Engrade

What ever happened to all assignments would be due on Sunday or Monday that was said during our first class? I completely missed the due date on this assignment but better late then never.


I have used an online school management system in the past called School Tool. I immediately thought Engrade would not be as good as School Tool, but I was wrong. School Tool is very cumbersome and difficult to navigate if you do not know the program well. After using School Tool for many years I was very proficient, but that took time. Engrade I was able to pick up immediately. I love how easy it is to weight my different categories and even the option to drop the lowest grade, which I always had to do manually in School Tools.


The only problem I had with Engrade is needing to input the student's id. When I was working we did not know our students id numbers, honestly I do not even know if they had them... I am sure they did but I have no clue. My school always set up the classes for us with the rosters, so I assume if Engrade was the program the school was using, the id numbers would already been inputted. I am used to working with online grading systems so in general, Engrade is extremely easy to navigate. I would improve the view of your gradebook. It gets very frustrating when inputting hundreds of grades to have to stop every few students to scroll down. I would make it so you could see all your students on one page. 


Online grading software is imperative for teachers in this digital age. Parents want to be able to check and find out immediately how their child is progressing. With online grading systems, emails can easily be sent out to alert parents what a child is missing. When a teacher has a website in combination with the online grading, students can assess assignments they are missing and hand them in the next day. Gone are the days when parents can be ignorant to how their child is doing in school until report cards come. Online grading software also provides print outs for each student with all of the assignments and their grades. If a family does not have Internet or a computer, a teacher can easy supply the parent with the student's grade at any moment. 


If I had a choice when I was teaching, I would have used Engrade instead of School Tool, provided it was available at the time. Below is a screenshot of my fictional first period class.