Trouble Accessing School Website

I just purchased a Toshiba Satellite C50 - A Series laptop at Best Buy. Geek Squad Guy installed the recommended Webroot security software. The primary purpose of this computer is to provide access to my Schoolteacher girlfriend's online Gradebook via her school system's website.

As recommended by her computer folks at school, we downloaded Java 7, both the 32 & 64 bit versions. Accessing the school website's "PowerTeacher" section was not a problem. The problem is getting into the actual Gradebook. As an alternative to directly accessing the Gradebook, the following instructions are provided:

Step 1: Download PowerTeacher Gradebook

An alternative method of launching PowerTeacher Gradebook is being provided by your PowerSchool administrator because the Java browser plug-in cannot be detected on your browser. (my caps).

Then there are a series of steps on how to download and unzip the Gradebook zip file to a convenient location, with an icon installed on the desktop as a shortcut. We tried that and were not successful.

Rather than be stuck using this "work around", assuming we could ever get it to work, we would love to be able to get access to the Gradebook directly via the website.

Any ideas on how to get the Java browser plug-in to be detected on the browser?

Are there any other issues that could be preventing a direct connection to the Gradebook?

Many Thanks!

Vinman :)