How’s your kid doing?

By Cathy Nicoll – The Daily News

‘Mom, the dog ate my report card” won’t cut it any more as an excuse for putting off bad news.

This is the computer age, after all.

Bicentennial School in Dartmouth is now posting all of its students’ marks on the Internet.

“We have a web-based marking system that’s available to students and parents at any time,” principal Don Dine said.

“Each student has an account and all of the students have been trained on how to link all of their accounts for all their subjects.”

They can see only their own marks, posted by their teachers, and where they rank in the class.

Printouts also available

If a parent doesn’t have access to a computer, Dine said, the school will print off the marks and send them home.

Some other schools are using websites to post information about students for their parents, but he believes Bicentennial is the only school in Nova Scotia using an online grading program, provided by Pearson Education’s mygradebook.com.

Conglomerate Pearson Education is a division of Pearson plc, a multinational publisher of fiction, nonfiction and educational materials.

Some of its imprints are widely known, such as Penguin, Viking, Addison-Wesley and Prentice Hall.

Pearson also publishes a wide line of educational materials.

Bicentennial decided to start posting grades online after a survey of students showed that more than 90 per cent of them had access to a computer at home, Dine said.

The school has been training the children how to use the website, he said, and the kids are teaching their parents.

Parents were told in a newsletter that if they requested paper marks, the school would print them off.

“Those who are able to use the computer are pleased with it because they can see what assignments have been missed, they know if the mark went down,” Dine said.

Parent Dan Bedell, whose son is in Grade 9, likes the new system.

‘Great’

“I personally think it’s great. It eliminates surprises for students and parents,” he said.

“Rather than having to wait for report card day or parent-teacher night, you can go online any time and essentially get real-time data on what’s been accomplished to date,” he said.

The new system has had an interesting side effect: more interest from students.

‘Impact on mark’

“Before, there wasn’t the connection between their mark and the work that they did because they would do work in September or October and they wouldn’t get their report until February,” Dine said.

“Now they can see that if they missed that homework assignment, it has an impact on their mark.”

Source: The Daily News, November 8, 2004
http://www.hfxnews.ca