SimpleGradebook Support Forum

Privacy legislation, and the interpretation and enforcement of the legislation, has evolved since Simplegradebook was created in 2013.  At this time, it is important to bring the use of Simplegradebook into line with current legislation.

In the past, teachers used Simplegradebook freely without much regard for consent for the entry of student information.  Today, it is necessary to ensure that the personal information of students is entered either with consent or entered as anonymized information.

Consent

Consent must come from the school district, who have custody and control of the student information.  You must ask for or have permission from your School District to use this program to store student information.  If you do not have permission, do not use Simplegradebook.

Anonymized Information

Alternatively to getting consent from the school district, you may choose to anonymize the information. For example, when adding students to your classes, instead of entering

Albert Einstein 245367 

you could enter

E763A Student 123456

or a completely randomized letter/number combination code and keep a written key to who has been assigned which code.

If you have already entered students into a class and need to anonymize them, use the Students button beside the class to edit the student information. 



Students will still be able to access their grades and reports through the access code.  However, when printing reports, you may have to manually write names and student numbers on the reports if there is a report collation process at your school.

For Simplegradebook Pro users, it is important to ensure that any communications with students using the messaging system do not contain any information that could be used to identify the student.

Simplegradebook recognizes that this additional complication may result in users no longer wanting to use the gradebook.  Unfortunately, there appears to be no alternative to these approaches. 

In this upgrade, the reports have been simplified, and consistency between the web and pdf report formats is improved.

In addition, a new feature has been added for all users: the ability to suppress the Term and Category aggregate grades in the reports.  The controls for this feature are found in the Class Settings display:



To see the difference these controls make, here is a report from a percentage class with the controls set to display the aggregates for both Terms and Categories:


If the Categories are unclicked in the settings, this is the result:



If both the Terms and Categories are unclicked in the settings, only the raw assignment data is shown.


 
 
All existing classes have been set to include both the Term and Category aggregates, so teachers and students will not see any difference unless teachers decide to unclick the controls in the settings.  In addition, the default when new classes are created is to show the aggregates. 

Please note that the reports that students can see either in the app or on their personal Simplegradebook accounts are also affected by these settings. 

Please send any feedback you have on this new feature, or any problems experienced due to the upgrade, to info@simplegradebook.ca

Changes in this version:

Enhanced security - extensive security enhancements
Improvements

• The cursor now goes to the end of the field in the gradebook cells instead of the beginning.
• Tooltips are more consistent.
• Access codes have been included in the display under the "Students" menu item available in the Classes display
• Performance Order report for Performance Scale Classes (available from the Report icon in the gradebook display) is now working properly, and includes both missing and excused assignments. 
• Practice assignments in performance scale classes are now identified with the word "(Practice)" added to the assignment name in reports. This was done so that it would be clear on student reports why an assignment does not count against a student grade if it is missing or scored zero

Other Minor Bug Fixes - as noticed during testing for security enhancements

***NOTE: This upgrade, while not a major change to functionality, implements significant code changes throughout the system.  Please report any unusual behaviour to info@simplegradebook.ca as soon as you notice it. 
 

Changes in this version:

Enhanced security - various enhancements to security.
Messaging - Administrators can now disable Simplegradebook messaging in their School Settings. Applies to Simplegradebook Pro schools only.
Attendance - Pro school Administrators can view detailed attendance in the student information display.  Applies to Simplegradebook Pro schools only.
Referrals - The ability to generate referrals and share them with administrators has been removed due to lack of use.  It can be re-instated on request.
Bug Fix - Grades including a "+" or "-" (eg. B+) can now be entered as override grades in letter grade only classes.
Bug Fix - Extra delete button removed from messages display, and the ability to delete selected messages works properly. Applies to Simplegradebook Pro schools and users only.
Bug Fix - Messages selected for a student are correctly filtered. Applies to Simplegradebook Pro schools and users only.

Missing tasks won't appear in the report if you are using Terms or Categories, and if the assignments are not assigned to a Term or a Category.  You can assign them to the correct term through the Assignments spreadsheet.

Notice the right hand column in the image below. If the Term is blank, it is not assigned.



To assign the assignment to a Term, just select one from the dropdown. 

 

After some feedback from teachers, an enhancement was made to make the order of assignments displayed in the gradebook easier to control.

The options for controlling assignment display are located in the Class Settings.  The new display is shown:



Previously, the "Order of Entry" selections used the creation date to order the assignments.  This led to some problems when assignments were displayed, because two assignments created on the same day might not be displayed in the order they were entered.

After the modification, teachers can choose the actual order of entry, or the creation date. This will provide a true order of entry display. 

Note that for any teachers who had forced assignments to appear in specific order using the Creation Date, they can still select Creation Date to get their custom order.  However, because the default is now the corrected reverse order of entry, they will have to select it in the Class Settings. Apologies for any inconvenience this creates.

Two factor authentication is now available for teachers and administrators in Simplegradebook.  Two factor authentication prevents unauthorized access to your account in the case where, for example, someone has learned your username and password by looking over your shoulder when it was typed in. 

Two factor authentication is optional. To use it, go to your Profile in My Simplegradebook and tick the box:



Caution: While you are in your profile, check that the email address that is associated with the account is one you can access, otherwise you may lose access to your account by enabling two-factor authentication.  You can change the email address in your profile if needed.  If you run into a problem accessing your account, send an email to info@simplegradebook.ca and help will be provided.

Two factor authentication works by sending a 6 digit authentication code to the email address associated with your account after your username and password are entered. The login process is interrupted and the following display is presented:


To complete the login sequence, enter the code from the email.  The codes expire in 10 minutes, but you can easily request another one if you were interrupted in the login process and need more time.

More clarification is needed here, is this the student's performance over time to demonstrate whether they are improving or not?

Increased to 10.  Sorry for the delay. 

This has been fixed - there was a bug preventing the extra categories from being shown.  The process is described here:

How Do I Get More Categories