Online Reporting to Parents ‘My Grades’

Over the last week I have been talking about the web parts we have been producing to support the drive for Online Reporting to Parents. Undoubtedly our most popular web part so far has been the ‘My Grades’ web part. The idea behind this is that parents, students and teachers can track the progress of a student across a whole Key Stage.  Throughout the period parents would normally receive a series of reviews and reports but these would be sent out via students. Connecting the data together has been the major issue here in terms of tracking the progress of students. This is where the ‘My Grades’ web part comes in.

The example above shows the  grade progression for a student in KS4. Their subject and target grades are pulled directly from the MIS system into our web part. When a report or review is completed by teachers it will appear in real time to students and parent. Grades which are one or more below target are shown in red and those grades above target are shown in green. One of the biggest challenges is the real time nature of this activity. Do we want students and parent to look at review grades and reports before they have been checked? At present we have opted for a delay period before the information is made available to students and parents. What is interesting is the reaction of students before we set these controls up. Students do care about their grades and would come in early in the morning (or log in at home) to see which new grades were available. We even had students assking teachers in lessons- when are you going to put my grades on! A nice challenge to have to deal with.