ThinkWave

ThinkWave is a cloud-based gradebook and classroom management tool for teachers. Signing up involves a few steps to help users set their calendar, grading preferences, assignment categories, and category weights. Teachers can manually add students to classes -- or upload them from CSV files -- and send students a link with a login code. Students sign up with their email address, a username, and a password. From there, teachers can assign content, attach files, view student uploads, track attendance, send messages, and more. Built-in video tutorials appear on each page to help users get started.

The quality of data users can get out of ThinkWave will depend largely on what they put in, so teachers should be deliberate about what information they want to have on hand for each student and enlist help from school administrators or parents to get the information they need into a spreadsheet up front; this will help them avoid time-consuming individual data entry later on. Users should be aware that there's no autosave feature or save prompt, so they'll need to save every entry manually before proceeding to the next. A paid plan offers additional tech support and 100 GB of storage. However, if teachers don't plan on having students upload much content, the free version should suffice.

For teachers who want to wade into taking their gradebooks digital, ThinkWave (despite its somewhat dull interface) provides key setup support, can handle a large variety of student data, and comes with both standard and customizable reporting options. As a learning tool, however, ThinkWave is somewhat limited. Teachers can provide exemplars, detailed directions, and feedback on student work, but students can do little more than upload work and view grades and feedback. While this is considerably more useful than what a traditional gradebook offers, the digital version favors reporting tools and data tracking over collaborative or creative features that would enable students to take more ownership of their learning. Still, parents and students will appreciate the ability to see student progress, and everyone benefits when fewer consumable resources are used to create and submit assignments.

Teachers will want the premium version of ThinkWave for the extra storage to support the uploading of many different file types, including word processing documents, picture files, videos, and PDFs. That said, the onus is on the teacher to create assignments that promote creativity and collaboration so that the work the students are doing is engaging and builds higher-order thinking skills.