We use Whipple Hill for report card writing for our 5-12 graders. Our
Lower School elected not to adopt their grading/report card tools so far.
That is still a topic of discussion for us.
Gradebook - The gradebook is pretty simple to use. If you are already
maintaining assignments on your course pages, then you just fill out a
couple fields to include it in the gradebook. Points, assignment type,
factor, whether it's extra credit or not. One nice thing about the
gradebook is that it's directly tied to attendance so you can easily see
if a student was absent the day it was assigned or on the day it was due.
You can also add comments that are private to you and choose whether or
not to publish assignment grades to the students and/or parents.
Grading - The course grading lets you setup letter grades, competencies
and comments which can both be displayed on a single report card. There
is a structure for "reviewing" grades if that is a part of your process.
You can calcluate your grades based on the gradebook and also factor in
other grades to that calculation. One note about the comments, the
authoring tool is primitive. You can bold, italicize, and underline and
there is a spell check, other than that it's basically just a text box.
If you author your comment in Word and then try to paste you will lose any
formatting that you have. So, most teachers do end up having to maintain
a copy outside of the grading system. The reasoning behind this
"restrictive" approach is the tool that generates the report cards can
have a difficult time with any special formatting or Word's infamous
special character codes. If you love writing HTML, you can go that
approach, but let's be serious. Another complaint is that it would be
nice to be able to see what you have written about a student in a previous
term while you're authoring in the current term. You can reference a
prior term report card, but having one view has been suggested, to
streamline the process.
Report Cards - If you're flexible on the appearance of your report card,
they are fairly simple to build and can include attendance information if
you're tracking that in Whipple Hill. However, if you are very specific
on how you want your report card to look, then you will want to
investigate this further. Basically what you're getting is a template
with some options on what you want to include. You can include more than
one term on a report card. One issue that was a "deal breaker" for the
Lower School is the ability to include grades from multiple terms, but
only include the most recent comment. Our comments are lengthy, so
having to include all the comments from each term makes the report card
pretty lengthy. If your parents are strictly using them online, then it
may not be a big issue, but for us it just didn't work.
I hope that helps anybody that's considering this as an option. Feel free
to contact me with any other questions.
Jason Ulrich
MICDS Technology
314-995-7314
julrich@micds.org
A forum for independent school educators <ISED-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU> writes:
>Hello,
>We are exploring using something other than Powerschool as a vehicle for
>report card writing and sharing.
>
>We have been using Whipplehill for a while now and teachers use it for
>sharing information such as news stories, homework, etc. I'd love to talk
>with anyone who is using the Grade Book and Grading modules for K-8.
>
>Ellen
>--
>Ellen Baru
>Director of Technology
>The Cathedral School
>1047 Amsterdam Avenue
>New York, NY 10025
>
>Phone: 212-316-7447
>Fax: 212-316-7558
>E-Mail: ebaru@cathedralnyc.org
>
>[ For info on ISED-L see https://www.gds.org/podium/default.aspx?t=128874
>]
>Submissions to ISED-L are released under a creative commons, attribution,
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Jason Ulrich
MICDS Technology
314-995-7314
[ For info on ISED-L see https://www.gds.org/podium/default.aspx?t=128874 ]
Submissions to ISED-L are released under a creative commons, attribution, non-commercial, share-alike license.
RSS Feed, http://listserv.syr.edu/scripts/wa.exe?RSS&L=ISED-L
