Digital Gradebooks and What They Mean
Since the beginning of the digital age, many sectors have either embraced or resisted the digital transformation that has wrapped them up in storm. It has disrupted an employee's daily work cycle, with changes and tools being brought into the picture to help, guide, and motivate them to strive harder for perfection. The education sector is no different: this field has embraced and evolved to make the process of learning more informative, engaging and fun for today's generation by incorporating technology that, a few years ago, could not be imagined to fit into a classroom space. Machine Learning enables teachers to find patterns in their students study methods, while AR and VR ensure of a student's complete attention by teleporting them to a whole new world. A number of examples of such innovation can be listed, with one such example being the Digital Gradebook.
What is a Digital Gradebook?
A digital gradebook essentially serves the purpose of an online gradebook for schools, that allows instant information access and transparency about a child's progress. This is an increasingly popular tool that is significantly shaping the way student assessments are conducted in educational institutions. A typical online gradebook is a web-based software that offers access to teachers, students and parents, and allows sharing of academic information between the parties.
Don't be mistaken: a gradebook doesn't just show you the grades of a student for a specific subject. It also holds information regarding assignment details, instructor notes, feedback, downloads, student and parent queries, and so on.
The Benefits of Digital Gradebooks
For you lovely teachers,
As a teacher, you are entrusted the duty of educating the younger generation of the country, as well as handling a huge amount of information and data throughout a single academic year. Handling all of this data means spending lesser time on focusing on improving the quality of your teaching methods and a student's progress.
Digital gradebooks have brought about spectacular innovations in teaching, where instructor no longer have to worry about maintaining and protecting the abundant volumes of student grading documents manually. This gradebook allows a teacher to input in grades in a fast and efficient manner, and also makes a note of each grade entered. All information stored in the Digital Gradebook are preserved and protected with external requirements. Also, a lot of these digital gradebooks are cloud-based, so every piece of data can be easily stored, analyzed and retrieved at any time.
Digital gradebooks also provides students with 24/7 access to grades, activity calendars, assignment notes, instructor feedback, etc. This cuts down a teacher's work to a little less than half: as a teacher you not only reduce the time you spend on checking and replying to dozens of emails, but also waste time in sharing assignment reviews and scores of the students in the class with their parents. Along with entering scores, digital gradebooks are regularly updated to automate tasks that report those scores to the administration and students.
For the students,
Just as this innovation has made life easier for teachers, it has done so for students too, offering them a whole new experience in learning. It helps students set their own goals, track their progress and identify gaps in their learning so that they can focus more on those areas. These not only help students view their scores, but also helps them add notes to assigned grades, record mistakes, and get timely feedback.
Most gradebooks also have a notification system that alerts students as soon as their grades are updated. Students can ask questions about their grades faster and obtain quick responses this way. They can also check the list of current and upcoming courses and assignments, as well as download any learning materials and files related to the assignments.
It was noted that the missed work dropped by 40%, with performance in terms of grades improving by 5-8%.
Best Gradebooks for Teachers and Instructors
ThinkWave.
ThinkWave is an online gradebook that features an intuitive, simple and clean interface designed to ensure easy navigation. For various groups, the teacher doesn't have to switch accounts to access them separately, but only requires a single account. This is a cloud-based software that doesn't have to be installed on various systems, and can be accessed from any devices in any location.
Jupiter iO.
Jupiter iO is an all-inclusive gradebook offered by Jupiter Ed, which is an EdTech company that has been operating since 2004. This provides teachers with options to assess students online, analyze results instantly, keep students informed of any grades and assignments, track student performance in real-time and personalize lessons for individual students. It also enables anywhere-anytime learning.
JumpRope.
The JumpRope gradebook is designed to offer a standard-based solution that's adaptable to all different learning environments. Standard-based solution means that student assessments can be aligned with one or many standards, which means that teachers can divide a course into units and add standards for a better performance tracking.
An important feature is that it allows instructors to assess students on habits of work besides academic standards to generate and convey a complete picture of a student's progress that can then be shared with the students and their parents. It also generate transcripts that are totally compatible with graduation requirements.
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