Chock full of news and updates on your favorite online organizer along with tips for teachers on how to better utilize GradeMate and more fully integrate technology and the classroom!
We’re proud to announce that GradeMate now hosts all files in the Rackspace Cloud! What does this mean? Well, much, much faster upload and download times and a much more secure system for managing all of your files. Best of all, none of your private files are stored on our servers anymore — everything sits behind Rackspace’s secure and private file container system.
We hope you continue to take advantage of GradeMate for this coming school year. Best of luck!
The new GradeMate iPhone app is finally in the iTunes Store, and it’s 100% free! We wanted to get at least a basic version out there so you could see what it is we’re working on, and plan on offering a bunch of fun new features in the upcoming weeks and months through updates.
One of the more important features in version 1.0 — and one that took us the longest to get right — is the full synchronization between the mobile and online applications. This means that whatever you do with your courses, assignments, notes, or files, those changes can be immediately seen no matter how you access GradeMate. So for example, if you add a course and some assignments online, and then fire up the mobile application, the app will pull any changes you made and update everything, all in the background. And even better: if you add some information on the mobile app — with or without an Internet or network connection, and on either an iPhone or iPod Touch — those changes will get pushed to GradeMate online the next time your device gets connected! Your data is with you wherever you go, with or without an Internet connection.
Right now, you can view your courses, edit their information or settings, and add new ones. Assignments and notes can be added for courses that you made, and you can see all of your existing assignments by course or in a calendar list view, along with their notes and attached files. The Courses tab will also let you go online to your saved links either within GradeMate or on Safari, and you can access your files right in the app as well. And if you have any GradeMate messages (sent or received) you can view those right there in the app too.
We’re hoping to get some feedback on what it is that you guys want to see in the next updates, or just GradeMate features in general, so send us anything through the iPhone app’s feedback form or right here!
GradeMate went through a beautiful make-over today. We’ve spent the past six months improving the site functionality and look/feel of the application and we’re incredibly proud to release it to you. Changes and upgrades include a new Bookmarks feature, a brand new layout and user experience, enhanced and heavily updated security features, edit undo/redo in the Grades Manager, and a new view of your course pages.
And the fun doesn’t stop here! We’ll be making large improvements and additions to the service from now through the summer. Some additions include:
We do all of this for you, for free, and would love your feedback and support. Don’t hesitate to send us bug reports and feature requests or let us know what you think of the web site!
It’s been a little while since I’ve had the chance to make any significant improvements to GradeMate, probably a little over a year, which I apologize for. However, all of that is about to change as GradeMate will soon go through an entire shift in its direction and purpose.
What does this mean for you? Well, all of the features you currently use and expect from GradeMate will still be available. Nothing is going away. However, the look and feel of the application will be a little different (and prettier) and there will be a whole lot more you’ll be able to do with it.
Most of the changes are going to be gearing it to be used in the classroom. Project pages, book reports, enhanced sharing and collaborating, a blog feature, and a whole lot more is slated for development through Spring 2010. I’ll be sure to keep you posted but for those interested, send me an email at mike@mygrademate.com if you’d like to be included in the private beta to test and provide insight/feedback into the new site.
Stay tuned for more!
There hasn’t been many feature updates lately because we’ve been fast at work rebuilding the service from the ground-up. The new system running GradeMate (which will hopefully be up by the end of the month) will allow us to create new features and updates to the site amazingly fast. With that, we’ll be adding a feature request form to the site and maybe eventually a discussion forum. Bear with us for the next few weeks, we’re sure the new and improved GradeMate will be awesome.
The newest version of GradeMate was released today, and with it came a new File Manager. You can use the file manager to keep all of you course and assignment files organized and viewable in one convenient place. Uploading, downloading, and removing your files just got a lot easier. And as always, you get unlimited file storage space.
In the next couple weeks we’ll be working on letting you create your own assignment types in addition to the ones we provide. This will help you keep yourself organized the way you want to. Also, we’ll be introducing a new feature we’re really excited about – Groups and Project Pages. I’ll post an article soon going more in depth into this later, but Project pages will be a publicly accessible page for anyone you might be working in a group on a project with where you can share notes, files, to-dos and much more. Better still, there will be a message wall where you can add messages from your phone or email and even have them sent directly to all members of your team.
Finally, we’re looking for a few writers for the GradeMate Blog. We’d like to get some good articles on a consistent basis together with the GradeMate application. If you’re interested, navigate here.
With the new release of v0.9.6 GradeMate gets a little bit older and a lot a bit better. Users can now set ‘assignment weights’ to their courses. For example, if you know homeworks will be 40% of your grade and tests will be 60%, you can set that for your course so you never have to worry about entering a weight for an assignment again. GradeMate will simply adjust the weight per assignment based on the number that you currently have.
It’s a much more convenient way to approach Grades, so check it out and let us know what you think. The Grades page also got a facelift with a great new user interface. All of your grades can be edited quickly and easily just like a spreadsheet.
GradeMate went through a much anticipated update today with the new beta release of version 0.9.5. Now users can choose which type of assignment they create, be it homework, test, lab whatever. Also, assignments have their own individual pages where you can add assignment specific notes or upload files for that item. Hopefully, this will allow you to be a little more organized and have more control over specific assignments.
Not only that, but we’re preparing for the next release which will see a complete makeover of the Grades page. You can expect more updates on that in the next post.
Some of the things that are keeping us busy right now:
Thats about it. Once we clean up the site we’re going to go full blast at releasing a Calendar. Hopefully it will be out early 2008.