Published: October 21, 2006 09:22 pm      

Grades now available online

Monday morning Huntsville Independent School District publicly launched the Pinnacle Internet Viewer (PIV), a 24-hour online service that allows parents to access their child’s grades and attendance from any computer. Parents had the opportunity to sign up for access Monday during parent/teacher conferences.

Teachers currently use an online grade book system and must update it every Friday by 5 p.m. PIV allows parents access only to view the teacher’s grade book.

Cherie Meroney, HISD’s director of elementary instruction, said as soon as teachers make updates to the grade book, it is available for parents to see.

“There are major projects that take longer to grade,” she said. “And if it was due on Friday, the grade may not be in there.”

Each child is assigned a different identification number and then a randomly generated password is assigned to the ID. Parents with more than one child will have more than one ID and password.

Once parents log in to PIV, they are provided an attendance summary and current grade report. They also have access to view teacher comments, missing and future assignments, grades for tests and assignments, preliminary attendance reports and discipline reports. The official attendance report is not available through PIV. Students in grades Pre-K through first grade have limited access to the system because they receive letter grades instead of number grades.

Tracie Simental, HISD’s director of technology, was one of the testers for the PIV program. She set up an e-mail alert available on the system to notify her whenever her child earned below an 82 on a test. After her child earned a 70 on a test, she received an e-mail and that evening was able to talk to the child about test grades.

“The e-mail notification is great because I don’t always think to go look, like most parents, I don’t have the time,” she said. “If you set those criteria, then it tells you when they make a bad grade.”

To access PIV, visit the HISD Web site at www.huntsville-isd.org and click on online grade book under the parent link.