Description: The article is a tutorial containing the information about parent focus portal, showing us several ways to find the important and useful information such as students’ grade from the system and the steps to get into the portal.
Looking at the initial page called the portal page, before we go too far, the first is the area title to ask a question about focus, click here, this is the best way to get in touch with iet, if you have any problems at all with any of the technology on campus, its tied to focus, so if you have a focus question, you can do that, but you can also ask additional questions about anything tech related.
Click on that link, there will bring up a window and that window will let you describe your problem, please give us your student’s name and your name as well to help us out, as we’re looking for what the problem would be, you can go down to the subject line, give us a subject and you can put in your email address as well.
We know how to get back in touch with you, this will create an RFS with us that we can respond to you, it will happen via email and you will get a feedback from a real person trying to solve your problem, so when you have done, you’d click Submit query, it would send in the RFS and give you an email confirmation.
You can see along the top, there are some menus, school information, my child, my information billing, assignments and grades, you see a place in the middle for general messages, we’ve got a reminder about updating emergency contact information on this screen.
Then on the right hand side upcoming events, this school events calendar will show up in the main part of the window where it’s titled featured programs, you see a list of your students scheduled in this case.
I’m looking at a middle school student, so they have a Bible homeroom class and then periods 1 through 7 it lists the teacher and class name for each period, it also shows a grade for each of those classes.
Then on the right side of that, you’ll see check boxes next to email addresses, for each teacher, you can use those to email the teacher below the classes, you see in absences link and a calendar link as well as check boxes in order to email attendance or the principal.
That’s high school or middle school specific, let me take you through the classes here, so I click on Mr. Mavericks, sixth grade, social studies class, this is going to show Mr. Mavericks online course, so take a look, you can see that he’s got some pictures up here.
A number of handouts teachers will be placing their handouts gear, this way students can get to them from their i pads, parents can also see what things were handed out in class and it makes it easy for the child who should recover their handouts.
If they should happen to lose them, we know children don’t do that to go back to focus, I will click on the focus link, it will reload the portal page, each of these links for the classes will take you to that classes online course, every class at Monta Vista has its own unique online course.
Next to that, you see the grades, this shows you the grade in the class, but better than that, you can click on the grade itself, it will take you to a grade book view showing you each of the assignments in this column, it will show how many points were earned and how many points the assignment was worth in the second column.
The third column gives you a traditional percentage in letter grade, any comments from the teacher may show up in that fourth column, the next two columns show you when the assignment was officially assigned and also when it’s due, the second to last column shows you which category that assignment is in, so you can get a good overview of how your student is doing.
If you’d like to know why your students grade is low, you can start here and this way you’re able to ask a more informed question of the teacher, if you decide, it’s even necessary to contact them.
This is the exact same information that the teachers are looking at at the top, you’ll see the categories in this case assignments, tests and quizzes, you see how they’re weighted to create the final grade.
Then you see the grades in each category, so in this class, this particular student had a 94%, but you can see they have a hundred percent in their assignments, but a b-plus, their tests and quizzes, those two grades combined to give a 94%, that’s the grade book view returning to the portal page.
We can copy the teachers’ email address and send them an email from the email program of your choice, however, if you’re in a place where that’s not something, you can click on the checkbox next to the email address, then scroll down, it hides off the bottom of the page, so it’s easy to forget this scroll down, you will see that there is a form for filling out the email now.
You can choose your email address, you got a cc, so if you wanted to send a copy, you can type in any email address there, you’ve got a checkbox to CC, you have the actual body of the message, this is where you type your email, then you would click the submit button to send that email to the teacher, they would get it a regular email and respond, the response would go to your email address now.
There isn’t a place to check what emails you have sent, but if you CC yourself, you will get a copy of this email, the teacher should respond in a timely manner, so you’ve gone over online course, we’ve gone over grades, we’ve gone over email down here.
I’m going to show you this link to calendar, this is a great way to see an overview of all the assignments that your child has had, this doesn’t show you great, it shows you a calendar view, so let’s check that out, this pulls up the current calendar, you can see the current date highlighted there, this is all the assignments in all of the courses for this student to look forward.
I can see that this student has a quiz on Friday, if I click on this link, it will pull up a separate window, so I can see the details of the assignment there, I see the date, see the teacher and the course, whatever notes, there may be that assignment, this is a quick one-stop way to view all upcoming assignments, this only shows assignments that entered into the grade book, so if there’s an assignment, that is not going to be graded, it may not show up in this view.