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Fredonia Professor Tackles Android Apps for Educators

  • By Dian Schaffhauser
  • 03/31/11

A professor and a former student at State University of New York at Fredonia have recently updated one of their Android applications for academic use. Andrew Cullison, an assistant professor in the philosophy department at the university, and Jonathan Nalewajek, a computer science graduate and former student system administrator currently working at Xerox, launched Android for Academics in 2010 specifically to help higher ed instructors and K-12 teachers with administrative chores.

Their latest release is a new version of Grade Book for Professors specifically to run on Android devices. Grade Book synchronizes with a Google spreadsheet and allows the user to use the mobile device to manage the grade book data maintained in the spreadsheet.

Features include the ability to edit student grades directly on the phone, to e-mail students their grades with the click of a button, and to protect grade books on the device through a pin number. An update to the app adds the ability to e-mail all students in a class as a bulk operation and to do quick views and easy grading of individual assignments.

A video demonstrating the common functions of the app shows how the user can open a grading session for a given class then work through the list of students to add grades. If a particular student's assignment has already been graded, the app recognizes that from the spreadsheet and crosses off the name of the student in the grading list.

Although other apps from the company are free, this one has two versions--one edition that's free but ad-supported and another that costs $4.99 but is ad-free.

The company also offers Attendance, a free app for taking attendance with an Android device; another called Grade Ticker, which simplifies numeric grading of assignments; and Grade Rubric, for teachers who use a grading rubric for evaluating an assignment.

Further information can be found here.

About the Author

Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.

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