Engrade

I have to say I do particularly like this Engrade tool. It definitely makes it very convenient to manage all of the numbers. I really know nothing about gradebooks or the software out there, or how most teachers even manage their grades, but I had envisioned myself using Excel to make it easy to get quick snapshots of how everyone was doing. The thing I liked about the idea of using Excel was that I could easily make visuals out of it, to chart how my class was doing overall, compute averages, or even to analyze particular tests in order to reflect on my own ability to write reliable assessments. So, I appreciate the fact that Engrade similarly makes it easy to quickly get averages and overall pictures.

I played a little bit with the tool, and if I am understanding correctly, the students can see their own information by logging in. I think that is excellent. I had wondered how I would deal with the problem of making sure my students could track their progress in my course. Having them record their own grades in a notebook or something was the best I could come up with, but I was not pleased with that idea. Engrade would solve that problem for me.

I love the fact that I can create quizzes and mini-lessons on this site as well. Whether or not that is useful to me will depend on the level of access my classes have to technology. It would certainly make grading and recording grades a much easier process, but being that I am an English person, I am far more interested in "subjective" assessments such as short, written responses, as opposed to the multiple choice quizzes. Still, it could definitely be a useful tool, even if I only used it for occasional lessons or quizzes, and maybe used it as an extension to the grading method I set up in Excel. I definitely intend to explore with it when I have my own class and real assignments, to see if it helps me set up a grading system that I feel accurately reflects performance in my classroom.

As an answer to the blog prompts, I think students and parents would love this software because it would be an easy way to keep them informed of the student's progress in the class. This is important, especially at the secondary level, because I would have so many students that it might be difficult for me to keep the level of contact that some parents might want. I think classroom teachers in general would find Engrade useful for that reason, but also because it would make grading easier if they set up their quizzes on the site itself. I could see this being especially useful in math or science classrooms, or in English/History when doing vocabulary or terms assessments.I think Engrade could be even better if it provided visual tracking of a student's progress. For example, graphic representations like line graphs to track if there is a particular period of time in which a student was struggling or a particular type of assignment that is causing them trouble. It would also be nice if the quiz generator would also analyze the results to see if any particular question was not valid because a certain percentage of students missed it.