Engrade.com!

Here is my pretend class that I created in Engrade - I loved using this extremely user-friendly grading/attendance program! Although I don't currently have a real class, I could see how much easier the grading process would be. I love the feature where you can weight the grades, that would be extrememly important to me, not to mention the feature where you could click on "drop the lowest grade?" As a first time teacher, this program had all the elements I could possibly envision, including attendance. I would have to keep using it for a longer period of time, in a real-life scenario to have any ideas or suggestions for improvement.

One of the best parts about it, though, is that students can access their own grades and keep track of how they're doing - often I hear students asking teachers to go over their grades so far, they've lost this or that project that had the original grade on it, etc. This feature, that students can log in for themselves, is extremely useful in this day and age where there's a big push to get students to take ownership over their education! Parents would love it as well, so that they could keep track of what grades their children are receiving all semester long. Both students and parents could make appropriate changes and suggestions as they keep better track of grades and attendance. Obviously what's lacking for parents is to see WHY their children received the grade they did, but then hopefully the student saved the actual hard copy of the project or test so that their parents could look at them if need be. My best guess - students would like having access to their account, but wouldn't like for their parents to have that same access!