Enter your grades only once.
Once you have entered your grades into an electronic gradebook software program your work is done. Reports can be produced with the click of a mouse button. With a paper gradebook producing reports and doing analysis means typing your grades all over again into a calculator or spreadsheet (or tabulating the grades by hand - even worse!). A teacher with an average workload might teach 5 course sections with about 30 students in each class. During the course of a year this teacher might grade the students on 50 activities (Assignments, Labs, Tests, Quizes, Homework, etc.). That works out to 5x30x50 = 7500 Grades! Calculating the class average means punching 7500 grades into a calculator. Then later progress reports and report cards must be produced. Again and again 7500 grades must be manually manipulated. Teacher's often find efficient ways to avoid doing these calculations over and over but in the end efficiency is achieved at the parent's and student's expense because the teacher naturally produces less reports, less often. Since reports aren't done very often students and parents all too frequently are unaware of problems that could have been caught and fixed if discovered by timely reports.
Avoid embarrassing mistakes.
Continuing the above example let's consider accuracy. After you add up 7500 grades what do you think the odds of making at least 1 mistake are? Even if you are very careful, unfortunately you are human and mistakes are inevitable. Unfortunately principals and parents are often not so understanding when you are explaining why you calculated the final grade incorrectly. With an electronic gradebook it is grades are easily justified by printing out a detailed report for the student in question.
See the forest, not the trees.
Instead of spending hours with your head down calculating grades you can spend your time running a wide variety of comprehensive reports, discovering valuable information about how your students are doing. Moreover, you can use realtime class averages and other statistics to enhance your own performance.
Keep the students and parents up to date.
How many times have you heard words to this effect? "Why didn't you tell me Johnny wasn't doing well. We would have done something about it. Now it is too late." All the blame is put squarely on you. Don't let yourself get into this position. Most modern grade book programs allow the students and parents to see their grades on the school website. In addition, good grade book programs have another feature that allows you to email reports to the parents at any time. There can be no excuse of "I didn't know" with these advanced features.
Do "What if" scenarios easily.
Have you ever wondered. If I dropped the lowest grade, what would happen to the class average? What if I dropped the two lowest grades? Etc. With an electronic gradebook you can try out these scenarios instantly without any effort.
Increase your professionalism.
Instead of having just a single progress
report for a student, have a report package ready for parent - teacher interviews.
Come prepared with several reports backing up everything so you can field any
questions on the spot and be able to back them up.
Get your free GradeBook now.