Using Greatbook

Greatbook has five places along the top: Grades, Assignments, Report cards, Trends, and Setup. You will spend nearly all your time in the first one.

Setting up a class

Setup is where you describe a class once, and it has a panel for each part of that.

Class is the name, the grade level, and the grading periods the year is divided into.

Students is your roster. You can paste a whole list at once rather than typing names one at a time.

Subjects are the areas you teach, and they colour and group everything else.

Standards are what you are actually assessing. Each one belongs to a subject, and has a short code and a longer description.

Categories are the kinds of work you assign, such as homework, quizzes, or projects.

Grading is where you say what each category is worth, and how the levels you record turn into a course grade.

You can change any of this later. Nothing is fixed once the year starts.

Entering grades

Grades is a grid: students down the side, assignments across the top.

It is built to be filled in without a mouse. Arrow keys move between cells, typing enters a score, and Enter moves down to the next student, so a stack of papers goes in as fast as you can read them.

Subjects and standards filter the grid. Narrow it to one standard and you are looking at how the whole class is doing on that one thing, in the same grid, with nothing to set up.

Colour follows performance rather than decoration, so where a class is struggling is visible before you have read a single number.

Assignments

Assignments is where the work itself is described: what it is called, which category it belongs to, which standards it assesses, and when it was given.

An assignment can cover more than one standard. That is the point of keeping standards separate from assignments: one project can tell you something about three different things, and the report card can say so.

Report cards

Report cards give you a page for each student, for each grading period.

It shows the course grade the assignments add up to, and beside it, where the student stands on each standard. Those are different questions and the page keeps them apart on purpose: an average is not the same as knowing whether a student can do something.

Then there is the grade you decide to give, which is yours and is not calculated, and room for comments.

Finalising a report card fixes what it says, so a grade you have already sent home does not quietly change when you enter a late assignment afterwards.

Trends

Trends draws the same information over time.

For one student it shows whether they are climbing or sliding, standard by standard. For the class it shows the same thing as an average, so you can see whether a unit landed.

Undo

There is an undo button in the top bar, and it covers what you have done in this session. It is there because the fastest way to enter grades is also the fastest way to enter one in the wrong row.

Trying it first

On the first screen, choose Try a sample class. It fills the app with invented students and invented work so that every screen has something in it, and you can look around without having typed anything real.