You launch IGPro. You choose “Open a Gradebook on Your Computer”. You click OK and it sends you to…….where????

You EXPECT to be “pointing” to your teacher folder, but it’s not.

This happens most often with shared computers. If the teacher before you has backed up his/her gradebook to a location other than the network, then when you come along to open IGPro, it looks for YOUR gradebook where the last teacher backed up his/her gradebook.

Not to worry. You just have to “map” IGPro back to your gradebook. All gradebooks are located on the network at:

N:\sasixp\IGPRO\IGPData71

1. Click My Computer on the left of the Open window.
2. “Double-click” the N: Drive.
3. “Double-click” SASIxp folder.
4. “Double-click” IGPro folder.
5. “Double-click” IGPData folder.
6. “Double-click” 071 folder.
7. “Double-click” Your teacher folder.

Sometimes our computers can be uncooperative. They send us cryptic error messages and even freeze up upon occasion.  A lot of you have found that the newer computers won’t even read your thumb drives!

Before filling in a Help Request, hunting down our T-Spec, or throwing the computer out the window, first try rebooting the computer. If it’s your thumb drive that is the problem, reboot the computer with the thumb drive plugged in.

This will solve a large percentage of the problems you encounter. If the problem persists, then please DO complete a Help Request or contact our T-Spec, Teresa (tossing the computer out the window, although it might make you feel better, is still not recommended).

So remember, when in doubt, reboot, reboot, reboot!

The other day I was asked the question, “How do students download Word documents from SchoolFusion if they don’t have MS Word installed on their home computer?”

What a great question! A lot of our students are using other, less expensive, word processing alternatives.

To help these kids out, you can save your Word documents as “rich text format”, or .rtf. That will retain most of the formatting and is recognized by most word processing applications.

Back during my days as an IT consultant I had the opportunity to teach some federal employees how to use the new windows-based software that my company had designed for them. In a windows world, it’s all about “clicking here” and “clicking there” which I assumed would make their jobs easier. Well, they were quick to enlighten me otherwise. They could work like lightning using keyboard commands–having to reach for the mouse and “click” actually slowed them down. So, I modified my training to incorporate windows keyboard shortcuts and became a convert. Here are some of the shortcuts I find most useful these days:

• [Ctrl] + [x] = Cut
• [Ctrl] + [v] = Paste
• [Ctrl] + [z] = Undo
• [Ctrl] + [b] = Bold
• [Ctrl] + [i] = Italics
• [Ctrl] + [u] = Underline
• [Ctrl] + [n] = New
• [Ctrl] + [o] = Open
• [Ctrl] + [s] = Save
• [Ctrl] + [Prt Scr] = Print Screen
• [F1] = Help!

This year in IGPro the order of the spreadsheets has the 4th Marking Period Spreadsheet at the top. This was done so that the current spreadsheet displays at the top when parents and students go online to check grades.

However, it also means that when you created your gradebooks, the 4th Marking Period Spreadsheet was the first one you saw. As a result many of you have entered grades into the wrong spreadsheet.

Don’t panic! Here are the steps to copy those grades over to the correct spreadsheet:

1. Open the class and the spreadsheet the tasks are to be COPIED TO
2. From the Tasks menu, click Copy Tasks
3. Select the class the tasks are to be COPIED FROM
4. Select the spreadsheet the tasks are to be COPIED FROM
5. Click Next
6. Select the tasks to copy
7. Clear the checkbox for Delete original tasks after copying
8. Click Next
9. Select Raw Score
10. Click Next
11. Click OK

In spite of our best attempts, some of us are still receiving the IGPro server error when trying to open our gradebooks. 

To correct:

1. Launch IGPro.
2. Cancel out of all the windows referring to the IGPro server until you are staring at a blank screen with just the IGPro toolbar across the top.
3. Go to Edit/Preferences.
4. Uncheck Use an Integrade Pro Server.
5. Close IGPro.

The next time you launch IGPro, all should be right with the world.