Gradekeeper by Daniel Ethier is a cross-platform spreadsheet type program. theGRADER’s strength is its interface window that doesn’t overwhelm those who’d prefer spreadsheets stay in the bean counter’s domain. I’m so used to the spreadsheet format of electronic gradebooks that I found theGRADER difficult to use, but I think that was just me! I also couldn’t find a raw score setting or view all students command in the application. This PowerPC only application is designed to be simple and quick but still store student information, comments, assignments, and calculate percentages and assign letter grades for an entire class throughout a course. Than’l Interactive Design offers theGRADER (1104K). As the Read Me says, “Open the sample class and play around with it for a rough idea of how the program works.” Teacher’s Aide (84K) by Ryan Koopmans is another older, but still functional Mac-only gradebook. This one won’t fit on a floppy disk for portability, but it will do everything for you except brush your teeth – once you figure it all out. Built upon a relational database engine for flexibility and speed, it also carries a database type learning curve! The documentation is provided in a well-organized and thorough PDF document, along with a good tutorial. While not updated since 1996, I couldn’t make the Eagle crash under Mac OS 9, and the author states the program was targeted to work on a Mac LC under System 6.0.5 or later! ZDNet didn’t like it much in their review, but I found it about average for gradebooks.įirst Class Gradebook 1.5b5 (1950K) from First Class Systems weighs in as a very attractive PowerPC or 68K offering. The author chose a spreadsheet appearance to mimic the appearance of a traditional paper gradebook. It functions well on 68K and PowerPC Macs. The venerable Eagle Gradebook is a Macintosh-only freeware offering by Rex Evans. If you’re searching for a computer gradebook, I think you’ll be able to find one that suits your needs and budget from the listing below. (If they flunked the Mac OS 9 test, I omitted them from this article.) For organization (and possibly impartiality), I’ve listed the gradebook programs I’ve found in order from freeware to the most expensive and in alphabetical order within that organization. I’ve only used one of them extensively, but I have taken a good peek at all the rest and checked for compatibility under Mac OS 9. Not surprisingly, many of the programs below are cross-platform.Įach of these programs has its own learning curve. While at ZDNet, I did a similar search on the Windows side and was surprised to see that there was near parity in the number of offerings in gradebooks for both Mac and Windows. I grabbed a basic list of gradebooks from the Pure Mac Software Teaching Aids page and found a few other titles on ZDNet and elsewhere. Careful backups and/or hard copies (paper printouts) aren’t a bad idea either! Once you get over your initial fear of losing your “gradebook” – an unforgivable sin in the education world – computer gradebooks are really a blast. Used well, they can even help the dedicated teacher in analyzing scores and improving instruction. For the rest of us party animals, grades mean at least a near “all-nighter” of entering scores and marking report cards.įortunately, there are lots of very good software titles that can speed the task of recording and averaging grades. If they’re the diligent sort, they’ve spent every evening of the grading period carefully recording and averaging their students’ scores. 1999 – Every six to nine weeks, teachers face one of their less favorite tasks – grades.
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