What do you use for Elementary Report cards?

I am in charge of the elementary report cards for my district....although we aren't hand-writing them, we are using Microsoft Excel for the grading and then we have the teachers do a mail-merge to get their report cards to print out and send home. We have tried to make this as easy as possible, writing code that does the merge automatically for them, but I still think it's too complicated for most people, especially people who don't get Excel. (Plus a nightmare for myself supporting all these elementary schools!)

I am curious what other schools are using? Your likes/dislikes? I am looking for something mainly for semester grades, but would be nice if it was an integrated system that would do daily grades as well as semester grades. Plus I have to have the same report card across the district, so would need to be able to standardize that. I have different report cards for each grade level. We also have different grades for each area if you will and then numeric scoring for sub areas for each content area. So we might have a grade for "Communication Arts" but then the student is scored a 1-3 on different items within that grade, like effort in reading, reads fluently, etc. This varies by each grade level.

Anyway, welcome any ideas/thoughts!

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Permalink Reply by Maria Devauld on January 9, 2009 at 12:38pm

I'm from Canada, I've been in two provinces and both use Esis. The product has been customized for the province I am in now. All districts within the province must enter their final grades into it. It also has the ability to give access to parents to see their childs marks/grades if you are using the grade book function. Works for all levels... although the elementary level is a little harder to get to. It doesn't get a 10/10, because there are still some things that need to be worked out. But I would give it at least a 6/10.

May not help you... but I figured I would mention it. :-)

Permalink Reply by Tanya Travis on January 10, 2009 at 7:54am

My district uses Power Teacher. The product has the ability to accessed from home or school, can create summary reports that are great for parent conferences, grades can be accessed by parents, and it includes additional functions such as attendance, student information, etc. The program is extremely easy to use and is popular with teachers.

Permalink Reply by James Edward Charles Webber on January 10, 2009 at 8:57am

A resource, book

http://www.pegtyre.com/

Permalink Reply by Terry Parent on January 10, 2009 at 9:52am

Our school just moved over to a web-based grading program. It's called Gradelink. Check them out at www.gradelink.com. Before this we were filling out grades by hand. This has changed our school greatly. The parents are also informed of their child grades daily. This is a great communication builder between teachers, parents, and students. Parents can also enable alerts when students get certain grades. And because it's web-based you don't need to install anything on your computer.

Permalink Reply by Evaggelos on January 11, 2009 at 6:35pm

The company I work for, Online School Data, specializes in the creation of custom report cards. There are plenty of companies that provide generic tools that generate report cards. We are a little different. We work with the school district and generate report cards that cannot be done with these generic tools. The district gives us the paper copy of the report card and we make them online accessible. Additionally, another strength of ours is the kind of support we provide.

The data is accessed and managed online. Our customers are amazed with the speed of our servers and the data is accessed without a problem even when modems are used.

Evan

Permalink Reply by Jenny on January 13, 2009 at 10:53am

As a teacher, I used to use Excel also, so I feel your pain :) - especially when it came to calculating grades by standards and itemized indicators written by my school. Definitely a time-consuming process!

I recently joined a company (Software Answers) that makes a web-based grade book called ProgressBook. It automatically generates standards-based report cards, customized by your district. It saves teachers a lot of time.

Let me know if you'd like me to put you in touch with a district that already uses ProgressBook for their elementary report cards to get their insights.

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