ThinkWave

What do you like best?

ThinkWave allows for tinkering with the configuration that you give to each grading component (that is, whether it's graded on completion; check, check plus, check minus; percentages or points). You can allow students and parents to real time access to the student's grade, and periodically send PDFs via email to the student, parent, advisor, administrator, etc. This is FANTASTIC.

When having a meeting with a student regarding their performance and productivity, the tenor of a conversation changes drastically when you have a concrete printout of their grade. Everything becomes framed more objectively and less infused with emotion. You can allow a student to turn in missing work (or not), but to see that their grade did not magically appear from the heavens. There is a syllabus with a grading policy and this is how they performed. ThinkWave definitely made me a more effective teacher and boosted my students' discipline and work ethic.

What do you dislike?

doesn't seem to be possible to share the gradebook (ie, a class you share) with co-teachers which then demands that you just give them your login and password. kind of frustrating because you're then giving access to your entire gradebook; it's not ideal.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Pilot its use with a cluster of teachers in your department during your first go.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

my last school was not willing to spend the money on a platform like Skedula or Jupiter, which are fantastic because of their centralized features and capabilities, but the downside is the price. The benefit here is that it is FREE for individual teachers to use and it gets the job done effectively.