It’s Sunday night, and I’m repeatedly checking Google Classroom and Edmodo to see if I missed any homework. For the moment, it seems as if all my work is complete, and I can spend the rest of the evening relaxing. I show up to class the next morning only to find to my surprise that the homework was posted on the portal, and I now have a missing assignment.

It happens to the best of students, homework being missed due to its being posted on a website they didn’t check, or a website they didn’t know how to access. Teachers are not communicating with one another, and as a result, a mixture of websites and methods are being used to distribute and assign homework. This causes more stress for students because they are forced to look on multiple websites to see their homework, and the current system allows even more room for potentially missing homework.

Every day I check Google Classroom, Edmodo, and now, the portal, countless times. And with the addition of the portal, I feel a heightened sense of anxiety about my homework—not about whether I have the ability to understand or complete it, not if I will find the time to give it my best effort, or if I will learn from the assignment, but whether I will be able to simply locate the assignment. This seems to me to be an immense waste of my time and energy—which would be much better channeled into the work itself.

It’s a problem the administration has recently added to with the creation of the portal, a website where teachers can assign homework and make announcements, and where a student can see who else is in their class.

According to Director of Technology Peter Evans, “The portal is the next generation of the products we were already using.” Meaning the goal was not explicitly for teachers to use the portal to assign homework. The portal is also intertwined with billing, tuition, alumni, and development. For teachers who use Google Classroom, it may be easier for them considering how interconnected it is with google docs and other google products. “We are moving towards teachers using the portal more and more,” Evans said. “We want to make it easier for students to only have one website to check.”

Although the portal was created with good intentions, too few teachers have made the switch from Google Classroom and Edmodo to make it useful. For me, only my English teacher makes use of the portal. As of right now, it has only added to the chaos. I appreciate that the administration is trying to provide a solution to this problem, but they have not been using the right approach to solve it.

The approach I would take to this problem would be to force teachers to use the portal to post homework. The portal is easy to navigate, and all teachers have an account on it. It would make the lives of students much easier because not only would all their homework be on one website, but they could also check their school and sports schedule, as well as the lunch menu, on one universal website.

I hope the administration will eventually convince all teachers to use the portal, and I don’t think it would be very difficult, considering they all already have accounts set up on it.