Online Gradebooks Come to the Classroom

For those of us who haven't had to use a gradebook recently, it may come as a surprise that lots of teachers now use online gradebooks. No more green notebooks or home-made Excel spreadsheets for the modern teacher, I guess.

It makes sense, given all the other forms of technology that are now in classrooms -- electronic whiteboards, online testing, plagiarism screeners, teacher-rating systems, PDAs. Gosh, teachers even have email now, I hear.

From what I'm told, there are quite a few different commercial systems out there, some with a per-teacher cost of between $30-75, others per-student at $12-14 per year.

That's a lot of money. So it's nice to know that there's at least one online grading system out there that was developed by classroom teachers and is free, called Gradeconnect, that is paid for through advertising rather than charges to schools or teachers.

There may be others just as good or more commonly in use. I haven't seen a decent review of online gradebooks, though I did find an article about the pros and cons of online course management systems (Trading Mules for Tractors), and a more recent list of some of the different systems over at Teacher Tools. There's also a short piece in NEA Today called Easy Marks.

Thanks to Ray Anger for getting me interested in this.