Cat Tech

As part of the Course Status Report discussion at last week's Academic Council meeting, the issue came up of making grade reporting more informative. EasyGrade Pro has two built-in options that enable teachers to provide additional feedback when entering grades; this feedback is viewable by students and parents alike when grades are published to the web or emailed out by teachers.

The first way of providing additional feedback for an individual grade in EasyGrade Pro is by using footnotes. Simply right-click on a grade and choose a footnote from the pop-up list.

If you do not like the list of available footnotes, they are very easy to change. At the bottom of the list (marked in orange above) is a link that will allow you to change the footnotes. Please note that

• the list of footnotes is only for the current class; you can define a separate list for each of your classes, and
• footnotes are best for often-repeated remarks, such as "Score reduced because assignment turned in late."

The second way to provide additional feedback is using a Score Note. This is a free-form comment field that allows you to provide a greater degree of feedback than the Footnotes. To access this, double-click on a grade, and the following box will appear.

The Score Note function defaults to a private state; anything typed in is for the teacher only. To make the remarks viewable to students, per the yellow above, choose the second option, "Note is for student." After you have done this once, the Score Note will remember your selection, and any future Score Notes will be pre-set for students to see.

Whether you use Footnotes or the Score Note feature, when you publish grades to the internet or email them out, the additional feedback that you have entered will also be published (unless you kept the Score Note set to "Note is for teacher.")

Using the Footnotes for oft-repeated feedback or the Score Note for more detailed comments, EasyGrade pro provides two ways for teachers to provide additional information on an individual grade.

[To see other posts related to EasyGrade Pro, click on the EGP tag to the right.]