Parker has finally decided to require that all teachers use the same homework website.  This is something that students have requested for years, tired of toggling between Google Classroom, Edmodo, and other, more obscure, homework sites. And yet, we are still unhappy.

Indignant students filed out of the auditorium on orientation day, outraged that the central homework site would be the Portal, rather than Google Classroom. I was among these students.

But now, weeks into the school year, I am singing a different tune: I like the Portal.

Most importantly, all of my classes are in the same place. In previous years I have had to switch between Classroom and Edmodo, not to mention the classes in which I took pictures of the homework written on the chalkboard.  This scattering of assignments always made it slightly more difficult for me to keep track of my work.

In general, I appreciate that the Portal puts all-things Parker, not just homework, in one place. Now I have a personal account on which I can reference my sports schedule, the Blue Calendar, my attendance record, and other resources.

The way the Portal displays my homework is actually preferable to Classroom and Edmodo. I have always hated the way Edmodo posted homework, in a long feed like the Facebook I equally dislike. Classroom posts take up half my screen in an attempt to be visually pleasing. This makes it more difficult for me to see multiple pieces of important information at once. The Portal, on the other hand, lists the titles of all my assignments conveniently, and all I have to do is click on one if I desire more information.

Even so, I do understand why people love Google Classroom. I too love the ease of turning in assignments and the general beauty of the Google Suite. We may never get an aesthetically pleasing Portal. But luckily, it is easy to turn in Google Documents on the Portal.  All a student has to do is link their Google Drive to their Portal, which, in my experience, took about 30 seconds.

My only concern is that it doesn’t switch ownership of the document to the teacher, meaning students can still edit their assignments after turning them in. However, a teacher can easily bypass this issue by asking students to copy-paste their work into the textbox on the Portal instead of submitting a Google Doc, the same way Edmodo does.

Sure, The Portal is not perfect. I can’t see all my homework assignments at the same time, it logs me out every five minutes, and events like Morning Ex are listed among my classes. My only real suggestion is that the Portal gets a page where all of a students’ homework assignments are put on a calendar, similar to Google Classroom. That way, I wouldn’t have to switch between my courses and could see all my assignments at once.

But, overall, it fulfills its most relevant function: I can access all my classes on one central platform.

Change is always uncomfortable, but this one is for the better.  In the long run, students will appreciate having one central website for everything, and not just in terms of homework. We will also not have to search random pages of the Parker website to find resources like the Blue Calendar.

We are the group of students who have to suffer through this transition period. We will have to work with teachers who don’t understand how to assign us homework, struggle to navigate through the initial design of the website, and generally work through its flaws. Over time, however, the Portal will improve. There is no reason to assume that it will stay stuck in its flawed design, given that we’ve already seen a few minor updates in the past month.  If we choose to give it some time, I believe that the Portal will turn out to be the most helpful resource for students.