New Terms and Conditions for Teachers - Why?

[TimDaniel]

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.