Why You Should Use A Gradebook Program

When I was a little kid, my siblings and I would spend a couple of weeks in the summer visiting my Grandparents. We mostly played outside, but if it was raining, we took over the enclosed back porch and played school. Grandma was a school teacher and she had tons of cool stuff for playing school. Our only technology consisted of some controls Grandma had cut off an old electric blanket that we pretended were desk intercoms. We would play for hours and only break for meals.

Both of my parents are retired teachers and one of my sisters is also a teacher. You could say I went into the family business. When we all get together school is all we talk about. Anyone who has ever stumbled into a group of teachers quickly realizes that it is hard for us to talk about anything else. Oh we try, and sometimes we do succeed. But given a choice...

What do teachers talk about? One of our favorite topics is how things are so different now than way back when we first started out. We all agree that we work harder and do more paperwork now. None of us believe our students will want to be teachers because of how difficult the profession has become. But the truth is we are wrong. Teachers worked very hard back “in the day,” and kids still grow up to be teachers. We must be making a good impression on them!

Education has changed, and we aren’t going back. There is a greater emphasis on student testing and achievement exams these days. There are regulations for students with special education and disability needs. There really is a lot of paperwork. But on the flip side, we have new technology that can help. One of the best innovations is the electronic gradebook.

We all keep grades. We all do it differently, but we all keep grades. We use many different systems to arrive at the final average, but in the end, we put a grade on the report card. Some people use convoluted systems that weight some assignments, other people do just the basics. Regardless of your method, an electronic gradebook can help you.

Now, I am the first to admit that being a computer teacher and having a laptop gives me computer access that not all teachers have. If you are one of the lucky people whose school district provides you a laptop or a computer on your desk, then you are a step ahead. Buying your own computer might not be in your budget, but if you can get yourself a machine by hook or by crook you won’t regret it.

When you are making the decision to switch to a computerized grade keeping system, the first decision you have to make might not even be your own. Some school districts require you to use a paper gradebook that you have to turn in. The district’s chief concern is that they don’t want you to lose your student’s grades if something should happen to the computer. That is a valid point, but not a deal breaker. You just have to show how you would back up your files. After all, most schools keep all their student records on computers, so they must have a plan for backing them up. Let’s put it another way, if you don’t make backups you are flirting with disaster.

You want to have accurate averages, and you want to have them at your fingertips. A student wants to know what she is missing? Print her a report. A parent calls and wants his son’s average. You don’t have to calculate the average, you have it in front of you. Need to go to a meeting about a student who is having difficulties? Go prepared with a nice looking printout.

The next question that a lot of people raise, (mostly math teachers) is, “Why use a canned program? Why not use a spreadsheet?” Anyone who is handy with a spreadsheet can create their own electronic gradebook. I even do this as an exercise in my course. It definitely is a step up from the paper book, because it automatically computes the grades for you and saves you hours of time pushing the calculator buttons. But it doesn’t get you all the way there. Remember all the paperwork and documentation? Gradebook programs don’t just compute grades, they give you reports. Very nice reports. The kind of reports that principals are impressed with. The kind of reports that you can take to a meeting with the guidance counselor or the special education teacher. The kind of reports that you can send home to parents.

My current gradebook program is pretty powerful. I think I would have had more difficulty learning it if it wasn’t the fourth or fifth one I learned. It does almost everything I could think of and some things I didn’t. But best of all, it is intuitive. That is important. Remember, you don’t want the process to get in the way of the product.

Here are the features I looked at in choosing an electonic gradebook program:

1. I wanted the ability to break assignments into my own categories. This is especially handy for elementary teachers who have to give a separate grade for Reading, Spelling, Writing, etc. for the same student. In older grades, many schools like to see a Participation grade as part of the formula. A good program will let you print out a grade for each of these categories.

2. I wanted the ability to take attendance. My program not only lets me keep attendance records, but I can customize it just like the codes our Attendance Office uses. One neat thing that I really like is that attendance is also part of the Seating Chart. I can just click on a student’s desk and mark them absent or tardy. I print out the report and keep it in a binder. I do keep a back up paper record at the same time because we have to have a list of who is there when we go out for fire drills and I don’t want to lug my machine.

3. Reports! This program will print all kinds of reports. I can print individual lists of assignments either all together or by category; missing assignments, attendance and seating, and class summaries. I print out lists of assignments for the class every two weeks. I send reports to special education teachers, guidance counselors, parents, and anyone else who requires one. Sometimes a coach wants to know how a player is doing for eligibility reasons. Reports are formatted nicely, they have my name on them and look very professional.

4. Ease of Use. I have used several different programs and I read reviews, so I knew a little. I also was able to download a trial version. Usually trial versions have a limitation, like you can only enter 10 students or something like that. I tried it out and liked it. This program has lots of shortcut icons and point and click capability. It is OS X native too. I can keep more than one class open at the same time, which I discovered I needed one day after school when I had fifteen kids from five classes all trying to make up work. Also, and this is a very big deal: The program lets me automatically save a back up copy in a separate location. I use my iDisk, but I could just as easily use my school network account. Backing up is critical!

5. Price! Our school will purchase software for teachers. The program the school supplied was pretty good, and it was for both PC and Mac. The problem was we weren’t using the latest version, for example it lacked the attendance module. Also, the web site said there were no plans to make an OS X native version, and I was tired of the printing problems I was having every time I printed from OS 9. The school wasn’t going to pay for the one Mac guy to have a new program, so I bought it myself. I don’t regret it. By hook or by crook...

For those of you wondering, I started out using a spreadsheet in AppleWorks and then Excel. Classmaster was the first program our district bought us and it was very easy to use. Our school currently uses eClass Grades which is a version of Grade Machine. I liked it and might have just upgraded if there was an OS X version. The program I am using now is called Easy Grade Pro and I like it very much.

Once you go electronic gradebook, you will never go back!