Using FM as a teacher

[Charles Henebry]

I've been using Filemaker as a college teacher for almost two years now, and I thought I'd share the fruits of my labors with others on this forum. I'm posting this here as a way of offering my help to others who are interested in using FM in place of a traditional gradebook or a spreadsheet. Please reply with any questions; I'm more than willing to offer further guidance or even post my FM solution as an example. I'm not posting it here now only because my actual FM solution has a lot of personal tweaks which will make it less than helpful to a newbie user.

What my FM solution does:

1) keep track of student data (grades, mostly)

2) produce grade reports for assignments and final grade reports at the end of the term.

3) email grade reports to students.

Data structure:

1) table with basic student info (name, picture, school id number, email) I call this table "Roster"

2) table of student grades (matched to table 1 by student name). I call this table "Grading"

3) table with key info for each assignment (matched to table 2 by assignment name). This includes grade weighting and instructions for creating the grade report for that particular assignment. I call this table "Report"

If you're able to download your classlist from the school's server, it's quite easy to import key info into the Roster table at the start of each semester.

Reports are produced by the following method.

• Report::Form Letter is a text field, allowing me to customize the output for a given assignment.
• Grading::Grade gives the student's grade on a particular assignment
• Grading::Comment gives a personalized response
• Roster::Report is a calculation field = Evaluate (Report::Form Letter)

There are other fields, but I want to keep it simple. As an example, if

• Report::Form Letter = "Dear " & Roster::First Name & ", " & ¶ & Grading::Comment & ¶ & "Charles Henebry" & ¶ & "Grade: "& Grading::Grade
• Grading::Grade = "B"
• Grading::Comment = You really improved in this second essay. You still need to work on deepening essay structure, to keep your reader engaged.
• Roster::First Name = John

Then Roster::Report returns the text

Dear John,

You really improved in this second essay. You still need to work on deepening essay structure, to keep your reader engaged.

Charles Henebry

Grade: B

This grade report gets sent out to students using a custom applescript crafted by Fenton, one of the great champions of this forum. If you're just sending a simple email out to each student, you can use the send mail script step in Filemaker. The applescript is only necessary if you're trying to send a different attachment with each grade report (I will often want to return essays to students with my markup, and the send mail script step kept getting gummed up and sending the wrong attachment to students—a disaster that I fortunately caught in the testing phase). For details, see this thread, or contact me for help.

I'm currently experimenting with keeping track of attendance in FM (as opposed to keeping track of it on paper and then entering the total # absences in at the end of the semester). That has added an extra layer of complexity, but if anyone is interested I'll post more details.

[sbto]

This sounds pretty good. I've currently got the same goals, but before I start emailing students, I need to make sure I can use fm pro well enough as a gradebook. (Not that I'm good at excel - I've just always been able to work around issues in excel).

I've recently moved my planning to fm pro - and I'm happy with the results. I've almost integrated a calendar into my Records (or Events) table so I can see the month ahead for 1 course. This appears to be doing what I want it to do.

Now I've been working on grading. I can't seem to get my head around how to give a section of students, or a course of students, an assignment, and then enter individual grades for it easily. Each course can have the same assignment, but different rules for how much it is weighted (but I guess that's part of the reporting part).

Once I get the grading down, I'll be interested in the apple script.

Edited March 8, 2010 by Guest

[josebetzy]

Recently with the help of the forum that always guides you in the right direction, we were able to complete our attendance and class scheduler as required by the schools accrediting agency. This is a post secondary institution (2 yr college). It is quite complex but is working beyond our expectations. We track attendance by class, tardy by every 15 minute intervals (labeled T1=15 min, T2=30 min, etc,) and when they leave early (S1=15 min, S2=30 min, etc.). It is tied to a class scheduler that creates the calendar days, hours and when the standard hours and days are insufficent to add up to the lecture and lab hours for the class as per the catalog, then they can add whatever days and hours to compensate in the Class Scheduler. Using the slid printing then the class schedule is printed with all the normal days and odd days as added. There is a Holiday Master that is tied also. With the forums help we where able to create in one script and make a yearly holiday calendar. This same Holiday Master handles Entities (different schools for the same owner) that operate their terms differently (some 12 weeks and others are 5 weeks). The Class Scheduler will not schedule classes for those days marked as holiday or break, etc.

Again we thank the forum here to their help for guidance and we where able to do the rest.

Our application handles Title IV federal funds.

You can write to my email if you need furhter help. Your appl;ication looks interesting because we have something similar but in Excel for each professor.

Write if you wish.

[sbto]

Why does this field:

Roster::Report is a calculation field = Evaluate (Report::Form Letter)

use "evaluate" ?

Edited April 1, 2010 by Guest
grammar

[sbto]

That scheduling sounds rather complex. Our school doesn't use filemaker for doing the schedule, and there are database experts in the IT department that deal with whole school issues and use other programs that I don't know much about. My interest was primarily in getting my own schedule to be visible in a calendar where I could edit the events myself - and I've managed that much. I've managed to also get pdf reports sent to a class.

Where I'm looking for some inspiration now is on making it a lot more practical to enter data about a class of students. I currently have a Grading table, an Assignments table and a Students table. I have all the students in 1 table, but frequently need to see all students from a class - I can set up a find to do this, but I'm finding it repetitive and not so intuitive ( I guess I'm defaulting to an excel perspective). When I need to mark a class, I currently import the student id's from an excel file into the grades table. I'd like to write a script to do this automatically. I also sometimes need to be able to enter 4 marks on 4 assignments for a class of 24 students at the same time - but haven't worked out a convenient layout for that either.

I've also got an issue with grades and what a grade involves. Currently, for my database 1 grade is 1 student's mark on 1 assignment. This works great for tests etc, but doesn't work well with rubrics, where 1 grade is made up of between 2-6 "levels" of achievement in various categories. I need 1 grade to occasionally be recorded as a calculation of scores on anywhere from 2-6 (or more) categories. I need to be able to set up the marks calculations so that I could weight the year by categories, rather than by assignment (so 1 test becomes 4 grades: 1 for knowledge, 1 for inquiry, 1 for communication, 1 for application)

This is further complicated by the fact that the idea of adding up marks and even using an average to calculate a mark, has been technically thrown out by the Ontario government for about 12 years now. In practice though, very few teachers have figured out how practical ways of arriving at a student's overall grade (the official language runs something around the lines of a grade being "the most consistent and recent" level of achievement) other than just eyeballing the mark. Using a mode doesn't quite work, because that would be the most consistent mark, but not necessarily the most recent mark. Leaving the grade calculation to be too vague, however, results in the potential for endless "negotiation" with parents and students as to what a student's mark should be (but may this isn't a bad thing...).

Anyway, after rereading this post I realize that I'm being quite vague about what type of advice I'm looking for - once I figure out my real questions I'll post again.

[auralsculptor]

Hi

I would REALLY appreciate your FM solution, as this is something I've tried to build a few times and struggled with the basic relationships between tables

I think I'm probably skilled enough to de-construct but not to build from scratch.

Happy to repost my modifications as a starter for others

Colin