Thread: What Do You Want in an Online Grading Book?

hi boris,
actually i'm doing the same thing....i'm writing the software in c#. i'm researching right now the software out there and all of them cost $60+. wouldn't it be nice if they were free for teachers?

I was thinking along the same lines of making an open source program out there so that other individuals could make changes to it.....

so how are you writing yours?

peace!
patrick.

does everyone in this forum believe white boards to be a good thing? i dont?!

Where could I get a free online grade book?

Our school has an online system and I do not care for it. It is an asp.net app, but I'm not sure if it was programmed in C#. It has some nice functionality, like updating to our eligibility lists, but we lost a ton of features that we had in our stand alone gradebook.

The biggest issue we ran across was a hardware problem. Many schools do not have the latest in technology, so prepare for that. We had to dump a bunch of bond money into tech because the program did not run smoothly in a Mac client, which is another major education hurdle when programming.

Good luck!

i've used thinkwave, classbuilder, and now gradebookwizard.

i like the last the best! i will gladly pay for an on-line book- if it does what i want it to do. none of these cost the $ you mentioned =- $60.00 .......

We've had several. The one I liked the best was a hand-configured one.

Features I like:
*a full spread sheet to see a full class and multiple assignments.
*all the grades entered show.
*lowest grade or grades can be dropped.
*all of a student's classes/grades can be seen by any teacher.
*a sheet with only quarter grades and averages to-date.
*the ability for the teacher to see exactly what the parent sees.
*student flagged when grade drops to a certain level.
*forms -- progress reports by class for each student or for all classes for an individual student.
*transcripts.
*place to store partent info and standardized test info.


mmmmmm
That's all I can think of for now.

Everything Bitsy says AND....

* the ability to print out a gradebook page with spaces to add assignments and grades by hand until the next time I enter grades

* the ability to leave a space blank OR whatever code I need to put in that space would show up red if a student does have not an assignment turned in so I can see at a glance who has missing assignments.

* the ability to put in a students name and print ONE report with all missing assignments rather than going into each class separately.

We are currently using PowerGrade and I do not find it to be user friendly at all. Before that we used Jay Klein's "Gradebook". It did EVERYthing I wanted it to do except it wasn't an online program. The one thing I do like about PowerGrade is that I can make comments about why a student got a certain grade (good or bad) on an assignment. Of course, since I have no clue what the PARENT sees, I'm not sure if it is helpful or not.

I agree that an online grade book is an excellent idea. Why write in C# though. It will not be cross-platform unless recompiled.

I have been running a moodle test website for a while. It is written in PHP with a MySQL (or other) database engine. It can run on any type of server and is completely open source. you can test drive it at

[url]http://www.opensourcecms.com[/url] or download it at [url]http://www.moodle.org[/url]

There is no 'grade book' module as of yet although someone has tried in the past. I will gladly volunteer my programming skill (Java, C++, VBA, PHP, Perl, Python) to help someone out.

Just a thought.

Originally Posted by alainp

I have been running a moodle test website for a while. It is written in PHP with a MySQL (or other) database engine. It can run on any type of server and is completely open source. you can test drive it at

[url]http://www.opensourcecms.com[/url] or download it at [url]http://www.moodle.org[/url]

.

Alain! I need to pick your brain-- I need a place to host a demo course I am doing for my Major Project (Grad School). My sponsor suggested Moodle, and I've looked it over....but....I don't think I am going to quite be able to get a grip on it in time to put up my course (In May, which I still have to write--arg!)

Any quick suggestions for me? I found that I couldn't even navigate the demo areas in Moodle (and I'm not generally too obtuse)--I did download the module, and attempted to enter the demo area...but....couldn't even seem to get past some "log in" issue *siiigh. Failing that, I'll pay a site to host it for me for a month or so while I collect data, but...I hate to admit defeat :twisted:

Thanks for any input!

Lisa

PS--nice call on the cross-platform issue-- all the Elem schools here are Mac.