With a few mouse clicks and a password, Cynthia Banner is keeping track of her son's progress in high school. Thousands of teachers are using such Internet postings, and they are changing relationships among students, teachers and parents in radical ways. There are no excuses about not knowing an assignment was due. ThinkWave, one of the largest producers of Internet grade software, currently has 215,000 teacher, student and parent accounts.
Teachers pay nothing for the software.
The company makes money from advertisers. Most available programs link a teacher's electronic grade book to a Web site designed by a company to assimilate the information into a database that a parent can access with a password. Parents enter their child's name and the password, look at a class schedule and click for the individualized details. In addition to information about grades and daily assignments, many of the programs allow teachers to post comments on a student's behavior, attentiveness and attendance. The trend seems to be leaping from school to school, as teachers e-mail each other about how they have made grades accessible.