New year may bring new education server

All county high schools are slated to implement a new online grading system by the beginning of the next school year.

According to the MCPS web site, the Online Achievement and Reporting System (OARS), consisting of two new integrated services — Pinnacle, an electronic grade book application for teachers, and Edline, an online tool to facilitate communication among teachers, parents and students — will be adopted county-wide by September.

Pinnacle automatically feeds to report cards, so teachers will no longer have to bubble in grade reports by hand. Pinnacle also calculates grades, which are updated nightly and generates interim reports, according to the OARS web site.

Edline receives daily automatic updates from Pinnacle, allows students to check their grades at any time and e-mails parents when new grades are available. Edline can also display homework, classroom news and an assignment calendar, similar to the Blair Educational Network (BEN).

BEN includes some features that Edline does not, such as an internal e-mail system, course-based discussion forums and access to others' schedules and account information. BEN also allots 50.0 megabytes for student's personal file storage.

If OARS is implemented, BEN will most likely be taken offline, said BEN developer and senior Kevin McGehee. "It's probably best not to support both systems because there are many replicated features," he said.

"Assuming Edline comes, BEN as you know it will go away," network administrator Peter Hammond said. And although the current features will be discontinued, Hammond said there might be a way to modify BEN to focus primarily on discussion groups and internal messaging. "That idea is a good one, but there are a lot of problems to work out," he said.

Blair will not switch to Edline until it receives final word from the county by the end of the school year. "Until it's actually in place, it's not definite," said network administrator Anne Wisniewski. "But I think it's likely it'll go through because [the county] is troubleshooting all the problems."

Junior Seth Reeker, a systems and operations manager who has been attending county OARS workgroups, thinks it's probable Blair will implement both Edline and Pinnacle next year, but he says it's unlikely that such a large-scale change will be a completely smooth transition.

The workgroups so far have focused on the logistics and features of each program. A recent glitch caused Pinnacle to crash on the last day of the first marking period, preventing teachers from entering grades into the system for five hours. There have also been incompatibility issues for teachers who use Macs at home, according to Reeker. But the county is "committed to making sure all schools have it next year," he said.

Carol Blum, director of high school instruction for OARS, said that the technical staff has been working hard to make sure most of the problems with OARS have been addressed. "I'm confident that [OARS] is very well managed here and that there will be no big problems," she said. "But will there be small glitches, will there be teachers who have trouble using it? Sure."

Blum said that there have been no problems with Pinnacle since heavy traffic caused Pinnacle to malfunction at the end of the first marking period. There have not been any problems with Edline, since nothing is entered into the system directly, Blum said. She is confident that OARS will be implemented in all secondary schools by next year. "We are almost 100-percent ready," she said.

Currently, 22 of the county's 26 high schools use Edline. Blair chose not to switch to Edline earlier because of its large size, as well as the questions as to the future of BEN and continuing concerns as to Edline's reliability. "Blair is so big, and since it wasn't mandatory to adopt it, it made sense to wait and see if it worked. We just didn't want to adopt it and have problems," McGehee said.

Edline currently requires one "super user" to be designated for each school, who would provide staff, student and parent user support, while Pinnacle is overseen by a grade book supervisor, who provides support to teachers using the grade book program, according to the OARS web site. Unlike BEN, OARS would not be supported by students.

The county will make the final decision whether to implement OARS in all schools by the end of the school year. "If we're told we need to switch to Edline, we'll do that," McGehee said. "If we still have an option, we'll make a decision then."