Report cards are traditionally instrumental in giving parents insight into how well their children are performing in school. Report cards also provide teachers with a brief summary of student performance to determine how much attention each child deserves during the next few months. However, as teachers and parents alike enter the 21st century, such forms of communication as online report cards are beginning to emerge.

With the advancement of technology – and more importantly – the Internet, we have seen many programs created to help both teachers and students. One such program is online gradebooks.

An online gradebook is an educator’s personalized web-based application that allows for organizing and storing information about teaching staff members, students, school districts, and parent-teacher associations. In this way, it is similar to a school’s student information system (SIS).

An online gradebook enables teachers to manage their grading with Internet access and a web browser from any computer. Current teachers use the gradebooks for many of the same functions once handled by paper grade books, including keeping records of students’ grades, homework, quizzes, or tests.

Another benefit is that parents can log in 24/7 to see their child’s grades, test scores, and attendance records. Parents can track how well their child is doing academically while teachers can keep up with students’ progress over the school year. Teachers are also able to communicate detailed information about their student’s performance directly to parents. As well, teachers are able to assess students’ work outside the classroom more quickly and accurately.

Parents can even see a child’s progression throughout the school year with access to attendance records, grades, collected worksheets, or any other assignments they have turned in. With online report cards available at any time, parents can see how their child is doing without waiting for a progress report or meeting with the teacher.

It helps teachers by offering access to up-to-date information about each of their students and providing a personalized history of every student’s performance during the course of a school year. Also, it offers flexibility as to when and where teachers can submit grades.

Using online report cards saves time and money by reducing the number of grade books necessary for each academic year. They make grading more efficient by cutting out several steps through automatic calculation and record keeping. With most schools already having an SIS system, it makes transitioning to online report cards easier; the data already exists.

 

What is the future of online report cards?

One of the latest developments in education technology is blended learning, which allows students to learn with digital devices in a more personalized way. It combines the traditional model of teaching students at school and using textbooks for instruction with an online component that allows teachers to track student progress better. 

In this way, students can have personalized lessons from their teacher at school and access to the same materials at home, which helps them do more self-directed learning outside the classroom. It is a change that has been slow to come – but one that will become increasingly common as online report cards follow suit. This shift in how we educate our children will help students learn more effectively and efficiently.

Thousands of schools across the country are developing blended learning programs. Schools can use online report cards to supplement these programs by enabling teachers to track student progress in real-time, even when not in the classroom.

With online report cards, parents receive information about their child’s academic progress immediately and feel reassured about their child’s performance. It gives parents peace of mind knowing what their child is working on at school and provides an avenue for teachers to communicate with parents about how students are doing outside the classroom.

There is also a growing trend in education technology towards personalized learning, which lets students progress at their own pace. Online report cards can help teachers in this effort by providing a more detailed look at each student’s academic performance, potential, and needs. The technology already exists for online report cards to become even more personalized with the ability to integrate into the school SIS systems that many schools are now using.

This would streamline the process even further, allowing teachers to see where each student needs help and offer personalized lessons right in the classroom.

The goal of education is to give students lifelong skills that they can implement beyond the classroom setting. Digital report cards offer an unprecedented amount of information about what students are doing both inside and outside the school day, preparing them for the real world.

With the increasing presence of online communication in our lives, communication has become increasingly impersonal. Online report cards are a way to get parents and teachers more involved with how students are doing in school to help students more effectively.

SchoolCues is an all-in-one school management system for small schools with limited budgets and resources. Our solutions include admissions and enrollment, online payments, student information system, gradebook, communications, parent engagement, donations and fundraising, alumni management and more. Schedule a demo with us today.