THE NTN GRADEBOOK PLUGIN
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New Tech Network believes that teachers must have tools that are well aligned with high quality instruction and assessment practices. Having the right tools makes it easier to be a great teacher and having the wrong tools can unintentionally make teachers worse. This is why Echo is NTN’s preferred digital learning management system. Echo has the features needed to support traditional teaching and innovative practices like project-based learning. Click here to learn more about Echo.
We also recognize that not every school has the opportunity to use Echo. For those schools that want to forgo a traditional gradebook, the NTN Gradebook Plugin offers schools the opportunity to implement a multi-outcome scoring gradebook within Canvas.
What is the NTN Gradebook Plugin?
The NTN Gradebook Plugin works within your school’s Canvas environment to add multi-outcome scoring functionality to it’s traditional gradebook. Once installed and enabled, it replaces Canvas’ traditional Grades and Assignment pages while maintaining Canvas’ native assignment features.
What is Multi-Outcome Scoring?
Multi-outcome scoring is a different assessment model used by innovative schools that emphasizes critical cross-curricular skills that are proven to help students succeed in college and career. Assessing these skills is a key element to the New Tech Network school model and aligns well with project-based learning. Two core design elements separate traditional and multi-outcome scoring gradebooks.
First, instead of using scoring categories like homework, papers, and tests that have little value outside the classroom, multi-outcome scoring uses more meaningful categories like knowledge and thinking, written communication, oral communication, collaboration, and agency that are more directly correlated with student success after high school. When viewing grades, teachers, students, and their parents get a clear sense of where the student is performing well and where they might need some extra support. Each outcome or skill is reported separately in a way that’s easy for students and parents to understand.
Second, traditional gradebooks allow only one score to be entered for each assignment which limits the quality and nuance of the data. For example, if a teacher was grading a research paper for both academic knowledge and writing skills, that detail becomes lost once the paper’s blended score is entered into the gradebook. A multi-outcome scoring gradebook allows teachers to enter multiple scores for each activity. This allows more detailed information about the student performance to be captured within the gradebook.
For each class assignment, teachers decide what categories will be scored and how many points each category is worth.
And, when scoring student work, teachers enter each category score separately which allows each category to be reflected independently of the others.
The NTN Gradebook Plugin for Canvas empowers teachers to implement a more meaningful assessment strategy and helps focus the entire school community on the skills most important to student success after they graduate.