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MasteryScan is a new iPad app from MasteryConnect that turns your iPad into a bubble sheet scanner. With the free iPad app installed just take a picture of a bubble sheet and MasteryScanner will quickly grade it for you. The grades will automatically synchronize with your online MasteryConnect account.

"The new divide will be between those with wonder and curiosity and those without." "The world only cares what you can do with what you know," Couros said. He said he clashed with a teacher back home who complained that his approach would let students Google up the answers for her exams. His response: "If I can look up the answers to the questions on your test on Google, your questions suck."

Engineering lesson plans.  Sort by grade level.  

A great post about abolishing grades

"Everybody was a good student. The kids were just encouraged to do what they like to do and what was best, and there was a structure; there was a program. It's not you ran around doing anything you felt like. I skipped a grade, but I didn't pay any attention and no one else paid any attention. Just that I was the smallest kid in the class, but the idea that somebody is a good student; somebody is not a good student - it just never arose. There were tests, but they just gave information about what's going on. This is something we ought to be doing better. The kids weren't ranked; there were no grades. There's a lot of cooperative work and cooperative projects and they encouraged us. You know, study, challenging questions, and it was extremely successful. I remember everything very well. I went into the academic high school and it's kind of like a black hole. I was able to get all As and a scholarship to go into college. I might well not have gone, except for what I learned on my own."

A grade book, planner, diary, schedule and resource manager all in one app. Its spreadsheet engine will calculate averages as you input your assessment data. You can insert and edit any kind of information for a class, student and semester visually, no more boring spreadsheets. Scroll, expand, filter, export, import and view your information at any time. No internet connection is required. iDoceo will work with any kind of grading system, you can even create your own. You will not miss you old paper grade book again.

Do you have a child moving up to 4th grade? Or are you are a teacher who will be teaching this grade level for the first time?

"In coping with grading, it's important for graduate students and young professors to know that they are not alone and that this process takes time. Not everyone goes through every stage or processes the reality of grading in this order, but everyone experiences some version of at least two of these steps."

This article lists the experience that most teachers go through over a weekend when they are faced with a huge marking task, clearly identifying the 5 different stages that they will probably go through.

Children who read on grade level by the end of third grade are more successful in school, work, and in life. This KIDS COUNT special report affirms a commitment by the Casey Foundation to help ensure that all students are proficient in reading by the end of third grade and help narrow the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged children.

Grading team work can be made simpler by having team members grade themselves and their team members using this rubric. Teams can take turns grading a weekly discussion throughout the semester and save the instructor time while helping students develop critical thinking skills.

One has to be very critical with such rubrics. This one implies that argument is a negative trait and that to earn maximum points, one must always agree. The rubric communicates that this is what cooperation is all about. Agreement. Argument or constructive criticism is essential to the collaborative problem-solving process. This category needs to be redesigned or removed altogether. The "makes fair decisions" attribute is much more appropriate.

Grades 6-12, College - Post-Doc

I tried this. I am not impressed. First, it only grades for papers grade 11 and over - even though the drop-down gives you options down to grade 6. I then took three papers from a grade 11 class. One was superior, one was mediocre, and one was written by an intensive ESL student - filled with errors that made comprehension almost impossible. The result? All three got C's. In addition, there were several grammar errors for the superior paper which are not grammar errors - and NONE for the ESL student. I would recommend we seek out another program.

How many children do you have? I am an educator and I have 6 children who are all different. My second child, a son, was never told to study, never had a spelling word called out to him, and strieved to make all A's and B's since the 2nd grade. His older brother with an IQ of 128 in the 5th grade didn't care about grades and passing. His younger brother almost graduated high school before him even though they were 3 years apart in age. The oldest son has ADHD. His grandmother was a math teacher and I am a math teacher, but yet that was the subject he failed almost each year and had to go to summer school. He had the same parents and the same environment as his younger brother, but he was lacking the drive that is born in you. I won't go into the differences of the other 4 just to say that the good Lord gifted me with 3 ADHD children when not much was known about it (the oldest is 44). Every child is different and parents must learn not to judge one by the others, just like teachers must not assume that about siblings they teach. A parent can be their to help and try to point them in the right direction with the right work ethics in school, but the bottom line is how much the child cares and wants to achieve. The envolved parent can help the child that sits on the fence and can go on either side, but the ultimate choice is going to be the child's. It is the same with church. You can take the child to church every Sunday, but when they get older it is their decision how to direct their life. I am not saying that a parent shouldn't try every day to give the guidance their children need and deserve, but you can't beat yourself up when things don't go the way you think they should. All a parent can do is standby their child and give them all the love they can and to know that sometimes that is not enough for the child.

I sent you the history to show that no two children are alike and not to judge one child by the behavior of another. In education we teach all types and there is no one way to approach all children. Sometimes it is not the parent that can make a difference, but someone else and not always a teacher.

Teaching Secrets: Communicating With Parents By Gail Tillery Premium article access courtesy of TeacherMagazine.org. You will face many challenging tasks as a new teacher. Dealing with parents is probably among the most intimidating, especially if you are young and in your first career. While communicating with parents can be tricky, a little preparation will help you to treat parents as partners and to be calmer when problems arise. Here's the first rule to live by: Your students' parents are not your enemies. Ultimately, they want the same thing you want, which is the best for their children. By maintaining respectful and productive communication, you can work together to help students succeed. Second, whenever problems arise, remember that parents are probably just as nervous about contacting you as you are about returning the contact-and maybe more so. I'll confess: Even after 26 years of teaching, I still get a little frisson of fear in my belly when I see an e-mail or hear a voicemail from a parent. But I have seen time and again that parents are often more nervous than the teacher is-especially if their child doesn't want them to contact the teacher. Indeed, some parents may even fear that if they raise concerns, their child will face some kind of retaliation. Remember that parents' tones or words may reflect such fears. In your response, try to establish that everyone involved wants to help the child. Here are some practical tips for communicating effectively with parents: Contact every parent at the beginning of the year. Do some "recon." Telephone calls are best for this initial contact, since they are more personal than e-mail. Ask the parent to tell you about his or her child's strengths, weaknesses, likes, dislikes, etc. Make sure to ask, "What is the best thing I can do to help your child succeed?" Remember to take notes! Once you've gathered the information you need, set a boundary with parents by saying, "Well, Ms. Smith, I have 25 more parent

"I admit this title makes a pretty bold statement for a society that pretty much uses the first five letters of the alphabet to define every child from about age 5 until adulthood. But, I am hearing more and more about the use of badges in the classroom, especially in conversations about gamification and self motivation."

I have been trying out some grading apps and am intrigued by ActivGrade because instead of being focused on a letter grade A-F, I could see students being more concerned with mastering a goal. Their "grade" is a color toward mastery of a standard. Red means I have a lot of work to do to master this, yellow means I'm making progress toward mastery and green means I've mastered this goal at this point. One grading algorithm to choose from in the app is a calculation which puts a 75% weight on the student's most recent assignment for a given concept. This means that as I get better at a skill, my most recent attempt at showing my mastery over the skill is worth more for my grade than my prior attempts. This seems like smart grading practice to me.

"A University of Alberta education researcher who achieved dramatic results with early assessment and intervention to help Grade 1 and 2 students with reading difficulties says there's still a chance to help these students in Grade 3. George Georgiou, a professor in the Department of Educational Psychology, along with his collaborators Rauno Parrila at Macquarie University and Robert Savage from the University College of London, started working with 290 Grade 1 students from 11 Edmonton public schools in 2015-16."

"Students from some of England's worst-performing secondary schools who enrol on medical degrees with lower A Level grades, on average, do at least as well as their peers from top performing schools, a new study has revealed. The research also found that students from poorly performing schools who match the top A-Level grades achieved by pupils from the best performing schools, go on to do better during a medical degree."