Apologies in advance, I’m sure that this is not the best forum for this post, but I’m pretty desperate to get someone from Amplify/Desmos to pay attention to this issue.
I and many of my school’s math teachers use the Amplify (formerly Desmos) activity builder to design custom activities for our students.
This morning, when some of us (but not all of us) attempted to log in, we discovered that our teacher accounts are being treated like student accounts. That means we cannot monitor student progress, design or edit activities, or do anything else. Argh. All we can do is access existing activities as if we were students.
We have reached out to Amplify and gotten nothing but bot responses so far, filled with information that’s either useless or false. I suspect we’re way down on their priority list, since our district does not pay them for math. (It does pay them for science, though…). I’m in the middle of a unit on Geometric Construction, and I’m about to rip it up and start over on a new platform.
Anyway, anyone else having this issue? Any success stories?
I’d seen student accounts having issues with assignments because they were misidentified as (or signed up for) teacher accounts, but not the reverse. I sent you a direct message for some more info.
I can’t find Part 1, sadly. If you have a link, that would be nice. I’m simultaneously trying to re-plan entire units of my curriculum to work without Amplify, and also seeing if there is a fix for this, and I’m pretty exhausted at this point.
For anyone following this thread, there appears to be an issue when a teacher is a student in a Google classroom. When classrooms get synced, the teacher accounts (that are also google classroom students) get converted to student accounts. This was done to reduce the common issue of students accidentally registering as teachers and unable to participate.
To resolve the issue of converting mistaken student accounts back to teacher accounts you can contact Support and create a ticket here. Include the Google classroom code so that it can be “unlinked” from Amplify, and mitigate getting mistakenly converted to student accounts again when classrooms are re-synced.
I have also communicated that if another resolution that doesn’t require any user action isn’t found, the issue is going to come up repeatedly as teachers use Google classrooms for PLCs and PD as well. Again, apologies for inconveniences, your continued feedback is important and heard.
This issue is still going on. I am, once again, locked out of my teacher account, because Amplify is treating me as a student. I have sent yet another message to the help desk. I will say that I am not engaging in any of the “risky” behaviors that are identified. I do not link my Amplify account to Google Classroom, and I have done everything I possibly can to be not named as a student on anyone else’s Amplify-linked Google Classroom. And yet this issue persists.
I do not know why Amplify cannot or will not fix the problem. Since it happened the first time, I have used the platform a lot less. The message seems to be “don’t use it at all,” because your access will disappear for no reason.
I know there had been a fix in the works for multiple account designations.
I know it does not have to do with “Amplify-linked classrooms”; it is literally Google’s classroom designations that are being used, regardless of whether those classes are Amplify classrooms or not, unless those class designations are explicitly excluded. In order to exclude a Google class you are a student in, you currently needed to send the Google classroom code to support to have them exclude it.
Well, on the bright side, Amplify is getting a lot quicker in their tech support response times. (Not from you Daniel, but from the official helpdesk folks.) I will say that the messaging that teachers get (I’m not the only one with this issue) is pretty inconsistent, and often incorrect. For example, I was told today that the problem is that I’m a student in 3 different Google Classrooms, but when I asked them to identify which Classrooms, they pointed to 1 (that I was unaware of) where I was indeed a student, but then 2 more where I definitely have never been a student. And they said nothing about a Google Classroom in which I am required, as a condition of my employment, to be a student. So, ugh.
I also would really appreciate Amplify acknowledging this as their problem, not ours. Google Classroom is everywhere (in the secondary education world, anyway), and it’s simply not practical to completely avoid ever being designated a student. If Amplify truly wants to offer a platform for educators, it seems like it’s Amplify’s job to make sure it’s compatible with a ubiquitous classroom software system. (Google Classroom). But instead, every piece of official support I have gotten from Amplify has pointed the finger at me for the cardinal sin of being assigned different roles in different Google classrooms.
Again, I feel strange complaining about a platform (Amplify) that is available for free, and I appreciate it, but Amplify’s decisions have taken me from a pretty heavy user of the Activity Builder product to someone who has basically stopped even logging in to Amplify, because the platform is so unreliable. I would gladly pay (within reason) to use a platform that worked, but freeware that completely locks me out on a whim and requires oodles of time negotiating with tech support is a platform I can’t use.
I’ve tried to be pretty vocal about this issue, in particular, needing a viable solution from our (Amplify’s) end that doesn’t require any actions from users. I want to surmise that it’s not the intention to place blame, but more to identify where the current issue is. The only solution for users until it’s fixed is to attempt to monitor your use, and if you are aware of a need to be a student to pass that class code to support so that it can be excluded. It’s not a nice solution as of yet, and I apologize for the difficulty. Many of us are former teachers, and appreciate your struggle.
To share, the Google designation caused two possible issues, one was students were being mistakenly identified as teachers, so with the obviously vastly greater volume students than teachers, it seemed a better solution to default to a student, so that students didn’t have trouble logging in. That has obviously not fixed issues. And it’s understood that a single teacher having an issue means that all their students do. This issue is still being worked on.
Thanks for that perspective, and for all your help on this issue. I hope we can get back to a place where I feel like the platform will be there for me from day to day. When it works, it’s such a great place to build lessons for students!
When I signed up for Amplify (then Desmos), I used my official school email address and the “login with Google” option. What if instead, I created a log-in that was either not linked to my school email address (tricky for legal reasons) or where I used my school email address but created my own password, rather than use the “login with Google” option? Neither is perfect, and both would require Amplify to somehow strip my current account of its Google-linked identifiers because I certainly don’t want to abandon all the lessons and materials I’ve already created.
Just spitballing… I’m introducing a new concept to students that would be perfect for the Activity Builder but where I’m debating whether it’s worth the risk that I’ll be locked out of my account again.