Report Cards
'Tis the season to give grades.
Yup, 'tis November, which means I'm starting to set up first-term report cards. They go out at the end of the month along with parent/teacher interviews and all that fun stuff. And, as is typical at this time of year, I'm looking at a new, updated cyber report card that I have to figure out fully before starting to enter grades and comments.
Not that I'm complaining. Far as I can see so far, once I get the mechanics of this software figured out, these new report cards will automatically cut and paste comments at each of the four evaluation levels in each subject area right into each student's report card right from a file of evaluation exemplars based on the Ontario Curriculum. Sounds like a time saver to me.
After writing report cards for 20 years, it's still not much of a memory jump to remember the days when I had to hand-write 30 report cards three times a year. Oh, my, the writer's cramp and the huge amounts of time often writing the same comment over several reports. Moving report card writing over to computers was a glorious moment.
Now, never having any exposure to computers until I was in teacher's college, the cyber report card was a wondrous thing. It boggled my mind that the files of 30 report cards could fit onto one tiny square of plastic that I could carry in my pocket. It was like something right out of Star Trek. No more carrying around huge sheaves of report cards for writing. Plus, typing was -so- much easier than hand-writing and the cut and paste feature over several report cards was the greatest invention for teachers that I could imagine.
Then I discovered all the exemplars for report card comments could be accessed right from the software as well, and cut and pasted into individual reports, and then I was taught how to take an common comment for, say, all the "A" students in any given subject and paste that comment across all the relevant report cards. It's making the drudgery of report cards just a little bit simpler all the time.
Now, cyber reports aren't all rosy. There was the time that the report card spell check razed through my reports without my knowledge and changed the names of my students throughout to similar sounding words like "Jangle" and "Dill". I printed them out without noticing it and my principal was highly bemused to see that "Jangle understands all the concepts taught in geometry this term.". It took some time to correct that helpful spell check, I'll tell you. My principal still teases me about it.
Still, when it comes to reports, getting started is half the battle to get the momentum going and I've gotten started today.
Question: Do you have some drudgery task at work that comes up systematically and just can't be avoided? Like death and taxes, teachers know they're going to face report cards three times a year. Do you have an equivalent task?
Yup, 'tis November, which means I'm starting to set up first-term report cards. They go out at the end of the month along with parent/teacher interviews and all that fun stuff. And, as is typical at this time of year, I'm looking at a new, updated cyber report card that I have to figure out fully before starting to enter grades and comments.
Not that I'm complaining. Far as I can see so far, once I get the mechanics of this software figured out, these new report cards will automatically cut and paste comments at each of the four evaluation levels in each subject area right into each student's report card right from a file of evaluation exemplars based on the Ontario Curriculum. Sounds like a time saver to me.
After writing report cards for 20 years, it's still not much of a memory jump to remember the days when I had to hand-write 30 report cards three times a year. Oh, my, the writer's cramp and the huge amounts of time often writing the same comment over several reports. Moving report card writing over to computers was a glorious moment.
Now, never having any exposure to computers until I was in teacher's college, the cyber report card was a wondrous thing. It boggled my mind that the files of 30 report cards could fit onto one tiny square of plastic that I could carry in my pocket. It was like something right out of Star Trek. No more carrying around huge sheaves of report cards for writing. Plus, typing was -so- much easier than hand-writing and the cut and paste feature over several report cards was the greatest invention for teachers that I could imagine.
Then I discovered all the exemplars for report card comments could be accessed right from the software as well, and cut and pasted into individual reports, and then I was taught how to take an common comment for, say, all the "A" students in any given subject and paste that comment across all the relevant report cards. It's making the drudgery of report cards just a little bit simpler all the time.
Now, cyber reports aren't all rosy. There was the time that the report card spell check razed through my reports without my knowledge and changed the names of my students throughout to similar sounding words like "Jangle" and "Dill". I printed them out without noticing it and my principal was highly bemused to see that "Jangle understands all the concepts taught in geometry this term.". It took some time to correct that helpful spell check, I'll tell you. My principal still teases me about it.
Still, when it comes to reports, getting started is half the battle to get the momentum going and I've gotten started today.
Question: Do you have some drudgery task at work that comes up systematically and just can't be avoided? Like death and taxes, teachers know they're going to face report cards three times a year. Do you have an equivalent task?