ETA For the Gradebook

[James_Waring]

Do we have an ETA for the gradebook yet? I had a parent teacher meeting yesterday and it was made really difficult by the fact that I couldn't open a pupil's gradebook on Teams and tell the parent how they had progressed across different assignments. I has to open each assignment in turn and search for their grade which was laborious and didn't look great to the parents. The roadmap linked below keeps getting pushed back.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=&searchterms=Teams%2CGradebook

Originally it was August for deployment, then October and now just Q4 2019. It;s literally the only thing missing for Teams to work effectively for our school - I love everything else about it. It's such a fundamental feature though that I'd have to switch back to Moodle if it didn't appear. 

Thanks

[#2]

@James_WaringI have the same questions with the added "PowerSchool Grade Sync" option deployed.  It says it was deployed Q3, but wondering if it is actually being used in Districts outside of a pilot situation. 

[#3]

@James_Waring Microsoft staff have told me they have been specifically told to say that they are not producing a Learning Management System (or VLE).
They will have to announce soon that they actually are doing so but they have a long way to go to catch up.

They keep replicating the features of a Learning Management System each year, copying many of the features of top LMS like Firefly, Frog, Canvas, Moodle etc...
Assignments is one of those features.
Each of these products has a markbook.

Most of them also Sync users and classes automatically.

[#4]

@ScottJohnJohnson 

Something that we're not privy to is definitley going on behind the scenes. The 'gradebook' was announced in May and here we are in the middle of December with still nothing. It's not exactly a difficult feature to implement. 

My guess is that Microsoft are developing an actual VLE in the shadows and don't want Teams for Education to develop past a certain point. 

At the moment Teams is something for businesses that's been shoehorned in to education with very little consideration given to what educators actually need from software. 

[#5]

@James_Waring I am waiting with baited breath.

I worked for an LMS and implemented a heap in my time. Creating a grade book from scratch would take ages (not just a spreadsheet but relations data like previous year data, which teachers access data, who can mark (some classes have multiple teachers on a class) - there is so much more to it so I can see them taking ages.

So many products are shoehorned into schools (look at Canvas - a great University tool but some schools are forcing this on their primary schools). Following with interest.