The greatest benefit to Fresh Grade is in its ability to communicate student learning in real time. Fresh Grade operates and looks like an eportfolio for students. The idea of Fresh Grade is that teachers can use it to update student learning in real time. Parents can then access their students portfolio on the site from anywhere with Internet access and see how their student is doing. Students can also use the platform to upload evidence of their own learning.
While Fresh Grade is a wonderful platform it does take a lot of work on the teacher’s end to set it up. The benefit of this though is that once it is set up, all the teacher has to do is upload assignments and grades for students.
The one drawback of Fresh Grade is that it does require access to the Internet. While that may sound like a non-issue in 2019, there are many families where this is a problem. Therefore it is important to still remember to provide families access to Fresh Grade while still making it known that they can come directly to you to talk about their child’s progress and learning in person.
I would like to thank Cliff Waldie from SD57 for coming in to talk about Fresh Grade.
I love you honest notions about FreshGrade. It does seem like a very ‘front heavy’ platform at Cliff mentioned, but the benefits begin to out weigh that! My favourite thing about fresh grade is that you can have back and forth conversation with parents, and that they are able to see what they child is doing on a day to day basis. Sounds like a great tool to use in our classrooms!
UNBC Resnet WiFi cuts out often enough for me to relate to the problem of Internet access…
All joking aside, though, while nothing beats face-to-face interaction when you really want or need to build a relationship with your students and their adults, the benefits of using FreshGrade are almost too good to pass up. Nothing I’ve seen that’s FOIPOP compliant has so many time-saving features and such immediacy.