How much time do you spend creating and grading exams? Undoubtedly, you should devote some of your productive time as a teacher into assessing students’ performance; apart from teaching, of course. However, if you find yourself spending too much time putting up grades and doing calculations, it probably means you’re dealing with an overhead of marking workload. The good news is, with a gradebook calculator for teachers you can greatly speed up the whole process.
As a matter of fact, there are plenty of good solutions available online — some offered even for free — that help you do the math part of the grading. However, the problem with grading, as a task, is not merely related to calculations. There are some extra headaches and hassles that burden teachers with extra mental work; filing marks and sharing grades when needed, to name a few. So, what can you do about it?
Teachers struggling with gradebooks: when outdated solutions are not enough
If you use old-school ways to do your grading, this may be the time to reevaluate both the methods and tools you use, as a whole. Why? Simply because you’re depriving yourself of precious time; time you could spend on polishing your teaching methods or doing activities with your family.
Speaking of time wasted, this may be the case, when you spend too much time struggling to make sense of Excel spreadsheets. Equally time-consuming is when you do the math calculations by hand; and then count on paper-based gradebooks to keep a record of your grades.
If you think that taking on smaller classes is the solution, in hope that they’ll be less demanding to solve the problem, think twice. The same goes for when you prepare fewer assignments to — kind of — balance your workload. You see my point, right?
To make matters worse, it’s certain that, from time to time, you may have to deal with some extra hassles, such as the following:
- Forgot your paper-based gradebooks at home the day you needed to share them with parents.
- Lost your (paper-based) gradebooks and had no backup.
- Forgot your paper gradebook in class and students got to see the grades and comments you probably had included on the side.
- Spent all weekend grading, evaluating assessments, calculating averages, finally storing them on your personal file system — your paper-based gradebook; only to have to share them with administrators later. That is to say, filling in your marks on fresh template forms, starting from the top.
Do you see yourself in one (or more) of these scenarios? You probably do. In all truthfulness, with a gradebook calculator for teachers, you surely wouldn’t. Let’s see how a gradebook calculator helps.
Getting administrators and parents in the game and how do teachers’ gradebooks affect them?
Apart from the time you spend preparing your gradebooks, you also need to take care of the way you share them with administrators, students and parents, as well. Most of the time, that would probably mean some extra workload for you, as a teacher. Be it because things didn’t go as planned or simply because you don’t have a consistent way of storing and sharing gradebooks in your school, altogether.
All in all, lacking a proper gradebook calculator for teachers, translates not only into additional handoffs between administrators and teachers; it also leads to essentially cutting parents off their children’s progress. The latter will become clear once we get into explaining the pros of a gradebook calculator for teachers, such as the one included with DreamClass. In short, you’ll see what you’ve been missing so far; so read on!
What’s in a gradebook calculator for teachers, such as DreamClass?
A short answer to that question would be the following: everything you need regarding gradebook management; regardless of the role you hold; teacher or administrator.
Store grades online and share them with administrators, students and parents
With DreamClass’ gradebook calculator for teachers, not only do you get to have all the grade calculations you need automatically done for you; you can also store grades online and have them instantly shared with all the stakeholders. Namely, with administrators; which is, by default, how it works. In addition to this, you’ll be able to share them with students and parents; that is, provided that you’ve given them access to their personalized portal accounts.
Get averages and weighted averages
Now that we’ve made it clear that both sharing gradebooks and having an online backup is available in DreamClass, let’s focus on the calculations. In short, grade calculations are done automatically. That is to say, once you’ve filled in your students’ scores, you automatically have the averages or weighted averages calculated for you. Averages give you insights regarding the performance of your Class, as a whole; or regarding each one of your students.
Not just a gradebook calculator for teachers
To further explain, since our solution is not merely a gradebook app, you get to create students’ profiles, classes, subjects and any other entities you may need to run your school. All in all, with DreamClass’ gradebooks, you have all the information you need to manage your students’ performance.
Recently, we got our gradebook functionality updated, adding categories for grades. More specifically, we made the structure of the gradebook much more sophisticated. And that’s because we aim to give teachers some flexibility in the way they group grades. Teachers can now have automated calculations that make sense for them. You may find more about our new gradebook functionality in our latest release notes.
Summing it up
Grading is, undoubtedly, a time-consuming process. Especially when you use obsolete methods, such as Excel files or paper-based gradebooks. In doing so, you’re burdening yourself with a type of hassle that could be avoided. And that’s with a gradebook calculator for teachers, such as DreamClass. With our solution, you won’t only manage to save yourself the headache of tedious math calculations; you’ll also offer yourself — and your school — a tool that will make student performance monitoring a breeze.
