Hassle-Free Report Cards
Writing report cards can be a very stressful time for teachers: there may be outstanding assignments to mark; weighted averages must be computed for each reporting element for each student; subjective assessments must be made regarding student attitudes and behaviour; and teachers must generate constructive comments to pass on to parents.
In the current technological age there is a strong parental expectation that report cards will be printed by computer and have a professional appearance. Parents expect to see cumulative information from all terms on each report card, and maybe even comments from previous terms. While re-use of the same hard-copy report card from term to term may have worked when report cards were written manually, it is not practical when printing them by computer. Therefore, new report cards must be printed each term.
Designing, recording and printing report cards by computer is not a trivial exercise. While this can be done using standard office software templates (e.g. Excel spreadsheets, Word or Power Point documents), the transfer of information between teachers, and the management of individual student data files from term to term, is problematic. Creating and maintaining report templates may be the responsibility of each teacher, as well as entering student names into individual files at the beginning of each year. When all appears ready to print, documents created for the default printer on a teachers PC often fail to print as expected on another printer.
While some of these issues may be alleviated by installing a local area network (LAN) and making a common high-quality printer available to all staff via the LAN, other issues can only be resolved by adopting a centralized system of data management such as that provided by the Overseer suite of applications.
Use of Predefined Templates
With Overseer, teachers need not be responsible for the design and maintenance of report card templates. This role may be assigned to administrative staff, the school’s Education Committee, or possibly a design team assembled for this purpose by a school association.
Schools have the option of using report card templates designed by either of two methods.
The default report card design option supports the definition of subject areas and subject components to be used on report cards, but does not give much flexibility in the report card layout and design details. This option comes with Overseer Admin which is typically made available to office staff only.
The custom report card design option makes use of a separate Overseer Reports software application to design the appearance of report cards in detail, including the choice of fonts, a choice of 3 paper sizes and 5 layout formats, the addition of logos, etc. This option gives scope for a school association or individual school to custom design report cards, typically one per division, for use by one or more classes within Overseer.
Both default and custom report card designs may be used in conjunction with Overseer LAN and Overseer Grades. In fact, it is possible to use default report cards for some classes and custom report cards for others.
Central
Data Management System
Primary responsibility for establishing and maintaining a school database is given to secretarial staff within Overseer. This includes managing student enrolment; assigning students to classes; installing report card templates; assigning teacher duties for home room classes, subject areas and subject components; and allocating Overseer user licenses to teachers.
If the Overseer database and software applications are installed by network support personnel, then teachers should have immediate access to student data and report card templates for personal use, with minimal configuration effort. The one configuration task which might fall to individual teachers is the installation of Overseer Grades on their home computers, if they choose to record student marks and comments on their home PCs. This is a very simple process.
Portable Gradebook
Once office staff have fully configured the school’s central database for a new school year, each teacher can create and maintain a personal Grades database for the purpose of tracking student marks on every test (or assignment) during each term. Marks may be entered in any approved marking scheme (via Overseer Grades), and are automatically averaged using teacher-assigned weights for each test. At the end of term, teachers simply need to refine the weights assigned to all tests, then import the weighted average marks into the master Overseer database (via Overseer LAN).
Teachers may also log internal (i.e confidential) comments on student progress, together with student marks, for each subject area. These can be very timely and helpful at the end of term as a source of nuggets to be transferred to report cards as formal comments to parents. This takes some of the pressure off teachers at report card time, provided they have faithfully logged comments on student work during each term.
A single-step import task (via Overseer LAN) enables a teacher to import all student marks and/or comments for which he/she is responsible to the master database. When all teachers have completed this step, all data should be in place on the master database for final editing and printing.
Where responsibility for a class is shared by more than one teacher, a mechanism exists whereby subject component teachers can pass a copy of their term marks and comments to the subject area head for integration at the subject area level. Similarly, subject area heads may pass a copy of their term marks and comments to the class home-room teacher who has responsibility for generating term summary comments.
Efficient
Editing and Printing
If using Overseer Grades, then all student marks, attendance information and comments required to print report cards will be available for viewing and printing via Overseer LAN after all teachers have imported term data from their Grades databases.
If not using Overseer Grades, then teachers may enter all term marks, attendance information and comments directly via Overseer LAN at the end of each term.
In both cases, final editing of report card content and printing of report cards can be performed by any teacher with responsibility for any portion of a student’s program. Printing of report cards can be performed for an entire class in one step, or for individual students. With a modern printer, it is feasible for Overseer LAN to print as many as four double-sided color report cards per minute.
Once the content is finalized for a given term, it will be retained in the master database for reproduction on report cards for subsequent terms for the balance of the school year.
