Today is August 1st, a reminder that it is time to start making the transition from summer projects to preparations for the upcoming semester. Since I didn't go to Norway this summer, I have actually been working on my fall courses from time to time all summer. I have a lot of new ideas for my courses that I will be describing in more detail as I finish up my planning this month, but for now I will just post some links about online gradebooks, teaching practices, tech trends.
For the past several years, I have used the grading program "Easy Grade Pro" on my Mac. I recommend it highly since it is a powerful and flexible program, but I have been looking for a way to put my grades online so that the students can follow their own progress throughout the course. I could use the online gradebook in our course management system, Moodle, but I don't like the interface or the appearance of the Moodle gradebook. We also have 3-5 sections of students in one Moodle classroom, so it is more complicated to get the settings correct for all the classes. Instead I'm going to use, Engrade, a free online grading program. Engrade is actually more than just a grading program, providing web tools such as an online assignment calendar for managing an online classroom. However, I plan to use just the grading program since we make our own class web pages using Dreamweaver.
It is easy to set up a course in Engrade since you have the ability to copy information from previous courses you have created as well as to input settings and assignments into several courses at the same time. My grading scheme isn't overly complicated, but I was easily able to set my own grading scale, weight the different types of assignments (homework, participation, tests, etc.), and add the students and assignments to the courses. Adding grades to the gradebook will be slightly less efficient than with Easy Grade Pro, simply because you can only see the column of students and 8 assignments at any one time. However, it shouldn't be a problem as long as I enter the grades regularly so that I don't have to click back and forth between assignments.
I'm hoping that the benefits of using Engrade will outweigh the slightly clunky interface. I will be able to enter grades from any networked computer, and the students will be able to log in and view their current grade anytime during the course. Engrade creates a page for each teacher and provides students with a login so that they can see their grades. See my Engrade page here. By the way, I don't ever remember having my gradebook set up an entire month before school starts!
After my gradebook was set up, I spent a couple of hours looking at current trends for enhancing teaching through the use of technology. It is fun to see the creative ways teachers are incorporating collaborative learning and creative expression through the use of a variety of social media and Web 2.0 tools. If you are interested in such things, here are a few of the best links I found:
Horizon Report 2008 (The New Media Consortium and the Educause Learning Initiative): A five-year qualitative research effort that seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching. learning, or creative expressions within learning-focused organizations.
Web 2.0 Projects Book (Terry Freedman): A listing of 60 projects using Web 2.0 tools. Organized by age group.
Teaching Tips (Honolulu Community College)