Engrade Experience

I created an Engrade.com account and a fictitious 10th grade Global History and Geography class consisting of 10 members to play with the site and discover its features. The link for the class page is http://www.engrade.com/teacher-gradebook.php?c=1. My user name is MrMcGillicuddy and my password is Will91 for accessing the class page and my first several mock assignments.

I thought this was a terrific program. Very simple, straightforward, and highly useful. It followed my commands explicitly and did everything I told it to, and the program allows you to easily customize, e.g., say you wanted to change your grading system from the conventional 90-100 is an A to 97-100 is an A+, 93-97 is an A, and 90-93 is an A-, you could set those parameters in the custom screen. I liked the assignment calendar charting, the custom profile and numbers assigned to your students, the weighting for individual parts of your curriculum, the cumulative grade numbers it keeps reflective of that weighting, and its time-saving attributes. It is hard to see negatives without using it for a semester, but it is rather impersonal seeing your grades posted, unless you make special use of the custom messages features. You would need to supplement it with personal remarks to your students face to face, I would think, to humanize the grading process.

I like the fact that students can use their own personal access code and see their grades and assignments at any time. I have seen a few teachers at Pine Bush High School use this type system and it is wonderful to see where your student stands at any given time. It seems that a student can only access his or her own grades, though, and it might be helpful to see the class grade average and range in the window, along with your own grade. If the class mean was an 80 and you got an 84, you might not be as unhappy with that grade as you would be if the class mean was a 90.

The program is extemely useful to teachers. As far as class management, record-keeping, and grade averages, it is quick and painless to use. It saves an extraordinary amount of time, freeing teachers to focus more on curriculum and learning strategies. Teachers can maintain multiple classes on their account and even differentiate students who they may have for more than one class. You can add or subtract students who enter or leave your class after the creation of the class list, and you can even add extra credit points for a given assignment which will be weighted into the average. The attendance keeping feature is handy too and a precise record for use in proving absences if called upon by parents or administration. Similarly, with grading, if a student's grade is significantly lowered by a zero on a missing homework assignment, this program pinpoints the omission for students, parents, and administrators to see.

I think students and parents would appreciate this gradebook online. Of course, student accountability would be easier for parents to observe and verify, for their childs' efforts and attendance could be continuously monitored. If parents knew that their child had an 89 average towards the end of the quarter , they could push their kids a little harder to make that 90. But, apart from parental benefits, students could know where they stand at any given moment, see when assignments are due, discuss issues with the teacher directly through the program, and determine over the course of a semester where they scored weakest and where they may need to spend extra time in studying for a final or year end standardized test. For the reasons noted above, students and parents always want to know how the rest of the class did, and this program doesn't appear to convey that information. However, a special request for that information could be relayed to the teacher through the program.

I see this program as a valuable compliment to other 2.0 tools in the classroom, all of which faciliate communication, which is vital, and keep learning in the light and not hidden. Many parents feel blind to the process in the classroom, relying only on the snippets of information passed on by their sometimes misleading kids, until reoport card time; and many students often have very little idea how they are doing in the quarter. Report card time is too late in the process to make changes and improve behaviors, and information needs to be timely imparted along the way. Together with the class newsletters in Assignment 5, blogs, wikis, and other communication mediums, the dialogue between teacher, students, and parents can be increased across the board and that is obviously beneficial for all in the learning process.