calling all teachers

if your school is a normal school and uses ncwise for grades, this will not help you at all. but if your school is silly like mine, and has no grading program for you, or encourages you to use the awful, awful edHelper... i am here with good news!

i was searching for a good (free) online grading program, and i came across engrade. engrade allows you to set up your whole gradebook and calendar online. you can enter classes, weighting of grade types, take attendance, etc. it will print off student progress reports, missing work reports, gradebooks, and even has room for comments. the program has been easy to use (took me about 10 mins to set up two classes), and so far seems stable. i always keep a paper gradebook just in case, but this seems legit.

the even cooler part of this program is that you can give your kids access to a portal for students where they can check their grades, check the assignment calendar, and (if you want) send you messages with grade questions. it could alleviate a lot of the "what's my grade now?" questions that are so obnoxious for us to hear all the time, and when you print off a report, it even shows what category each assignment falls under, and what percentage of the total grade that category represents.

i don't know if this is helpful to any of you, but it gets a mrs. korhonen thumbs-up so far!