Online Grading

Online grading has been something that has taken schools by storm. When I first began teaching, which was not that long ago; I remember hand writing my grades in the grade book and breaking out my calculator and doing averages. That was in 2002! After I finally got my “steady” job and learned from my mentor to do grades on Excel~ things got easier, but it was always a multi-step process. First you had to record the grades, post the grades, then once your averages were done on Excel you would have to record the grades using the districts reporting method. In our case, it was filling in bubble sheets to record grades for report cards. (Talk about a confusing process!! In order to give a child a “G” you would have to fill in a totally different code for the bubble sheets… I think I have blocked out the process because it was truly that painful!! :) )
With “InteGrade Pro you can manages students’ scores, assignments, and obtain up-to-the-minute calculations on grades, which helps teachers to track student performance over the duration of a course. With InteGrade Pro, teachers can organize tasks and put them into categories such as homework, quiz, or lab exercises. You can reward good performance with bonus scores and correct poor performance by graphically showing a student where they stand. At the end of a term, InteGrade Pro can transmit final grades back to the main office system to print report cards, reducing administrative time and effort” (description taken from Pearson web page).
This process has made life easier for the teacher. It’s like one stop shopping! You obtain the grades, you plug them into InterGrade Pro and the calculations and weighting is done for you. Also, since InterGrade Pro is linked to our main server in Sayreville, no further work needs to be done to submit the grades. The only “extra” step the teacher has to perform at the end of a semester is to set up end term spreadsheets. Just a few clicks and you are finished. It really does make the administration part of teacher a heck of a lot easier.
When having a choice between Excel and InterGrade Pro, the choice is obvious! InterGrade Pro has made my life as a teacher a bit easier. Excel was a wonder choice when that was all that was offered. But since technology has burst into the classroom, programs such as InterGrade Pro have made the reporting process a less overwhelming task.