The Function Button Row

You can hover (place your mouse icon/pointer on a certain screen location and don't move it for a few seconds) over any of these functions to see their roles. The lower rows function similarly.

• Add Item Add Item is used to add new assessment items like tests or quizzes. This moves you to a screen to enter information about this item (ie. name, description, etc. as outlined above).

• Del/Ed Item Delete/Edit Item is used to remove an assessment item (and it's associated student scores) or to change something about the item (ie. maximum score, group membership, etc.). It can also remove a custom sortorder for student names (which is stored as a assessment item called ``sortorder'').

• Rpt A Report Menu that allows printing a variety of reports including a couple of student marks reports, an empty marks sheet (for recoring mark entries) and a password report for printing/viewing student passwords.

• Weight Item Weight by Item is used to adjust the weighting of assessment items within their group, which used in determing the students' average. It allows any item to have it's weight changed. This is used to adjust the weighting of an individual item within its group or subgroup.

• Weight Grp Weight by Group is used to adjust the relative weightings of groups of (assessment) items on the student average. It does not allow reweighting within a group (since this is done with the item weight adjust function above).

• Post is used to copy student averages from the gradebook into the report card system. Marks may be changed, if desired, during this process (ie. promote to 50%, etc.). The posting process can insert a value into any of the subject objectives. There may be up to 20 objectives defined per subject in the report card system.

• Exp Export is used to export information about this subject into a format that may be stored locally on a teacher's computer. This designed to help allay any fears about data loss on the remote computer running Open Admin. It stores the data in CSV (Comma Separated Format) so that it can be used on any type of spreadsheet program. It can also create a compressed zip file containing marks for all subjects of this teacher for backup purposes.

• Mtce The Maintenance Menu is used for a variety of functions. Currently it holds:
  1. The SortOrder function to customize the ordering of student names on the main screen and in reports. The default sort order is lastname, firstname.

  2. The Compress/Delete function that can remove multiple items and their scores at a time or compress multiple items into a single item along with the scores.

  3. The Clone function that can create copies of (ie. clone) assessment items from a subject and put them into another subject (or section or the same subject). If a teacher has two sections of the same subject, this would make it easy to create identical assessments without having to enter things twice.

• Search The search function is used to search for text in scores (including the * (ignore) values), scores in a certain percentage range, or averages within a certain percentage range. This will search over all or selected courses for the logged in teacher.