Cobb

I agree with a close second - keeping my son off the computer games!

I leave this management issue mostly to my wife as professional & high school principal - very conservative I might add - she's got the skills to talk calmly to my 15 year old son. In fact, we just had one of those family meetings last night.

Well, the idea is that the kids eventually take respos for it themselves, which most can be trained to do by middle school mostly.

But I have a big quarrel about homework before say 6th grade anyway. As in: WHAT is the point? it has gotten to be a mark of school "goodness" or academic rigor, having the littles do HOURS of busywork. I ask you, a 3rd grader being expected to do 90 minutes of homework per day?

What parents SHOULD expect is that the kids should rattle off math facts, and memorize texts such as poems (trains the mind to memorize and categorize) and that the kids SHOULD be reading a lot of both novels and non-fiction, as soon as they can read independently. And yes READING 90 minutes, I wouldn't object to, but it is the institutionalization of busywork that I bitch about.

I don't know Schoolnotes, but I do know that the Palo Alto school district has had a system for quite a few years. Al's school has just installed

http://www.apple.com/education/powerschool/

the class of software we are discussing is generally known as

student information systems.

Here's a primer:

http://www.techlearning.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=19400338

first paragraph:

"Student information systems, one of the first applications of computer technology in education, are undergoing a significant transition yet again. The first major shift in SIS technologies occurred about 15 years ago when they evolved from mainframe programs to client-server solutions. Now, vendors across the board are offering centralized Web-based systems. These newer products are based on industry-standard database technologies that allow a SIS to share data with other critical administrative applications such as transportation, special education management, or food service. In addition, the latest generation of systems provides options for communicating important academic information to parents and students via the Internet."