Forgive the digression: I was talking with a friend yesterday as we were skiing and he mentioned Craig Medred’s latest article, which led to a discussion about how you learn from people’s mistakes. Here we go:
Twice in the last week, teachers at SAHS have lost grades on their students with the only recovery being going onto their website and downloading all of the students files and recording data back into the gradebook from each individual’s grade file. (They were also very lucky that they uploaded their grades before their computer problems.) This is inappropriate.
Your gradebook is a legal document that is a record of what goes on in your classroom. It is necessary to ensure its integrity. There are two ways of doing this:
1) Keep a written/printed copy of all of your grades. A backup can be your electronic copy. (In the days before computerized grade calculations, having a student steal a teacher’s gradebook was one of their worst fears.) If you type your grades directly into the computer and then print them out daily, this leads to going through a large amount of paper. If you start with a gradebook and type from that, it uses very little paper.
2) Keep all of your grades electronically with no written/printed copy, but with ‘bomb-proof’ backups. A backup should be made every time that you enter grades and it should be kept on a separate device (so that if one computer system dies, you are still covered). At the very least, I would keep a copy on my flash drive (probably my master copy) and back it up at school and at home. This method also requires a firm understanding of how if you have a corrupted file that you back up, what you end up with is a copy of the corrupted file.
One should also be aware that Easy Grade Pro is a disk-based program rather than memory-based, meaning that as you make changes, they are immediately transferred to the copy that is saved on your disk. This is good when it works, but if a mistake is made or a computer crashes, the file can easily become corrupt.
I do not recommend method 2) but it can be done responsibly with very careful attention to your file backups. I have always used a written gradebook as a starting point, with data entry into the computer. I believe that with a good system it is as (or actually, more) efficient than an all electronic gradebook.
In the past I have offered training in the ‘Tryon gradebook method’ which entails writing down every grade for every student in a book and then typing them into a computer. While some teachers have adopted it, used it, and say they like it very much, my impression is that it is not very popular and I have not routinely advertised training in it. I would be happy to provide individual training for anyone who would like it. A picture of a sample gradebook and a few points of discussion are posted on my Tech Pages.
Back to Tryon's Old School Gradebook