Online Student Records Help Parents Monitor Student Progress
In my last year of teaching, it was a budget year with teacher pay and benefits, school spending for buses, theater, sports, and maintenance all up for review. Our superintendent had budgeted a sizable amount of money to online student record access for parents. At the time, it seemed to me like a frivolous use of taxpayer dollars. It’s not like we didn’t send out progress and grade reports. How many parents had I called because their son or daughter had been missing class and hadn’t turned in work? Countless.
Plus, if a parent wanted to know her kid’s grades or missing work, she could just e-mail me and I’d send a grade print-out home with Zach or Trish.
I’m on the other side of the fence now as a parent of a middle school student. I love access to online student records. Online grades and missing work, combined with homework assignments posted online with printable copies, makes my life as a parent so much easier.
I realize now that with the old e-mail-the-teacher system, parents were less likely to ask for a grade report. They don’t want to appear to be hovering around their student. They don’t want to bother the teacher. They don’t want to take the time to write the e-mail only for the student to forget the printout in her locker.
When I monitor my daughter’s grades online, I feel like I’m a participant in her education. I can pull up her progress on my laptop and we can discuss what happened with that last algebra test. We can have a talk about where the missing vocabulary assignment might be and what she should use for her nature sketch in art.
When teachers post the homework assignments weekly along with printable assignments, the system is even better. If my daughter and I find a missing assignment I can click a few more times and print out another one. If she loses the homework, forgets it, or is absent, she can finish her work and catch up to the rest of the class.
“Are you done with your homework?” has now become “Please show me your world culture project. I’ve printed the rubric, so let’s evaluate your work.”
My teen’s response is still much the same, “Mom. Mom. Mo-oooom. Trust me, it’s done.”
She’s probably right; I’m sure she’s finished the project. But with these online tools, I can have those valuable conversations that show her I care about her academic progress. The most important teachers are a student’s parents. With online student records and assignments, I can impress upon my daughter how important her school work is and reinforce classroom learning at the kitchen table.
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