Thanks so much for the detailed description of the Gradebook and Grading. It
definitely looks like I want to look into this further. Since we have
Powerschool, teachers are already familiar with the annoying lack of ability
to format. The lack of ability to see the prior term is also something
teachers are used to at our school. So it doesn't sound like they would be
giving up anything.
I find it interesting that your lower school chose not to use Whipplehill. I
had investigated Whipplehill probably 3 or 4 years ago and when I showed
Whipplehill our current lower school report card, they said they could not
duplicate it in their system. But I'm motivated to revisit Whipplehill as it
is what we use at our school and teachers are used to logging onto it and at
least using the content pages.
Thanks again.
Ellen
On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 4:23 PM, Jason Ulrich <julrich@micds.org> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> 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,
> >non-commercial, share-alike license.
> >RSS Feed, http://listserv.syr.edu/scripts/wa.exe?RSS&L=ISED-L
>
>
>
> 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
>
--
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, non-commercial, share-alike license.
RSS Feed, http://listserv.syr.edu/scripts/wa.exe?RSS&L=ISED-L
