InteGrade Pro Version 9.3 NEW FEATURES Revised August, 2006-1 -
New Features in InteGrade Pro 9.3 InteGrade Pro 9.3 is a fairly major release of the grade book software. It has several new features and important corrections. This document details the major changes in the new version of the software. They are: Grading Groups Grade Table Rounding BCC Emailed Progress Reports Inactive Students Personal Notes Bonus Scores Multiple Grading Tables QuickNotes Sidebar Keyboard Navigation Student Advisor Combine Task Accuracy Error Reporting Various Corrections - 2 -
GRADING GROUPS Add and Define Groups Groups can be created via Setup > Groups. Membership in groups is set using conditions, manual selection or a combination of the two. - 3 -
Exceptions and Conditions Exceptions Conditions - 4 -
Adding Grading Groups to Your Classes Now that a group(s) have been created and the rules for the group defined, you can now group students together in a class. This feature is the first step toward being able to create and use different grade tables for different sets of students. To create different groups within a class, choose SETUP > SPREADSHEETS. Click the Grading Tab in the resulting dialog box. - 5 -
GRADE TABLE ROUNDING Add and Define Groups IGPro s method of rounding grades to letter grades was somewhat confusing before. Under Setup > Grading Rules, Grade Tables has been modified to make this easier to understand. BCC Progress Reports In response to user requests, IGPro can now optionally BCC ( blind carbon copy ) emailed reports to your email address. This will generate a lot of email in your email inbox, but will give you an exact record of what went out, when, and to whom. - 6 -
Inactive Students A few changes have been made to improve the display of inactive students (i.e. students who have been removed from a class). Instead of prefixing a ~ to the name, the student s information will be struck out. In addition, in the main view area, the student s information will appear in a different color, and his or her name will appear in parenthesis. You can now turn inactive student display on and off from the main viewer. You can now change where inactive students sort relative to active students under Setup > Display on the Spreadsheet tab. Personal Notes IGPro now includes Personal Notes. Unlike normal notes, personal notes will not appear on reports and will not be exported. To make a paragraph in a note a personal note, start the paragraph with TWO dollar signs $$. The paragraph will NOT appear on reports and will not be exported. This feature is intended for convenience only. If you would not write something down on paper about a student, you probably should not put it in your gradebook either! Bonus Scores IGPro now includes various tweaks designed to make bonus tasks easier to understand. The Empty Scores option for missing tasks no longer includes empty scores on bonus tasks. A blank score indicates something different for a bonus task. Viewing a bonus task as a letter grade will now produce a letter grade of n/a, rather than displaying a letter grade from the grade table. - 7 -
Using Multiple Grading Tables InteGrade Pro now allows teachers to apply different grading tables to different groups of students in a spreadsheet. Grading group pairs are created on the Setup > Spreadsheets, Grading Tab. NOTE: If a student is a member of more than 1 group, you can determine which grading table is used by considering the following. First determine which groups the student is a member of. Then determine which group has the highest priority. The highest priority grading group is located at the top of the list under the Grading Tab. Use the Up or Down arrow to adjust the priority as necessary. The grading table associated with the highest priority group is always used. - 8 -
Defining Grades for Two Grade Tables within the Same Class - 9 -
An Example of Grades Computed from Two Different Grading Tables Based Upon Student Groups - 10 -
QuickNotes QuickNotes are special note templates that are contained within a gradebook. QuickNotes can be assigned anywhere a note can be assigned on the main viewer, and can contain sequences that are replaced ( mail-merged ) with data for the current student (or task) to customize the note. Some of the sequences available include student demographic information (e.g. name, gender) and class and task information (e.g. class name, score on a task). In addition, student progress reports (Student Progress, Email Student Progress, Student Multi-Class) have the ability to attach a temporary QuickNote to all students being reported. QuickNotes are created via Setup > QuickNotes. - 11 -
Defining the QuickNote Using the QuickNote - 12 -
Sidebar A sidebar is now available in InteGrade Pro 9.3 in the main viewer. It is a property inspector, similar to the notes area. However, where the notes area focuses on notes, the sidebar will focus on other properties, such as group membership and selected QuickNotes. On Windows, the sidebar has three panes: quick find, groups and QuickNotes. Keyboard Navigation Keyboard navigation has been added to the main viewer on Windows only. You now have a different option for navigating between cells using keystrokes, instead of using a mouse or the arrow keys. Key Action / or ' Selects the Quick Find panel in the sidebar, and switches to keyboard navigation mode. The choice of navigating between students and tasks will default to the last selected type. If navigating between students, start seeking last name, regardless of the display setting., Switches between adding to first name and last name match string. For example: Fi,St will match Fisher, Steven. Up Arrow Down Arrow Letter Switches to navigating between students. This will only have an effect if the navigation side panel is selected. Switches to navigating between tasks. This will only have an effect if the navigation side panel is selected. Adds to query. Escape or Enter Backspace Accepts the current selection and ends navigation by keyboard Deletes character from the match. - 13 -
Student Advisor The student advisor field is now available in InteGrade Pro. The advisor name and number will is displayed on the Setup>Students, School tab and it is also available as a demographic field. Combine Task Accuracy InteGrade Pro's combine tasks now rounds to the teacher-selected number of decimal positions (0-3) before putting the calculated value in as a score. See your ITRT for more help with this feature if you desired to combine several tasks into a new task to help you manage a large number of tasks more efficiently. Error Reporting InteGrade Pro for Windows contains a technology that can be used to report unexpected errors back to the InteGrade Pro development team. If an error occurs, a special screen is brought up. InteGrade Pro for Windows contains a tool that can be used to send automated reports in the event of an unexpected problem. This does not apply to expected issues, such as a damaged floppy or disconnected network. This tool activates when InteGrade Pro would usually show an error message. Data is only sent to the InteGrade Pro development team after you give your permission. When an error occurs, InteGrade Pro builds an error report and then displays this screen: - 14 -
The report contains various details regarding your computer hardware, system information, and the state of InteGrade Pro, but does not contain student data. You can examine the information contained in the report by clicking Show Report. The general tab contains basic information about your computer, such as speed, operating system, and free disk space. The call stack, modules, cpu regs, stack dump and disasm tabs contain technical information about the state of InteGrade Pro and modules that are directly influencing it. processes contains information about other applications in use, and hardware contains information about hardware and device drivers. Click Send Report to send the report to your email program. Your email program may send it automatically, or may expect you to click a Send button. NOTE: The privacy of these reports is treated very seriously; the reports will be used only to diagnose and correct problems with the InteGrade Pro software. Sending the report is probably the easiest way to help improve future releases of InteGrade Pro, but it doesn t replace contacting support. More information may be required, and support may know of a work-around to the problem you are having. To return to where you were in InteGrade Pro, click Continue Application. This will often allow you to continue running the application. Since the current gradebook s contents in memory may be damaged, it is recommended you save your gradebook to a new file and restart InteGrade Pro as soon as convenient. You can also Restart Application or Close Application. If you have unsaved changes and click one of these two buttons, the changes will be lost. Various Other Corrections InteGrade Pro 9.3 also includes a variety of other minor corrections: In previous versions of InteGrade Pro the graphs always printed vertically. The student performance and task comparison graphs will now print either horizontally or vertically, depending on the selected orientation. Speed improvements to open and import. Various other minor corrections. - 15 -