Featured: 2/25/2013 JumpRope [Assessment]

JumpRope is a tool designed to help teachers, schools, and districts move from traditional grades towards standards-based assessment.



Educators using JumpRope's web-based platform can implement standards-based grading through innovative assessment and feedback. JumpRope strives to enable teachers and schools to “engage students with active pedagogy, purposeful planning, and authentic learning experiences.”



JumpRope provides easy, fast, and powerful access to current, accurate information about attendance, character, and standards-based performance. Standards-based grading for every classroom is practical with JumpRope. Teachers can write their own standards, use state standards, or align to the Common Core.

Main features of JumpRope:

• Take attendance for each period of the day, and the data is visible in real time to other teachers.
• Stay up to date on student behavior and character development. Any teacher can write anecdotes on student behavior, assign a category and value, and request follow up from another staff member.
• Design curriculum based on the principles of backwards planning, and your curriculum plan automatically populates your standards-based gradebook.

Jumprope is free for teachers. JumpRope also offers a full suite of tools to help school staff and administrators with school-wide reporting needs, schedule creation, and management.

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Featured: 1/28/2013 GETideas.org [Community]

Education leaders can develop their professional learning networks at GETideas.org.



The people at GETideas.org see it "as a professional idea generator – a place where education leaders can be inspired to make change happen in their school, district, or university." Their goal is to facilitate the exchange of ideas toward solving education challenges.

Benefits of participation in the GETideas.org community:

• Professional development customized to the needs of education leaders.
• Trusted, timely news about hot topics and events in education aggregated in one place.
• Profiles of exemplar educational institutions.
• Thematically curated collections of information on topics important to education leaders.
• Rich multimedia content provided by respected thought leaders.
• Opportunities to engage with forward-thinking leaders during real-time events focused on best practices in education.

The GETideas.org online community of practice is geared toward system-level education leaders at all levels. They can identify resources that will help them inform professional practices, network with other leaders, and share their ideas for improving education.

Visit the GETideasYouTube channel

GETIdeas.org is a Corporate Social Responsibility project of Cisco.

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COD - 5/2/2012 - Engrade [Tools]

Bring together all the people, tools, data, and curriculum in your schools on one user-friendly platform with Engrade.

Founded in 2003, Engrade has grown to more than 3,000,000 members today. Engrade has been adopted by teachers and schools in all 50 states and in 150 countries around the world.

Features of Engrade:

• Unified classroom management: gradebook, attendance, seating chart, discipline, and more 
• Advanced administrative reports
• Access anywhere with a mobile device or Google apps account
• All-in-one parent communication
• Connected curriculum and assessment
• Safety and security

Watch a video introduction to Engrade

Engrade provides all teacher services and a large number of school services for free. An optional premium service, EngradePLUS, offers advanced reports and customizations.

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Catch of the Day - openSIS - 7/12/2011

openSIS is a commercial grade, secure, scalable, and intuitive open source student information system (SIS) used by 5000 schools worldwide.

The core features of openSIS:

• Tracking of numerous student demographics in a permanent record and across enrollments
• Easy addition of contact information for parents, relatives, and authorized individuals
• A scheduler that allows you to mass schedule students as well as input individual student requests
• The grade book allows teachers to enter homework assignments, tests, and any other activity using weighted scales if desired
• Numerous standard reports and the tools to design custom reports
• Create report cards and calculate GPA’s and class rankings, generate transcripts
• Track attendance and health records
• A parent portal that allows your parents to see their childrens' grades, attendance, discipline, and more
• The ability to control user security at the local level, customize the included roles and/or create your own

The School Edition of openSIS is suitable for small and medium-size schools seeking a student information system solution. Offered as a secure hosted solution in the “cloud”, it is a tested, commercial grade product with many extra features.

For larger schools and districts needing customization and integration with existing applications, there is the openSISDistrict Edition. This version is offered either as a hosted “cloud” solution or as an on-site school-server. This commercial grade edition includes state reporting.

No upfront license fees are charged to use openSIS. Low support and maintenance fees give you access to complete help desk support at lower rates  than most commercial offerings. However, no maintenance and support fees are required to use openSIS.

openSIS data migration packages provide a seamless way to transition to openSIS from your existing SIS.

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Catch of the Day - Novachi - 4/13/2011

Novachi offers all K-12 schools in the United States a free comprehensive integrated learning management system and student information system.

Novachi is a safe and secure education system making it possible for schools to enable students, parents, teachers, and staff to collaborate online. Client data is stored in a secure and reliable data center within the US.

The Novachi system provides a flexible platform to facilitate better collaboration with a goal of improving educational quality, reducing the use of paper, lightening teacher workloads, and improving communications. Novachi automates "many classroom administrative tasks so that teachers can focus on teaching and students can focus on learning."

Watch a Novachi video tutorial: School Admin | Teacher

There is no contract, setup, hosting, or support cost when you signup to Novachi.

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Catch of the Day - SchoolCircuit - 1/21/2011

SchoolCircuit is a free online gradebook solution enabling students and parents to look at assignments, view grades, and improve overall student performance, easily and securely.

SchoolCircuit offers teachers a free gradebook, accurate attendance keeping, easy-to-manage student rosters, and class calendars. Some of the other features available to teachers:

• Tests and Assignments
• Class Announcements
• Message Center
• Teachers' Desk
• File Cabinet
• Online Access

Students are given the ability to check their grades online, communicate with their teachers, easily check class events and posted assignments, and more.

SchoolCircuit offers a licensed plan to schools with an expanded feature set. Administrators can access the class database, student records, powerful reports, and more.

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