Lately, I’ve been wishing that I had a gradebook integrated with the internet so that students and parents could easily access their grades.

Homework completion rate at our school is pretty low, so it often happens that students arrive at the end of the semester with missing assignments (homework, classwork they didn’t finish, take home tests, projects, you name it). Periodically, I conference with the students to provide them with a list of assignments they’ve missed, but this is a drain on our classroom time.

I’ve created a simple class blog to record all of the assignments that we do so that students can keep up with their missed assignments – but most of them fail to realize they’ve missed the assignment unless I specifically show them the holes in my gradebook (which is electronic, Easy Grade Pro).

It’s an uphill battle, but making the gradebook available for students at any time – at home, in the library, on the computers in the back of the room – may help somewhat. At least I hope so.

My teaching roommate asked me a week or two ago if I could set up a website for him that allowed his students to check their grades online. I told him that I could, but it would be time consuming and I told him I wouldn’t do it. It got me thinking, though, so I started searching for online grading software.

Initially, I intended to find an open source grading program that I could host on a private server. Instead, I found what seems like a good, free online gradebook.

Engrade

The site I found was Engrade.

I haven’t used it live with a class yet, but I created a few dummy accounts to test what it’s like from both the teacher and student perspective.

Some of the highlights:

• AJAX enabled interface. Entering data into the score sheet is efficient. You can navigate around fields using the tab button or arrow keys, just like I would in a spreadsheet.
• Calendar of assignments with notes. This makes it easy to integrate the grading system with my existing class blog on WordPress. For each assignment, I can include a link back to the assignment on the class site, as well as any relevant days of class notes.
• Grade by points or weighted categories. Nothing special, but I’d say it’s a must have for grading software.
• Printable access codes for students. Students sign up with a special access code that you give them. This could be time consuming and paper wasting, but the site gives you an option to print out an automatically generated list. It prints a bunch of students on each page to conserve paper, too.
• Uber secure. The publisher takes security seriously – so much so that they’ve written two pages or so about it in the Help section. Beneath all the techno-babble, they basically say that their servers are as secure and backed up as you could imagine. Freak accidents happen, but you’re more likely to lose your gradebook or your flash drive than you are to have the database be compromised and/or permanently lost.

After playing around with it for a day or two, I’m definitely impressed. I think it has all of the functionality I need in a grading system without a lot of the unnecessary customizability. I shared it with my teaching roommate, and he’s gung ho about shifting his classes over to the new system in the next semester.

There is one downside that I’ve noticed so far: minimal ads. 

When I signed up as a teacher, I was excited to see that there were no ads. The layout is very clean, and it looks like a pretty well developed web app. When I created a student account, though,  I did notice a few advertisements.

They are pretty minimal AdSense ads. I only noticed them on two pages – the page listing the student’s classes and the messaging page. I’d prefer for there to be no ads at all, but I’d say these are within the realm of acceptability.

My teaching roommate already approached our department chair about it, and we’ve got tentative approval to start using it to track our students’ grades. I haven’t decided for certain, but I think I’m going to start the 3rd cycle fresh with this new system.

Too bad I didn’t think about this before Christmas break, or I could have used some of that time off to transfer the current marking cycle’s grades onto the new system. Doh!

I also plan on surveying the kids tomorrow to see what they think about the online grading system. I’m curious how many of them plan to use it to check their grades, and I’d also be curious to see if there are any students with security concerns.