Happy Weekend!
Now that school has started back up, it's back to one of my (and probably most of yours) most unfavorite things....Grading!
I've never been a big fan of grading, and then entering all those grades into my gradebook-ugh!
Especially when it came time to add everything up during report card season! Lots of times I would run the numbers a few times before I was sure I had it right. (I also borrowed my sister's TI-81 graphing calculator-so I could see all those numbers, and double check if I made a mistake!)
It was NOT a fan!
Last year I had a revelation-why not move from a paper/pencil grade book to an online one?
This way, I could access it wherever I was, and I never needed to worry about making sure I had it with me-and even better....it would probably add everything FOR me!
So after a Google search of free online grade books, I was introduced to iGradePlus! (it's the 5th one down)
Let me preface the rest of this by saying they don't know that I am doing this, and have not asked me to do this...I just truly enjoy the convenience!
When you click on the link, they is the page that pops up:
They do have paid subscriptions, but I have found that the free version just works fine for me. (These are also
not pictures of their 2.0 version (which is a beta test)-they look a little different but have many of the same features-and it looks like better features-I'm still playing around with it!)
After you've done your login (you can see I might have mine saved for easy remembering!), this is your home screen.
You can see easily the most recent assignments that you've assigned (I just finished inputing my kids-so no assignments just yet! :P )
The settings tab is where you can set up your term options-I recently had to convert from quarters to trimesters and it couldn't have been easier!
The classes tab is the subjects that you teach/grade.
I have a lot because our new report card is domain specific to the CC. :)
The students tab has a list of students that you can add to different classes-great for those middle school teachers! It's also good for me because I don't have some kids in my spelling, so I just don't add them. Our 4th grade also switches for Science, so I'll eventually have the entire 4th Grade in there!
When you click on the assignments tab, it brings you to the first class you inputted. You can easily change the class with a pull down menu.
Click the little green plus sign to add an assignment.
You can give it a title, a description and decide which category it fits into (your categories can have different weights...and it calculates it for you!) You put in the max possible points, and then you can enter the scores that the kids got!
This works great for me because I work on a points system-basically every question is worth 1 point. I love this, because while it might look like a kids did really well with the points system, it calculates the grade (based on the 100 scale) for you and you can see that maybe they didn't do as well as you thought. You can even adjust the scale if you need to.
Another great feature is under the student tab. You pull up individual student's page and it looks like this:
It has all their grades for the subjects they are enrolled in-as well as an overall grade! You can see a graph of their grades, and even print reports! (For all those pesky meetings!)
These are just a few of the awesome features on the
free version!
The only con that I've noticed is that a lot of the time, it takes awhile to load student information. I have to wait a little for the page to load with the student I click on...it's not instantaneous. But I usually have other tabs open that I click over to while I'm waiting ;)
So, if you're looking for an online grade book, I can highly recommend this one. After one full year's use, and starting another (and even setting that up was easy), this has made my grading so much easier.
Friday's Outfit:
Dress: Target
Shoes: Amazon
Have a wonderful weekend!
Smiles and Sunshine,
Kaitlyn
