The Gradebook is there to help when completing end of term marking, composing school reports, looking for trends within a student's work, or preparing material for a parent consultation. It can help to spot opportunities for challenge and extension work and to alert a teacher to difficulties a student may be experiencing. A good markbook would do all of this because a teacher has carefully recorded the important details. The Moodle Gradebook reduces the workload significantly because it inserts the data automatically, generates meaningful reports with the click of a mouse, and becomes impossible to ignore in terms of the information about and presentation of student performance.
In the next chapter, we are going to look at more activities that can be recorded within the Gradebook. Specifically, they help to generate collaborative work. We shall look at how students can build up a useful database of medieval characters and how they can use a wiki to produce a piece of extended collaborative...