Grade Manager

Gradebook software for teachers by a teacher.

Grade Manager is the flagship product of Dunlap Software. As a teacher, I got tired of trying to find the gradebook program that did just what I wanted it to do. I wanted a gradebook program that could manage all of my classes and students in one convenient file. I wanted the option to use a database if I wanted to. I also wanted a secure way to allow students and parents to track their progress online. Grade Manager is meant to solve these issues for me, and to help you meet these goals as well.

Grade Manager is being released in two varieties -- Standard and Professional. Standard is designed with the single teacher in mind and is priced within the budget of said teacher. Professional provides a more robust solution that is designed for an entire school and comes packaged with a site-license that also allows the software to be installed on each teacher's home PC. For a quick rundown of features:

Both versions of Grade Manager sport the following features:

• Allows for use of either a Microsoft SQL Database, MySQL Database, or a proprietary file format. (Please note that use of the web script requires the use of MySQL at this time. MySQL is released under the GPL License for non-commercial use and must be downloaded and installed separately from this product. Use of the proprietary file format will not allow a centralized location for all teachers, classes, and grades.)
• Allows each teacher to define a grading scale for each class
• Allows for defining how a grade should be figured. (for example, you can assign two quarters and a semester exam as sub-grades of the semester exam and weight them.)
• Each class can have categories defined and a weight assigned to each. The number of categories is not limited by software.
• Includes report generation including an assignment report, student report, class report, and an ineligibility report which will currently print a list of all students receiving below a C in the currently selected period.
• Store information about students and parents with links between the information so each parent need only be entered once.

Web Features

One of the most-popular requests that I get from parents and students is an update about their grade, which it is part of our job to keep them informed. However, if you let it, this can take quite a bit of time. Therefore, two years ago, I developed a web page that would allow me to post my students' grades and allow them to see it after entering a username and password. This had the undesired result of me needing to enter every grade twice. Once in my gradebook and once online. Grade Manager is my solution to this problem.

As long as you have a MySQL server that can be accessed from the computer on which you use Grade Manager, then you only have to enter the grades once. (MySQL is a free database server that is not extremely difficult to install. If you need assistance in setting up any of the pieces, please check the support section of our website.) Please note that this may not work if there is a firewall between the PC containing Grade Manager and your web server/SQL Server. However, even if you can not directly reach the SQL server, then you can output a database update with the click of a button that can then be sent to your SQL server for entry. All with only the keystrokes required to get to a web page that allows you to paste the update. (Such a web page will shortly be available in our support section, but please note that if not installed properly, this can create a security hole in your grade database.)

The feature that I most wanted was the security of getting the grade online. One software package that I tried last year allowed me to ouput HTML and had a login page that redirected the student to a page like http://someserver/19084589.html. The problem was that if another student sat down later and saw this URL in the history, they were allowed to get there without knowing the password. This will not be an issue with Grade Manager as each page is dynamically created on the web server each time and the password is checked every time . It will not stop a student from getting there with the back button, but this will not be a problem as long as students close down the browser when they are done. In addition, there is a short time-out period set to help alleviate even this problem.

Grade Manager will be as secure as your web server/SQL server. For more information, please see our support section.

Hardware/Software Requirements

• Windows 2000/XP (The software will not work on Windows ME/98/95)
• A web server for use of the web features
• A SQL server for use of the database features
• .Net Framework 2.0 or later (The installer will check this for you and give you the option to install it.)

Our Pledge To You

If there is a feature that you have always wanted to see in a gradebook program, and it is not available in Grade Manager, please send us an email through our support page, and we will add it to our list of features to work on for our next release. Our goal is to make software that teachers will want to use. If you are a shareware user and submit a feature that we include, we will extend your updates to another major version update.

Screenshots

See Grade Manager in action! If you want to see any particular screenshot closer, then click on it for a full size version.