Overview The Grades and Plans program is comprised of three functional entities; screens which are used to record information, a database where the information is stored, and a report generator which retrieves the information, formats it according to the needs of a variety of reports, and either displays it on your screen or produces printed output. With Grades and Plans you can create Lesson Plans, maintain a Gradebook, and produce reports which assist you in administering report cards and progress reports. Attendance and Seating Chart modules will be released in the future which will fully integrate with the existing Grades and Plans program and any data you may have entered. Gradebook Features Grades and Plans can significantly reduce the effort required to produce report cards and progress reports. Grades are recorded on a screen with a format similar to a standard gradebook. First you must enter a grade item, its metrics (such as whether it's numeric, a letter grade, etc.) and a weighting category (if you previously entered this information as part of a lesson plan, Grades and Plans will already have entered these data elements). Grades and Plans then displays the item at the top of a column, with a list of the students in that class to the left... you simply fill in the grades. Grades and plans maintains each student's grades, by class and category, in the form you entered (such a numeric, letter, pass/fail). If no grade is entered for a given student/item, it is automatically considered 'incomplete' and recorded as an 'I'. It will be included in averaging calculations as a zero, and will be highlighted on all detailed reports.
If the student was not required to perform the item (e.g., if they were absent) the item is recorded as an 'X' (to represent excused) and the item is excluded from the average grade calculations. It is, however, printed on detailed reports with 'X' as the grade. When you generate a report, all grades are converted to numerics (according to the metrics you have defined), a weighted average is computed, and a letter grade representative of the weighted average is assigned. Simply request a report to produce report cards, progress reports, or a view of a specific student's status. Grades and Plans quickly performs all of the computation and produces professional quality reports.
Lesson Plan Features Grades and Plans provides you with the capability to develop your lesson plans using its integrated word processor. Features supported include the use of any font installed on your computer and the ability to choose its size, style (regular, bold, underline, italics). Paragraph formatting includes margin and hanging indenting. Editing features include 'drag and drop', cut, copy, and paste. Since Lesson Plan formats vary from school to school, person to person, and subject to subject, Grades and Plans provides a Template feature which allows you to define different content and formatting for each subject's lesson plans. The templates are stored in the database and become the initial text of each new lesson plan you create.
Since you probably won't want to write every lesson plan for a given subject exactly the same way, you can easily edit the information inserted from the subject's template as you add the additional content which forms the specific lesson plan. The lesson plan feature includes the capability to designate assignments and assessments which are to be stored in the database for later recording of Gradebook information. Reports are included to print Templates and Lesson Plans by a variety of sorts according to Subject, Grading Period, date range, etc.
Data Structures The Grades and Plans database consists of
- Student information; name, ID, birthrate, home phone number, Classes, etc.
- School Calendar information; Year and Grading Periods names, start/end dates, etc.
- Class information; name, relationship to grading periods, etc.
- Presentation format constants, such as School Name, whether to sort students by ID, Last Name, or First Name, etc.
Preference and setup screens are provided to generate and maintain each of these items in the database. The database is relational and enforces relational integrity. A data item appears only once in the database, so changing it on one screen will automatically change it on all screens.