Grading Made Easy!

For today's assignment, A6 (snapshot is above), I had to evaluate Engrade Software for at least 45 minutes and then post my reflection on here. I found this assignment interesting because I am not a teacher yet and have not had to use a grade book of any kind being I have no student's. I found it very easy to setup a classroom and created a roster of made up students. I did find some difficulties with trying to weight assignment categories and after giving it a good effort decided to stick with the original settings to not weight assignment categories. The difficulties I found was the layout and the information the site wanted per assignment. I think this may have more to do with my lack of experience with the software; but since I found everything else easy it was some what disappointing when I experienced difficulties with that section.

I liked the entire setup of the grade book and also liked that it not only gave the average per student; but also the class average per assignment/test. I really see how one student's poor score can affect the rest of the class as well as effect that student's overall average. The only suggestion I have for the software would be to have a notes section on each assignment/project/test so the student can understand what he or she did wrong and how they can improve this in the future. I feel grades whether excellent or poor need to be explained to the student so they have a better understanding of the course content and to also know how the grade was calculated. That is the only problem I see students and/or parents having with the software since; it is goes straight to the grades without further explanation.

I would definitely use this in my classroom and also would recommend other teachers and future teachers to use it as well. It keeps the grades organized and if the teacher has made an error one can just click the grade under the assignment and edit it from there; instead of going through all the students grades to just correct one student's mark.