A Gradebook app made to be simple and powerful, for the modern primary school teacher.
You can play with a demo version at marks.quatts.net. Works best in Chrome.
The primary goal of marks was to create a tool that enables data-driven teaching in primary schools. Primary education provides a unique opportunity for data-driven methods as there typically is one person in charge of a classroom for a long duration. This means many opportunities to track a student's progress and make interventions based on data, given the proper tool.
However, in order for a data-driven method to be successful, you need data (duh) and ability to quickly draw insights from that data (less duh). The largest impediments to these requirements are data entry and useful reporting. Marks attempts to remove these obstacles by focusing on easy data entry and reporting that reduces teacher workload. Essentially, it tries to make the teacher want to use the application to make their life easier, while providing a data infrastructure as a bonus. To incentivize teacher adoption, each feature is designed to reduce teacher workload in some aspect. For example, the quick entry mode in Marks allows for an unsorted stack of papers to have their grades entered and calculated quickly. This lowers the barrier for gathering data while making the essential act of keeping grades less onerous. To close the loop, being able to generate easily interpretable reports on the assignment, subject, and student level provides a useful resource for student/parent conferences, individual student plans, and report card generation. Together, making data entry and data interpretation as painless as possible provides a foundation for a data-driven classroom to be built upon.
Marks is currently in development hiatus. The basics of data entry (including quick entry) and display are in place, but reporting is limited to calculating a percentage automatically.
At some point the plan would be to add plots of grade performance at the student, assignment, subject, and classroom levels. The primary plot would be grades over time and relationship between a student and classroom performance over all. The goal here is to catch sudden student drop off in performance quickly or to determine which students need extra attention based on their performance relative to the rest of the class. Additionally, assignment and subject level performance plots would provide a method for the teacher to reflect on the effectiveness of the work they assign. For instance, if the class as whole does poorly on a project, perhaps it needs to be modified or discarded next year.
Overall, there is still much to do!