Online GradeBooks for Free

Ah...the end of the third grading period is here. While in a school this week I heard lots of chatter about posting grades in the grading software. "Excuse the interruption, but teachers would you please export your grades, again, due to a system error..."

Many school districts use gradebook software for the printing of report cards and that is all. But what about providing students with access to their progress on an ongoing basis. With parent conferences in the next couple of weeks, many parents would like to know what the student's grades are before they meet with the teacher for so many reasons. While many schools have the ability to print electronic report cards from "e-grades" that teachers keep, they do not utilize the student or parent access features of their "gradebook" package, or the software being used doesn't have that anytime, anywhere access for the various stakeholders who want to track student progress.

Do you keep your grades electronically? Take a look at EnGrade! It is a FREE online tool for classroom grades. Engrade is a free and powerful tool that gives teachers the ability to manage and post student grades, upcoming assignments, and attendance online in real-time.

Students and parents have online access to the data, too. I have begun to use the software in some of the long term professional development projects in which I am involved. This provides some feedback to the teachers about their implementation of daily use of technology in student learning activities. My grading system has been customized from a numerical scale to a rating of 1-4 which are represented in a more "expressive" way.

4= ;-) 3= :-) 2= :-o 1= :-(

The teachers, with their access as students in my class definitely can monitor their progress in meeting project goals! And I can give the principal access to these "grades", too!

Visual Literacy Ideas

One of the 21st century literacies is visual literacy. I have been doing some research for a training session I am preparing for and I thought I would share a couple of my "finds".

Browse the great visual literacy activities using photographs from the Oakland Museum of California. Take these great ideas and combine them with more primary sources from the National Archives or the American Memory Collection from the Library of Congress. Target critical thinking and inference with these tools to help student thinking differently about visuals.

Another tool that I found provides a roadmap for helping with visualization of data. The periodic table for visualization methods is an eye-opening tool for helping students analyze and communicate understanding of content and concepts. Teachers, we can really think deeply about the "graphic organizers" we are using and this tool helps us select an appropriate tool. What I like best is that each tool identifies if the thinking process as convergent or divergent!

And Here We Go!

Today's article, Six Ed-Tech Trends to Watch in 2007, in eSchool News is an important read for educators. We used to spend our IT dollars on the hardware, but now a shift of that trend is on the horizon. In the future, more IT dollars will be spent on the services that make our sub-computer ever so powerful! For educators I especially look forward to the possibilities of Trend # 4!