Suty Dan
Focus Group #4 Ways to Record and Report Student Progress
1980 Back in the early 1980's, I felt like I could no longer accept having to do all the recording of grades and progress reports etc. all by hand. I wrote a wonderful program that recorded students grades by title and grade, computed the average, and printed out a detailed progress report (in triplicate) on the Apple 2E. We used the program until the early 1990's, I guess those were the good old days, but the ideas were not lost. 1990's Now, we have a very powerful technology tool, the spreadsheet that can record, assign weight, average grades and print out reports for each student. I have long used a spreadsheet for such work. The spreadsheet can actually take the appearance of the grade books we are issued for hand recording grades. However, it appears that this is also becoming outdated, but I still use this for backup. 2000's Now, we have very efficient gradebook programs that are available. Last year in the Catholic school in which I taught, we had a program called "Oracle" that was quite complex in which I entered all grades by score, weight, and name very efficiently in a chart that had the appearance of a spreadsheet. The major improvement was that not only could I enter and average grades, but there was a variety of forms that could be printed out so the information could be sent to home parents for individual students as well as class gradesheets that could be submitted to administration for records. I also have used a program in the Katy school district that is similar and very efficient in which the grades are entered by each teacher individually but are transmitted to the administrative offices so that principals can instantly call up any student's grades.
20022003 I know of many schools that are now required to enter grades on computer programs that are highly efficient and directly transmit all student data into office records. Personally I feel that the transmissions should only be used for recording and printing record cards, progress reports etc. If they are used by principals to check up on individual student performances, it should be done when the teacher is present.
Future ...