• Home
• About Edline
• Success Stories
• Edline Schools in the News
• Web site enables parents to check grades and assignments from home

Web site enables parents to check grades and assignments from home

Wapole Times - August 25, 2005

Tom Glynn, Staff writer

Parents of students at Bird Middle School and Walpole High can choose to have a flag wave on their computer screen at home or work whenever a teacher updates their youngsters’ grades or assignments on line.

The optional notification is a feature of a service introduced at Bird last year and is to be available at both schools this fall.

By going to the web, parents can learn how their youngsters are doing on the latest test and in the marking period so far, subject by subject. Parents can find out if their youngsters have been doing their home work. They can learn about the assignments and major projects.
Teachers also can use the system provided by a Chicago company to send individual notes to parents.

There were no complaints from students or parents as the Edline system was phased in last year. Bird Principal Sandra Esmond said.

In a school with 460 pupils, only 15 or so parents said they wanted to keep receiving reports on paper rather than through Edline, Esmond said. (Edline will not replace report cards.)

Edline provides a home page for each school and individual pages for teachers. The teachers’ pages can offer class information, assignments, calendars and links to relevant sites – an arrangement already familiar to young web users.

Beyond that, Edline provides individual pages for students and parents. Once activated, the pages can be accessed only with a user name and password chosen by their owners and unavailable to others.

On those pages, students and parents can click to see grades, assignments and perhaps other information including what’s missing.

Teachers, Esmond said, can also add short notes: Doing better, still talking too much,” for example. Progress reports for the last term at Bird were posted on Edline for all students.
It will be up to the individual teachers whether they want to receive email through the Edline pages, she said.

Teachers traditionally are reluctant to make their email addresses public, she said, but added that the five or six teachers at Bird who’ve tried it say it’s not as bad as you might think.

The student and parent pages also offer a combined calendar. Teachers and other staff can enter an event which then automatically shows up under the date for a whole class or other group. Click on the event and get a page that can offer full details, whether for a class trip or a project.

Edline improves communications all around, she said, noting that middle schoolers can be uncommunicative.

Now when a parent asks how it’s going at school, the conversation won’t end with a “fine” or a shrug, she said.

Esmond learned about Edline two years ago from a parent who experienced it in another school system and liked it.

The first year, there was no money. Last year, by combining a grant and PAC donations, Bird introduced in gradually.

To use Edline, teachers first have to use an electronic grade book – in this case, GradeQuick. They choose how the components of a grade quizzes, tests, classwork, homework – are to be weighed and then enter the numbers, creating a moving average.

Teachers were concerned that the system would take away important flexibility – the ability to nudge up a grade for a student who showed improving effort and progress over the course of a marking period, Esmond said. But they learned the software can handle that, too, she said.

Teachers generally seemed to like Edline last year, she said. They found that it provided closer contact with parents and cut down on telephoning, she said.

Edline also proved to have advantages for the students, she said. The moving average is an incentive for them to push at the end of a marking period. They also learn how low marks early in a marking period have a lasting effect, she said.

One student, Esmond recalled, showed up to hit the books before class after his father saw that he was missing two homework assignments.

This year, money for Edline is in the school budget. It works out to between $2 and $2.50 per student for the entire school year. She said. “A very reasonable cost.”

Johnson Middle school will not be getting Edline right away because some of the teachers’ computers there don’t have the power to handle it. The high school, which tried to run a similar system on its own servers, is switching to Edline because local hosting proved to be too heavy to burden for the WHS equipment, she said.

At the first Bird staff meeting of the year, teachers and administrators will discuss how often they will update Edline student and parent pages.

Esmond said she likes the idea of updating at the middle and end of each month schoolwide so that parents don’t have to keep checking.

Back to top