After having some time off we're back for a new school year. We're very pleased to see a lot of people who've relied on the service last year to be back in greater numbers than before. 

Another trend that is emerging is that we're getting more customers internationally (Hello Canada, Australia, India, Brazil and Argentinia :-)

Happy new School year! 

Roger and the K12Portal team. 

We have a couple of new products and product updates on our site.

- School and demo servers.. If you are using k12portal at a school, or district, you can now have your own domain name and server. What does that mean ? Let's say your school is called heather, by filling out out our demo school form your application for schools could be reached on heather.k12portal.com. Filling out the form and more details are here.
One thing to remember: we will email you instructions, so make sure the email address you give us is valid, and look for an activation email from us after you've submitted the form.

As always, setting up k12portal is a breeze, you will be up and running in less than an hour. Compare that with some of the leading solutions ...

- By popular demand, we've added report cards to the gradebook reports. You can create a report card for your current term, or for the current school year.  If you haven't already, try them out.

Let us know if we can do better, we always appreciate feedback.

We wish you happy holidays, merry christmas, kwanzaa and an even better 2011 !

- Roger and the k12portal team.

At K12Portal we're most proud of people using our product, and using it you are !

In the last few weeks, we have seen a steady uptick in use of k12portal. Just a few fun statistics:

#1 country is USA, (the Netherlands is in the top 10 (ok,ok, my mom lives there :-)

Within the the United States, California, Florida, New York,  Texas and Georgia are the states with the most visits, even though we have visits from all states every day. 

The number of page views per visit is going up as well, which means that you're doing more with k12portal than you used to. The gradebook has always been popular, but we now see people taking attendance and creating blogs as well. Awesome !

We *love* the feedback we're getting from you. Good and bad ! We answer each and every mail you send us, often within a few hours. If you don't get a response, check your junk mail folder for emails from k12portal.com. 

Let us know if there's anything we can do to make your experience better. You can help us by spreading the word. 

Thanks for choosing us !
-Roger

Today's a big day for K12Portal, we're launching the District and School Edition of K12Portal.  When we launched K12Portal about a year ago, we set out to build the best possible tools for teachers, schools and districts. Since the launch, it has been a roller coaster, and we're very proud of our success in the teacher community and of the more than 10,000 students we're currently managing. New signups are increasing every day !

We've continued to be busy though :-) While teachers and students will remain our core focus, we also want to make sure that schools and districts can take advantage of our tools and solutions.

Our school and district solution allows school and distritcts to manage grades and attendance. We offer a 30 day demo server for you to try it out. Getting started and setting up your school can be done in less than an hour !

If you're interested in using K12Portal as your student information system for your school or district, check out our offering at k12portal.com/weborders

Thanks, 
-Roger

Yay ! We passed the 1000 account mark (we're now over 1100 actually). 

We feel an enormous sense of accomplishment. I remember vividly walking down Market Street in San Francisco on the phone with a really good friend of mine, bragging that we had 50 signups ! Of course, of the early signups, at least 10 where of the team :-)

Anyway, we're proud and feel an enormous responsibility to all of you who are using K12Portal. 

Thank you. 

And keep the feedback coming !

-Roger

Dear Members,

This is a very difficult note for us to write, but we think that being open and honest is an important aspect of any relationship, whether it's embarrassing or not. 

Yesterday night, K12Portal experienced a major outage for the first time in the 2.5 years that we have been operating the site. Our hosting provider (Amazons AWS service) had a multi system failure, which caused the loss of our database storage. This should never happen, the database storage is supposed to be redundant, but it happened nonetheless. 

As a result, we lost about 5 days worth of data. This is devastating to us but more importantly, to our members. We've undertaken steps to make sure this won't happen again and we're in the process to recover as much additional data as possible.

We deeply regret the inconvenience this has caused. If you created an account after 5/4, it is likely that your account was lost. If you cannot login please recreate it. Any grades or assignments entered after this date have been  lost too and will need to be re-entered. Feel free to reach us on feedback@k12portal.com if you have additional questions. 

Please accept our sincere apologies. We are 110% committed to building a great, safe  and reliable experience. 

Thank you for understanding. 
The K12Portal team. 

We have made some changes to the site. Previously we landed on the
calendar page. From some of the feedback we got it would make more sense
to land on the dashboard page, so we've enabled that. The early feedback on 
that change has been good. 

We've also started adding documentation to the site. You can find it by clicking the
"Academy and Docs" link in the menu bar on the left. 

Enjoy !
-Roger

We're making big strides here at K12Portal: we're announcing a new and much 
improved way of enabling sharing assignments and grades with parents and students. 

In the gradebook, look for a link top right that says: "Student Dashboard". 

All that is required is to click the link and enable sharing. 

Enjoy ! As always, keep the feedback coming !

-Roger

Several users have asked us whether or not it is possible to customize the attendance and score codes.  The product supported this internally already so we decided to expose this to our users. Here's how it works:

- Access the gradebook
- When you're in the gradebook, click on the "Setup"-tab

Here you'll find the "score footnotes" and the "attendance codes" links, which can be used to customize the score and attendance codes. 

Customize away, and keep the feedback coming !

-Roger
 

 

We're seeing record traffic (almost) everyday. Based on user feedback we've added a couple of features to the product. 

You can now share calendars with colleagues, students and friends. This allows people who you are connected with to create events on your calendar. 

Also, we've added a shortcut to add students to a section, right in the gradebook.

Furthermore we've fixed several bugs that we've (and you ! ) have found in the last weeks. 

Finally, I'd like to thank everyone who's left feedback, good or bad for us. The most important way for us to make things better is if you tell us ! You can leave feedback using the links on the top right of the page or at roger@k12portal.com. 

Thanks for using K12Portal!
 
-Roger / K12Portal team

Happy Holidays from us to all of you. 2009 was our best year yet and we're going into 2010 with tremendous momentum !

We'd like to thank our members for the feedback and support. Keep the feedback coming it's how we make our products all they can be !

All the best and here's to the next decade !

- Roger / K12portal team. 

Dear Members:
 
We have had tremendous early success with our product, many, many of you have been checking out the service. As a result, we have found several bugs (yikes!) that we have been diligently fixing. In addition, we have gotten several requests for some changes and feature requests. 

Some specifics of new developments:
- New dashboard page has been rolled out. It contains more of what you want, in a format that is (hopefully!) easier to read
- New assignment detail screen. 
- Improved overall stability and performance of the site, including an improved backup  mechanism

We're getting very close to roll out a public version of our reporting engine. This will allow you to create and update existing reports. This is ofcourse mission critical, we're working diligently to make sure the quality is what you would expect it to be. 

Here is what you can do for us: Every page has a 'Leave Feedback' link on the top of the screen to the right. As you're using the product, please let us know what your thoughts are ! Alternatively you should always feel free to reach me on roger@k12portal.com. I read all my email, and respond to it too !
 
From the K12Portal team, we wish you all a great and prosperous 2010!  

Very Best Wishes from the team !

Mikin, Roger, David, Anna and a cast of 1000's :-)


 

We've been up for a week now, and the early feedback has been really good, and informative ! Fortunately, not too many bugs but some great usability feedback.

We're on it... expect updates and improvements on an ongoing basis. Keep the feedback coming, it's how we get better !

After a couple of years of hard work, we're thrilled to announce that we're live with the first iteration of K12Portal.com. A lot of hard work went into this release. I'm sure there are still bugs and issues outstanding, feel absolutely free to reach out to us and let us know what you think ! 

The (very proud) K12Portal.com team.