Overly complicated MCPS information distribution

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Mcps is run by morons. You can't expect to have a pleasant experience with anything.

You're up, then. Let's see how you do.

[Anonymous]

The purpose is to make it difficult. Bury. Forcing those who receive the communications to click on a link to read whatever nonsense they deem worthy

[Anonymous]

What’s amazing is that even if you try to read all that stuff, any important information is completely obfuscated.

I figure anything important will come in an email from the school or get posted here by one of you guys. Thank you!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:What’s amazing is that even if you try to read all that stuff, any important information is completely obfuscated.

I figure anything important will come in an email from the school or get posted here by one of you guys. Thank you!

lol. And sad

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:What’s amazing is that even if you try to read all that stuff, any important information is completely obfuscated.

I figure anything important will come in an email from the school or get posted here by one of you guys. Thank you!

Don't count on it

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Mcps is run by morons. You can't expect to have a pleasant experience with anything.

You're up, then. Let's see how you do.

I have a child with an intellectual disability. I hope this doesn't sound insulting but mcps has been brought up as a potential employers for them because they do not fire people for poor performance. Our hope is that if one job is unsuitable for them, the system will shuffle them around until they land in a job that they can perform reasonably well for many years.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I think it's just MCPS silos and lack of thoughtfulness about the parent experience, not kickbacks to companies or anything. Like, I think the Google doc (with all it's flaws, although FWIW the links in it were clickable for me in the past) was built by the AEI department without any central MCPS guidance on "how to design communications for families." Then they probably sent it to someone in the comms department and said "send out this doc" and the comms person was like "well, I've been told that we in comms must now always send things out on ParentSquare, guess the way to do that is send a bitly link to this doc they gave me, and also this next webinar is on the 3rd so I guess I should mention it, but I:m not gonna rewrite the whole text because AEI said they wanted it in PDF form.". And then your ParentSquare notifications were set to email so you got it through email.

Yep, this sounds very plausible. The silos in the cumbersome MCPS bureaucracy have always been a problem and don’t appear to be getting better.

[Anonymous]

Contact them about it, OP. The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing, and yes, that level of complexity is entirely unacceptable.

So that they're more likely to react, tell them it looks like they're trying to HIDE the things they supposedly want people to know about, just so they can benefit from the announcement, but without actually wanting feedback.

[Anonymous]

It's actually not that difficult to design (on IT side) a communications platform that is easy on the eyes and serves the intended community.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think it's just MCPS silos and lack of thoughtfulness about the parent experience, not kickbacks to companies or anything. Like, I think the Google doc (with all it's flaws, although FWIW the links in it were clickable for me in the past) was built by the AEI department without any central MCPS guidance on "how to design communications for families." Then they probably sent it to someone in the comms department and said "send out this doc" and the comms person was like "well, I've been told that we in comms must now always send things out on ParentSquare, guess the way to do that is send a bitly link to this doc they gave me, and also this next webinar is on the 3rd so I guess I should mention it, but I:m not gonna rewrite the whole text because AEI said they wanted it in PDF form.". And then your ParentSquare notifications were set to email so you got it through email.

Yep, this sounds very plausible. The silos in the cumbersome MCPS bureaucracy have always been a problem and don’t appear to be getting better.

Companies were cleaning up their silos and standsrdizing their IT 20 years ago.
Theres no excuse for this.

[Anonymous]

Years behind. There are so many able persons right in the same county who can bring mcps to the 21st century. Like high school students ; they could create an easier communications tool

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Years behind. There are so many able persons right in the same county who can bring mcps to the 21st century. Like high school students ; they could create an easier communications tool

Thry dont need to create anything, and thats the point.
They have what they needs but when they dant understand the a functionality that they want they just abandon one system and implement another. But not really. They dont truly abandon the first before starting to use the second

A true it professional would understand the new need and leverage co.aony A to not only implement it but train stuff on it.

They also need an it professional to not do stupid things like push personal student information through a message board app. And they absolutely need to train teachers on hos to use canvas, StudentVue and the Google. And then they need someone who understands how to Monitor and give feedback to people misusing them.
Its a disaster.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Years behind. There are so many able persons right in the same county who can bring mcps to the 21st century. Like high school students ; they could create an easier communications tool

Thry dont need to create anything, and thats the point.
They have what they needs but when they dant understand the a functionality that they want they just abandon one system and implement another. But not really. They dont truly abandon the first before starting to use the second

A true it professional would understand the new need and leverage co.aony A to not only implement it but train stuff on it.

They also need an it professional to not do stupid things like push personal student information through a message board app. And they absolutely need to train teachers on hos to use canvas, StudentVue and the Google. And then they need someone who understands how to Monitor and give feedback to people misusing them.
Its a disaster.

Instead parent volunteers have been training admins in how to use various features of ParentSquare. It's ridiculous.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What’s amazing is that even if you try to read all that stuff, any important information is completely obfuscated.

I figure anything important will come in an email from the school or get posted here by one of you guys. Thank you!

lol. And sad

But strangely true. When MAP scores finally went up this month, some parent on DCUM posted about it instantly...MCPS took a week to send a message about it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think it's just MCPS silos and lack of thoughtfulness about the parent experience, not kickbacks to companies or anything. Like, I think the Google doc (with all it's flaws, although FWIW the links in it were clickable for me in the past) was built by the AEI department without any central MCPS guidance on "how to design communications for families." Then they probably sent it to someone in the comms department and said "send out this doc" and the comms person was like "well, I've been told that we in comms must now always send things out on ParentSquare, guess the way to do that is send a bitly link to this doc they gave me, and also this next webinar is on the 3rd so I guess I should mention it, but I:m not gonna rewrite the whole text because AEI said they wanted it in PDF form.". And then your ParentSquare notifications were set to email so you got it through email.

Yep, this sounds very plausible. The silos in the cumbersome MCPS bureaucracy have always been a problem and don’t appear to be getting better.

Companies were cleaning up their silos and standsrdizing their IT 20 years ago.
Theres no excuse for this.

We moved to MCPS from out of state last year, and honestly, the tech has been the worst part of the experience. My kid has assignments scattered across 3 platforms (including Google Classroom, even though people say it's forbidden, it's clearly not), and it's so hard for them to manage relative to their prior school district.

As a parent, I've had issues getting error messages trying to access MCPS classroom as a parent, one I could only fix, when someone on DCUM shared an obscure link that was nowhere mentioned in any of the MCPS PDFs that maps correctly to Synergy.

This is all just bad tech management from MCPS. I never had any of these issues where we before.