Southwest Preparatory Virtual School

Obviously, it is important to make sure you can run the software modules that make up part of the Virtual School courses. Follow the directions below to get yourself set up on each computer you will use to do your schoolwork. Make sure not to lose these instructions, as at some point you may choose to configure another computer (at the house of a friend or family member) so that you can do your schoolwork away from home.

1) Connect to your internet service provider, and start your web browser. For the browser, Internet Explorer (usually on the desktop as a big blue "E") is the most common one, though Netscape Navigator works as well. The AOL browser is not recommended, but can be tried if there are no other options.

2) Go to www.swwf.org/vschool.htm to log in through the school's site. If you have an older machine, it may tell you that to see the page properly, you should download the "Microsoft Virtual Machine". This isn't critical, and you may click "cancel". The Virtual School web page will have two fields (user name and password), and type the word "student" in both of them. Then click on "login". This will send you to the site for Plato, the company we use for courses.

3) Assuming this is the first time someone has tried to enter the Plato Web Learning pages from the machine at which you are working, it may prompt you to download the latest version of Macromedia's Flash software. Follow the instructions on the page. It should then take you to a page where it asks for your Plato account number. Enter the number 30130. You probably will not have to do this again, but keep this info handy just in case.

4) You should now be at the Plato Web Learning Network welcome screen. In the middle, above the three name, group, and password fields, there should be the sentence, "Your account is: Southwest Preparatory School". If it says something different, you may have entered the account number incorrectly. Click on the item to the right which says, "If this is not your account: click here." (This will take you back to Step 3.) If Southwest Preparatory School is written, then move to the next step.

5) Enter the following information for your Plato name, group name, and password:

PLATO Name: test student
Group Name: test group
Password: test

Click on "send". If it says that you are already logged in, another new student may be doing the same thing you are. Simply wait fifteen minutes or so and try again.

6) This part is very important. Assuming the software has not been downloaded to your system before, you may be asked if you want to download the plug-ins the system needs to run the courseware. You do. It is possible that it will do so automatically. If not, follow the instructions, including logging out, exiting the browser, and restarting the browser. Make sure that there were no other browser windows open, or the new plug-ins will still be waiting for you to thoroughly restart the program before they will work.

7) Follow the steps above again (though you probably won't need to enter the account number this time), and this time, you should get to a welcome page for the Plato Web Learning Network Learner Edition. Your options are on the left, and 99% of the time, the only two you will use are "assignments" and "log out".

8) Click on "assignments", and click on the one called Software Test. Try each of the items in it to see if they all properly load the module in a new screen. You do not need to go through the modules. You can exit a module after it comes up by typing the shift key and F10 at the same time. We do this to establish whether your computer can handle the different kinds of modules our courses use; what is important is that a new screen appears with information on one of our subjects.

9) Once you have tried each module, make a note of which ones didn't work (if any), and then click on the "log out" option.

Whew! If all went well, then you are getting much closer to being a student of the Virtual School. Make sure to complete the school application with copies of all supporting documents.

If there were problems, then contact us to see if we can figure out what went wrong. We have seen a number of odd quirks when trying to get our courses to run with either AOL or MSN, and also with the Windows ME operating system. Pop-up blocking software can also keep our system from working as it should (if you have it, disable it or set in its preferences to ignore material coming from the "platoweb.com" domain). Southwest Preparatory does not require students to use particular internet service providers or operating systems, but if you have one or more of the items mentioned above, you may consider trying to access the modules on another computer (if possible) in order to avoid frustration. Regardless, please talk with us before spending significant sums of money to upgrade your system; the problem may be something simple that we can help you with.