Lately, I find myself less than enthusiastic about learning to use a new forum or software or data entry program. Maybe it's because I'm getting old and set in my ways. Learning a new program is really low on my list of things I want to do. And if I'm going to USE the program, it must be easy, have a very short learning curve for me. I don't have time to teach myself some complicated program.
Enter My Home School Grades, an online reporting system developed by homeschoolers. I was given access to MHSG to use and review. I have a grade reporting program that comes with our umbrella school membership, so I have something for comparison. And I was pleasantly surprised. I set up our school and two students rather quickly, added curriculum, grades. My Home School Grades is extremely user-friendly and I didn't spend a lot of time trying to teach myself what has to happen next. MHSG gives users four videos to walk us through how to set up students, add grades, classes, activities, and make transcripts. The site is very straightforward. I like that.
The one wrinkle: I am not giving my kids letter grades this year. We are going through material for mastery and are using terms "incomplete", "in progress", "satisfactory", and finally "pass", and MYSG does not allow me to use those terms; instead, MHSG records grades as letters or numerals. Within each of my students' records, MHSG gives me this Tip: Grades can be entered as letters (A+, A), as numbers (96), or as fractions (16/19). You can change how they are displayed in your account settings.
When my homeschoolers reach high school, I will switch to letter grades, and the grading system within MHSG will be useful for our family.
A lifetime membership is priced at $49.99. (A bargain. For one year, I subscribed to another grade-reporting site that charged $10 a year.) My Home School Grades offers a 14-day trial membership to allow you to try before you buy.
1 comment:
Having now graduated 2 homeschoolers, I can't recommend paying anything for software for grading. A spreadsheet is more than sufficient. The only thing you need is final grades for a transcript, and in our case, I didn't give grades for homeschool taught classes even in high school (because we were still working for mastery). There were enough grades from outside classes, that I only used those on the transcript.
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