Cloud Based School Management Software with Teacher Gradebooks

Yes. A key function of the education management system is to streamline the flow of information and eliminate double entry of data. Teachers keep assignments and grades in their gradebook, grades are automatically calculated, and results are instantly available for report cards and student transcripts.

Yes. Each teacher has a secure personal account with a pre-populated gradebook, an interface for taking attendance, printed and email reports, and powerful tools for messaging students and parents. Grade and attendance information instantly flows to the administrator views. Teachers can have private or group wide discussions with students regarding assignments, messages, or individual student work.

Yes. The school management system provides powerful messaging and emailing functionality. Administrators can post messages to students, groups of students, teachers, or parents and automatically send them by email. Teachers can send messages to students in their classes. Recipients can comment and reply to the messages.

The management system automatically sends summary emails to students and parents. These reports include latest messages, recently graded assignments, upcoming assignments, and recent attendance. By default, summary emails are sent weekly. However, those emails are only sent when there are new messages, new assignments, new grades or new attendance.

Yes. ThinkWave student management system provides powerful tools for calculating GPA, including weighting by units, adjusted gpa for honors classes, and the ability to include or eliminate classes, terms or years from the final calculation. The GPA is available for report cards, transcript reports, GPA reports, and custom reports.

Yes. Your school’s logo can be uploaded and will be included in report cards, transcripts, and custom reports.

Data is hosted on Google App Engine. Google App Engine is a cloud-computing platform mirrored on redundant servers. The servers are backed up constantly on multiple mirrored locations in various data centers around the US. The data centers contain some of the highest physical security access requirements found anywhere in the world. For additional security, we recommend schools perform a local backup at least once a term. The Setup tab provides the ability to export all grades, attendance, and custom field data in .csv format. The exported file will have a .txt extension. Renaming the file from .txt to .csv will allow the file to be imported into Excel. Also, we recommend schools generate the report card, transcript, student summary and gradebook reports once a term in .pdf. ThinkWave school management systems software has incorporated and abides by Google's privacy policy by reference within our privacy policy. We use SSL to transmit data, as can be noted on the top left of the browser window.

ThinkWave school management system software provides tools to export attendance, grades, and custom field data in a widely-compatible .csv format.

Each administrator should have an individual login. An additional administrators screen in the setup view provides tools to create an access code for all the administrators in your school. There is no limit to the number of administrator users.

Yes, there is an option for multiple teachers to access a course in the student management system. First, add the teacher aide as a teacher in the Teachers tab in the education management software. Then, in the Teachers menu, click the Assisting item - and enroll the teacher as an assistant to the proper classes. Finally, send an invite letter by email to the assistant teacher to access their online account.

The system makes it easy to associate multiple parents and guardians to any student, as well as group all students for each parent.

Yes. ThinkWave school management software is used in a wide variety of educational institutions, including colleges, vocational schools, training programs, and more. If parent access is not needed because the institution is geared toward adults, it is easy to disable Parent online access and just use online access for students.

The annual license for ThinkWave includes storage for previous years’ data. So there is no difference if your school maintains 1 or 10 years of historical data. It is possible to use the “Rollback” function to create previous years, and enter historical data to enable comprehensive transcripts for students.

Yes. There are multiple ways to use the school management system to manage your school’s attendance. Attendance can be recorded on a per-class, per-day, per half-day or custom basis. Marks can be entered directly by administrators or by teachers. Custom rules can be used to calculate attendance results. (example: student earns a second-half-day absence if she misses over 50% of minutes during 4th, 5th and 6th periods).

Yes. Each teacher can establish custom grading options in their gradebook interface. Grade calculations can be pure points or flexible grading options. Flexible options let teachers combine points, percentage, letter, pass/fail, complete/incomplete or custom grades into one final grade. Teachers can throw-out lowest grades, use assignment-type weighting, combine subterms, and more.

Yes. Teachers can establish default grading options for the entire gradebook, or set up custom grading options for each class, or even customize grading options on a per-term basis.

Yes. Teachers can copy assignments, including descriptions and attachments from previous terms, or even from other instructors. ThinkWave student management software automatically distributes the assignments into the current term with the same spacing as the previous term. All descriptions and attachments are also copied.

Yes. Students have multiple options for submitting work online. Students can directly submit work using a text editor, and teachers can make revisions or corrections to the work. Students can also upload files, or submit links to online resources, such as Google Docs. Teachers and students can have a private discussion regarding each individual submission.

As a rule, schools use the student management system while solo teachers use the free online gradebook. Some advantages of using the ThinkWave schoolwide system include: All teachers get their own gradebooks and individual logins. Multiple administrators can access all school records and gradebooks with their own logins. Combined data from multiple teachers integrates to create unified report cards and transcripts. Your school can track day attendance instead of just section attendance. Students see all their teachers automatically upon login.

Yes, ThinkWave can print a standards based report card. The report card can be customized in a variety of formats to properly display standards assessments. Many of our schools use ThinkWave to automatically generate Pre-K, Kindergarten, and other standards based reports.

Admins begin by setting up standards and attaching standards to courses. Then the teachers get those standards in their gradebook automatically. Standards can be created in Setup | Standards & Skills (this is where you would go to add "Letter Recognition", etc.). Then, select a course in the Classes tab, and attach the standards and skills to the class. To attach a standard to a course, go to the Classes tab and click the edit icon next to "Standards & Skills". Teachers can then assess standards separately (in their Final Grades by Class subtab). Standard assessments will then automatically show on the report card.

Yes, ThinkWave can print behavior and conduct on the report card. To create behavior marks, create a Graded Skill called "Behavior" [and all your other character marks like “Pays Attention”] in Setup | Grading | Graded Skills. Then, go to the Classes tab and on the bottom there, check the edit icon next to "Standards & Skills". Behavior can be added to only one course or multiple courses. A grade can be entered by teachers / admins for Behavior and a comment up to 5,000 characters can be entered. The behavior skill can be included on report cards and transcripts. The grade would be entered by teachers in their "Final Grades by Class" subtab, or by admins in the Final Grades tab. The behavior mark can be displayed either next to the overall class grade or in a separate section on the report card.

Yes. Teachers can add comments up to 5000 characters per course using the Final Grades by Class view in the gradebook screen. Alternately, comments can be added (or overridden) by administrators in the Final Grades tab.

Yes, we have the option to set up A/B Schedules. To set up this schedule, school administrators should:

1. Go to Setup | Schedule | Day Schedules.
2. Rename the Default schedule to “A”.
3. Click “Add Schedule” and create a B Schedule.
4. Click on schedule A, and edit the periods as necessary. If you need to create more periods, like “1st Period B”, do so here: Setup | Schedule | Periods.
5. Then, and this is important, mark every other day in the Monthly Calendars (found on the bottom right of Setup | Schedule | Monthly Calendar & Schedules as “B”. You will need to click on every other day in the calendar and change the schedule in the pulldown to B day (the A days will already be set).

Note: you can also create more detailed Day Schedules. If you like, email us details and we can set this up for you.