1st+Class+Software

=1st Class Software=

Introduction; uses & benefits:
Since the 1990s electronic gradebooks have been in existence within school systems. However, it has only been recently that the electronic gradebooks have become web-based. Educators have, in the past, spent countless hours adding up scores manually and have not always had the most up-to-date class grades for students. As the evolution of the personal computer and spreadsheet software became more commonly used for a variety of functions, educators began to use it as a means of calculating student scores. But, again it was not always up to date and viewer friendly. Within the last decade, electronic gradebooks have cut down grading drastically. Educators are always looking for ways to cut down the amount of time grading, entering the grade, and posting the grade. In the research article, “Improving Junior High School Teacher Computer Literacy through the Use of an Electronic Gradebook” the study found using an electronic gradebook for a teacher who had five classes would save almost three hours per week or 27 hours per grading period (Shirley, 1996). Within the last three to five years electronic gradebooks have gone from being only viewed on the educator's personal computer to being viewed by administrators, students, and parents via the web. With so many features and products on the market, I narrowed the choice down to 1st Class Software gradebook. After looking at many web-based software packages; Micrograde, Snapgrades, Easy Grade Pro 4.0, and Excel, I decided that this product was the easiest to use, manipulate and design. The advantages of using a web-based product is that it allows the educator to keep both parents and students informed of current grades, missing assignments, and will allow the educator to comment on particular assignments. Along with grades, the software will also allow educators the ability to email current grade status, inform parents of missing work, or print out progress reports with the click of a button.

Weaknesses & challenges:
The challenges, as with any software, are the educator’s responsibility to learn the software and use it in a way that is both beneficial to the student, parent and educator alike. Along with the educator’s responsibility to learn software, Shirley states "computer availability, adequate instructions and motivation are important elements in effective classroom." Along with educator challenges, there are also technology issues to contend with such as; internet connections, server, privacy, ease of navigation within the site that could either be a challenge or weakness. One possible weakness is parents and students not using the site on a regular basis.

Example of application in online classroom:
1st Class Software claims to “provide perhaps the easiest interface and most report and feature rich grading program on the market today with a built in web server. Educator's can turn their computer in a webserver to keep students and parents up to date. It also has a powerful feature to mail those same reports out to the parents and students.”  Using information from an eighth grade computer/career exploration class, which could easily be transitioned to an online course, an electronic gradebook was developed as an example. See figure 1.

Figure 1

The above figure gives an overview of the course name, student name, student id, student's grade average, and points per assignment. The tabs at the top of the page allow the user to click on individual categories that have been setup by the educator. For example, selecting attendance as the category, 1st class would display the days absent or late for the week.

Along with various ways of viewing student’s grade; there are also a variety of ways to print reports. The software allows the educator to print progress reports, graphs in a variety of different ways to see how the class did as a whole on an assignment or individually on assignments. Figure 2 below illustrates a graph of all eighth grade assignments with students being identified by color.

Figure 2.

Learning objective:

This type of software easily allows the educator to transfer any type of graded assignments into an easily accessible tool for the student. Grades are still viewed as being extremely important part of any course and having a web based gradebook will allow the connection of course objectives to the student’s activities in either an online or traditional classroom environment.