21st Century Educator

Here's the basic idea.  I create 31 identical (one for each of our 11th and 12 grade students) Google Documents using a agreed upon template.  The teachers have access to edit the documents, and add their grades.  Our IB diploma coordinator adds comments to the documents, and then we download the documents as PDF files, ready to be emailed to the parents.  We could do this entirely electronically, but we are also going to print a copy to mail to the parents for their records.

The trickiest part is making sure that the documents that are formed will look good when converted to a PDF.  I suggest using a very simple structure of the documents, in this case less is more.

Our document has our school logo at the top, a space for a generic comment about our program, a simple 2 column table to report grades in subjects, space for a more specific comment about the student's performance, and then space for our IB coordinator to sign the report, which he'll only be able to do once it's printed.

See a sample of the report here:

http://is.gd/4Z8Oj

See what it looks like as a PDF here:

View sample as PDF

• David Wees's blog

About David

David is a mathematics teacher and a learning specialist for technology at Stratford Hall in Vancouver, BC. He has been teaching since 2002, and has worked in Brooklyn, London, and Bangkok before moving back to Canada. He has his Masters degree in Educational Technology from UBC, and is the co-author of a mathematics textbook. He has been published in ISTE's Leading and Learning, Educational Technology Solutions, The Software Developers Journal, The Bangkok Post and Edutopia. He blogs with the Cooperative Catalyst, and is the Assessment group facilitator for Edutopia. He has also helped organize the first Edcamp in Canada, and TEDxKIDS@BC.