Hello Dopers, specifically doper educators/educational administrators!
I work for a non-profit in an education setting and am in the need of some advice. We have about twenty students all together, but have several different types of “class” to track, which include everything from basic skills testing scores, GED students, High School students, College students, and students working on a Nationally recognized construction curriculum and testing. We also have to track attendance and daily evaluations of students for reporting and pay reasons. Basically, all this is tracked through a large number of Excel documents, which are shared on our network and accessible to everyone, and tied together into a summary excel workbook that pulls from several sources. We talked today about upgrading to a one-program, one-file solution, using something like EasyGrade Pro. Before we invest in a few copies of it, though, I would like to know what you use? What would you suggest for our situation, which includes about 4-5 staff interacting in several different aspects of young people’s progress. It would need to be accessible by several of us, but we could get by with only one of us accessing it at a time, and our program that we use for sharing does not allow us to save over each others files, but saves as a copy if two are open at once.
Thanks in advance,
Brendon Small
It’s been a year since I’ve used it, but SnapGrades worked well for what I did. I didn’t try to expand it too much like you’d like to, but they offer a free demo, so it’s worth a look.
Our school district uses the Aeries system, which handles grades, attendance, testing, student info, schedules, and what have you. It’s designed for use across a number of platforms. I have no idea how much the sucker costs. When I ran my own gradebooks, I used Gradebook A+ for Windows with some success.
I tried out snapgrades today. It seemed to work really well for our basic applications, but I didn’t know if I could have two teachers able to access the same grade book and both edit it. Another thing I wondered about was if it could do scale scores (say, TABE scores, such as 450 level D, not just a percentage of 100). Also, the construction part is difficult, as it is a certification that can take as little as a week, but the assignments are all dependent on students (I don’t make them do the basic math stuff before getting to fractions, etc. for construction math, unless they need it, in which case they have to go over it with me) and the tests are basically regular percentage grades. When I signed up for the free service, it basically asked me if I should use ABCDF grades, or pass/fail grades, etc.
I will definitely look into Aeries. The internet here is sketchy at best tonight, but it looked promising at first glance.
EasyGrade Pro seems like it will do most of what we were looking to do, but if there was a nice free/shareware alternative, I would be glad to use it. My boss seems okay with paying the 300-400 for the program for all our computers, but I keep teaching the kids bits of Linux and about open source programs in general, so I like to explore the alternatives.
The Aeries system does look awesome, but man, 11k a school, and 2k-4k a year in support. We definitely don’t have the budget for that, but it would be pretty cool to have something that awesome. Maybe in the future, when I get to work for a school district instead of a private non-profit, something like this would be an option though.
Thanks! Brendon Small