Web Browsing for Substitute Teaching Jobs

My wife recently began substitute teaching to help her network to find a full-time teaching position in the future, and the school district where she subs just switched to the online substitute system called Aesop from Frontline Placement. To try to get a substitute job you must login via a web browser to their site and then repeatedly refresh your page for hours until a job finally shows up (unless you pay extra yourself to get their own customized software called Jobulator.) That sure does not seem like a fair way for them to set up their system. It definitely gives preferential treatment to people who pay them for the supposed "extra" software. However, I googled for Jobulator alternatives and noticed many substitutes who used Aesop were using Firefox and an extension called Check4Change to do essentially the same thing as Jobulator. The Check4Change plug-in allows you to set Firefox to periodically refresh a page and then check a section to see if it changes. If there is a change it will sound off a clip of David Bowie's 1972 classic "Changes" to let you know something has changed. Then you can disable Check4Change temporarily and accept the job and be on your merry way. My wife had it up and running this morning, and while we were sitting at the kitchen table we heard David Bowie start singing. Unfortunately, by the time she made it to her laptop the job had already been taken. I guess there are a lot of potential substitutes doing the same thing! She had been thinking about switching to Chrome, so I looked for something like Check4Free for Google Chrome, and I found Page Monitor which seems to work similarly, without David Bowie (they use either a chime or a cuckoo clock sound as an alarm.) I tested it out on the Google Finance page and it seemed to work there, but my wife will have to test it on Aesop later. And now I have that 40 year old song stuck in my head!

Comments

Substitute Teacher using AesopOnline said…
Thank you for the tip. I tried Jobulator and didn't like it. I too searched for alternatives and used Check4Change for a while. It works well, but my school district is very competitive. I continued to look and found SubSidekick. You have to pay for it but they give you a free trial and it can automatically accept jobs. I don't have to rush to the computer as you mentioned because the job is already assigned to me! :-)
1:19 PM
Anonymous said…
In our district if you use SubSidekick your are kicked in the butt with a captcha. We are labeled like the "Scarlet Letter" instead of an "A" it is a "CAPTCHA". They will not remove it and it stays on as long as you are a sub. A real kick in the stomach. They were not very nice about it too. I felt very upset and feel that I need to look for a new job after 22 years of sub teaching. We were all outsourced to a company that uses the company in question. I am sick really sick over this entire thing.
9:01 PM
Zuhur said…
the problem for me is Aesop itself. It NEVER shows a job on the computer until I accept on the phone When it calls me, it routinely hangs up or says, "I will not call you any more today" before I have the option to hear the job or push any numbers at all. What a disaster this is!

When someone called us on the phone, we could accept or turn down subbing work, now we can't even get it
12:37 PM
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