We made a website to help teachers write student reports

I had to write periodic progress reports for each of my students over 4 years of teaching in Taiwan. If you have the same problem, you might be interested in the free website myself and a small team of developers created! We don’t have ads or any form of revenue from this; we just wanted to make something useful.

Basically, you can tick some boxes in a form and our website will randomly choose from a variety of relevant sentences to write a paragraph for you! You only have to check as many boxes as you want to.

So, please give us some feedback! Could this be useful to you? Anything we should change or add?

Teacher’s Pet

Teachers should look at their students work and then comment on that

It’s not Rocket science.

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The entire concept seems unprofessional and unethical to me. I get that it’s probably tedious to write progress reports for students, but isn’t it also part of the job?

I don’t see how teachers handing out autogenerated progress reports is much different from students handing in plagiarized essays. Lazy teachers using a tool like this doesn’t set a good example, IMO.

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I understand where you’re coming from, but there is a significant difference between progress reports and essays. We ask students to write essays to help them develop various skills (e.g. critical thinking, composing an argument, research, style, etc). If they use tools or other people to write their essays for them, they are missing out on this critical personal development.

On the other hand, the purpose of a progress report is to communicate, either to admin or to parents, how a student is doing in class. If a tool can help teachers write reports faster, and the reports remain customized for each student, I honestly don’t see any losses or downsides.

Now, a keyword there is customized. If our tool generated the same report, or random reports for each student, I would agree that it was unethical, because the reports would no longer adequately describe each student’s status in class. But that’s not how it works; we attempt to include many different options for various types of behavior, and we make it easy for users to edit the text once it is produced in case there was anything not covered by the form.

My feedback is that it’s not very mobile friendly. I can only see the middle of the page and can’t see anything on either side, no matter how I try to change the view

As for auto-generated reports, I don’t know that that is the worst thing ever, though I can’t see how this system does it. My school, for example, expects us to fill out quite a few pages of checked boxes on each student’s progress, then the Chinese teacher is supposed to write at least one page about the kid’s progress and the English teacher is supposed to write another one. It’s total busy work for us to satisfy imagined/nonexistent parent demands. But the site above isn’t mobile-friendly and I’m not by my computer, so I can’t decide if it’s worth it for me to use.

There are already dozens of sites that do this. Been around for quite some time.

it’s a short cut, not cheating.
if you teach 30 students, and they all participate actively in class, show interest and ask questions it’s a huge time killer to write the same over and over again.

No.

Thank you for the feedback. We’ll probably finish making it mobile-friendly in a few days.