Beginning Feb. 2, students discovered they couldn’t access their grades due to password changes. MMS went through its first of several changes when all students were required to change their passwords. An update on the system forced everyone to get new, temporary passwords. Once they attempted to login with the temporary password, a prompt appeared stating that users would need to create their own original password in order to continue to use the site.

These new passwords that Freedom students created for themselves will be permanent, unless MMS goes through another major update, causing them to create another one. Having each student have their own unique password is a lot safer for everyone. Before the update, if someone knew your student ID number, which is printed on pretty much everything, they could access all information stored on any MMS account. This includes grades, names, addresses and any other important information stored on the website. Knowing these types of things invades people’s privacy. MMS has changed what information is currently shown on the website now. Things like addresses and personal information have been removed. By doing this, they are doing a better job of protecting the safety of students.

As of Feb. 15, more changes were expected to come. Since MMS is Freedom’s SIS (Student Information System), they will have made several updates to the website to become more secure, meaning it is less likely for issues like hacking or overriding to occur. Also, the system will automatically be backing itself up in order to save all changes that were made. Having this feature will save hours of work and frustration for several people.

Computer Resource Incorporated (the MMS company) will be hosting the new data and applying the updates itself, rather than requiring Freedom to do so. The Freedom School District won’t need to be checking MMS constantly to see if an update was made and for us to make those changes and updates ourselves. Having MMS host the data is just an overall easier solution for the school.

Freedom is hoping to apply one major update to MMS. It will be more convenient and efficient for students and teachers. If a student is absent, they will now be able to see the worksheet or assignment that they missed on MMS rather than having to get it on their day back and making them further behind in work. This feature will similarly mimic Google Classroom because the actual worksheet will be shown on the computer for all students to see. This way, it is easier to catch up on missed work, quickly check any upcoming assignments or access a worksheet that a student has lost.