mad: :mad: [is there a emoji for stressed] [gun to head]

 

Edit: Why is the email address already in use when there are no other parent addresses like this our domain.

 

EDIT2: SMHW is picking up catering staff who have children in school so when we edit the email address for the staff account (take it out) and add it to their parent account. The trouble is, SMHW wont let us blank out the email address field. ARRRRGHHHHHH

 

Edit3: Well, 6 hours later and ive tidied up the data, to the best i can!

Edited October 7, 2016 by timbo343

[ozydave]

Well, this hideous site gets worse!

 

Ive had a reply from SMHW about different PINs for different children with same parent:

 

Thanks for getting back in touch. ParentA is showing up twice in the data import, once as the primary parent for ChildA and once as the primary parent for ChildB. This means an account was created for her for each student. However, if you link one of ParentA’s accounts to both children in Show My Homework, she will be able to use one login for both children.

To link a parent account, please

1. Go to Admin > Manage Users >Parent tab

2. Search for the parent and click the pencil icon

3. Select a student from the drop-down list

4. Click save

I do hope this helps! If you have any further queries, or if I can be of any further assistance, please don’t hesitate to get back in touch.

Kind regards,

 

And a reply regarding updates to data in SIMS.

 

Thank you for getting in touch. Emails are only pulled into a parent’s Show My Homework account if they have an email address in the primary email address field in SIMS before their account is created. Unfortunately, once the account has been created, any emails added into SIMS will not be pulled across into their accounts and we cannot bulk update parent emails.

When parents login with their PIN, they will be prompted to add an email address to their account. Alternatively, you can update any parent accounts with emails individually by going to Admin>Manage Users>Parents and clicking on the pencil icon next to their name.

If you have any other questions, please don’t hesitate to ask.

Best regards,

 

 

Can this site get any worse? It turns out it can. We cannot delete Parents or Students who are no longer here or on role in SIMS!!!

 

Any Changes made to an account takes you back to the start! Crying out loud!!!!!!!! :mad: :mad: [is there a emoji for stressed] [gun to head]

 

Edit: Why is the email address already in use when there are no other parent addresses like this our domain.

 

EDIT2: SMHW is picking up catering staff who have children in school so when we edit the email address for the staff account (take it out) and add it to their parent account. The trouble is, SMHW wont let us blank out the email address field. ARRRRGHHHHHH

 

Edit3: Well, 6 hours later and ive tidied up the data, to the best i can!

 

Your not happy with SMH are you. I just get that impression !

[timbo343]

Your not happy with SMH are you. I just get that impression !

 

Haha! What makes you think that? Im just sharing my experiences with it and quite frankly i think people need to be told of experiences of things. I mean, even the sync between us and them should work if data is updated surely?

 

Spending 6 hours correcting the data yesterday was enough to drive anyone crazy.

[gaz350b]

One thing you find very quickly is that automated sync tools show how good or bad your Mis data is.

[hardtailstar]

FYI

 

Certificate error

 

Show My Homework Status

[6Foot2]

Link: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/cloud-services/175739-ssl-certificate-revoked-issue.html

[Steve21]

Another good day for users...

 

New Incident Status: Identified

We are working to correct an issue that has temporarily rendered the Show My Homework service unavailable. We expect to have this issue corrected in the next half an hour. Further updates will be posted here as soon as more information is available.

 

Steve

[bigal06]

So I have been strugling with Show My Homework for quite some time now since launch in school before summer. We are AD integrated because I thought it would make things easier but I was so wrong.

 

Why?

 

• Well it was pain to initailly set up with no support from Show My Homework what so ever. I asked if they had a guide to assist setting up their AD integration solution and their response was
  'Thank you for getting back to me. Apologies, AD is not our product so we don’t have a user guide for it. A quick look on google returned this result which you may have find helpful?
  Microsoft Support
  I hope this helps, but please do let me know if you have any further queries at all' - turned out they had input the LDAP bind password incorrectly so it was never going to work!
  
• In order to use Show My Homework with so called 'Single Sign-On' students must go to a specific URL and despite telling all the students to follow the link on our Website/VLE many still Google 'Show My Homework' because thats what kids do and will fail to login as it's not the right URL.
  
• Student emails have to be imported via CSV by Show My Homework and this is the link to AD so without it students/staff can't login.
  
• If you don't click login straight away from the special URL there is a possiblility that the user will be directed away from your specific Sub-Domain and then go round in circles trying to login on the default login page.
  

 

 

I have worked through these and many more issues that have been mentioned on here but one I just couldn't understand until finally a breakthrough - Single Sign-On doesn't work with Microsoft Edge. Well thats all students/parents and staff with new computers/laptops out... yes, I know you can use a different browser or even Internet Explorer on Windows 10 - but how many parents/students and staff know how to do that? They click on the 'internet thinging' and follow the special URL on the website and click login and you get the Ooopps Error that offers a link back to the login page - but not your login page, the default login page which does actually load. The students and staff are now at a point where they have followed your instructions to go to the special URL via the Website/VLE but have now landed on the default login page and go round and round in circles and simply cannot login. Why - because Microsoft Edge doesnt work with Single Sign-On but the user is not aware of this at all as there is no specific error informing the user of this. We test the user login on site with them (Window 7 and IE) and it all works so send them away and ask them to try again but now at least I can advise not to use Microsoft Edge and show them how to use IE on Windows 10

 

Not one single day has gone by where we have at least one student (usually more) come to IT Support stating they can't login to Show My Homework since we started using it - except during summer holidays! We started installing/using in April/May - we almost know what the students are going to say when they come to IT Support. To add to this we also now have to deal with parents via phone and email because of Show My Homework....

[timbo343]

So I have been strugling with Show My Homework for quite some time now since launch in school before summer. We are AD integrated because I thought it would make things easier but I was so wrong.

 

Why?

 

• Well it was pain to initailly set up with no support from Show My Homework what so ever. I asked if they had a guide to assist setting up their AD integration solution and their response was
  'Thank you for getting back to me. Apologies, AD is not our product so we don’t have a user guide for it. A quick look on google returned this result which you may have find helpful?
  Microsoft Support
  I hope this helps, but please do let me know if you have any further queries at all' - turned out they had input the LDAP bind password incorrectly so it was never going to work!
  
• In order to use Show My Homework with so called 'Single Sign-On' students must go to a specific URL and despite telling all the students to follow the link on our Website/VLE many still Google 'Show My Homework' because thats what kids do and will fail to login as it's not the right URL.
  
• Student emails have to be imported via CSV by Show My Homework and this is the link to AD so without it students/staff can't login.
  
• If you don't click login straight away from the special URL there is a possiblility that the user will be directed away from your specific Sub-Domain and then go round in circles trying to login on the default login page.
  

 

 

I have worked through these and many more issues that have been mentioned on here but one I just couldn't understand until finally a breakthrough - Single Sign-On doesn't work with Microsoft Edge. Well thats all students/parents and staff with new computers/laptops out... yes, I know you can use a different browser or even Internet Explorer on Windows 10 - but how many parents/students and staff know how to do that? They click on the 'internet thinging' and follow the special URL on the website and click login and you get the Ooopps Error that offers a link back to the login page - but not your login page, the default login page which does actually load. The students and staff are now at a point where they have followed your instructions to go to the special URL via the Website/VLE but have now landed on the default login page and go round and round in circles and simply cannot login. Why - because Microsoft Edge doesnt work with Single Sign-On but the user is not aware of this at all as there is no specific error informing the user of this. We test the user login on site with them (Window 7 and IE) and it all works so send them away and ask them to try again but now at least I can advise not to use Microsoft Edge and show them how to use IE on Windows 10

 

Not one single day has gone by where we have at least one student (usually more) come to IT Support stating they can't login to Show My Homework since we started using it - except during summer holidays! We started installing/using in April/May - we almost know what the students are going to say when they come to IT Support. To add to this we also now have to deal with parents via phone and email because of Show My Homework....

 

Just tested EDGE here too and yep, it doesn't work for our subdomain link either.

 

We too now have to start emailing parents with PINs students haven't passed the information on however i do it from the admin@ email or teachers2parents software we use to email parents on mass

 

The administration of the site really grates me too as the sync doesn't sync current users in SMHW.. its a joke!

[sammy42]

I have started to give parents the SMHW support telephone number off their website. I am so fed up with parents complaining about something that I had no input into at all.