Introduction
Overview
SM-Marks Online stores student results as markbook of related marks that you can do calculations on and print results from. To use SM-Marks Online you need have a login name and password. If your school has a license to use SM-Marks Online you will need to organise a login name with the appropriate person at your school.
When logged in, SM-Marks Online shows a list of options and the main menu and toolbar. If you already have a markbook made with SM-Marks you can import it to start working immediately. Or in the New menu there are commands to make new markbooks, classes, students, and tasks. In the Edit and Action menus the commands edit or delete the details of existing classes, students, and tasks. All names are entered and edited in the table that displays the markbook.
If you previously used SM-Marks the most important difference, other than SM-Marks Online working in a web browser, is that the markbooks can be opened by more than one teacher at a time. The same markbook can be simultaneously opened be all the teachers who are allowed to share it. This means teachers no longer need to wait to enter results into their own class, if another teacher already has the markbook open. Refer to the Working online topic in the Introduction section for more information on sharing markbooks.
For example, to make a markbook choose the New|Markbook command, type the name of the markbook and click the Create Markbook button. The beginning of a markbook is then shown as 3 lines in a largely empty table. Before entering students a class must be created. Choose the New|Class command, type the name of the class, press the Tab key to move to the teacher family name field. Then type the teacher's family name and press the Tab key again. Then type the teacher's given name and click on the Create Class button. This process can be repeated for each class as required. The Tab key is used to move to the next field, but you can also click on each field.
Students and tasks can be created in a similar way with the New|Student and New|Task commands. When students are created they are placed in the current class, which is shown below the toolbar and in the View menu. In contrast to students who are in specific classes, each task is always visible in all classes. Refer to the Markbook organisation topic in the Introduction section for more information about why this is the case.
Results can be entered by clicking on the Edit (looks like "paper and pen") icon to the left of the flag at the top of a task column. After entering the results, click on the Save button. With SM-Marks Online, the results entered do not need to be numbers, although normally calculations are only done on numerical values.
A calculation can be set for any task that does not contain raw results. The Help|Calculation assistant command sets the calculation stored for a task. or you can use the Edit|Calculation command for more flexibility. Every calculation requires the setting of the affected classes and the tasks used. Usually a calculation affects all classes, although it is possible to restrict it to only some of the classes. Every calculation requires at least one task to be used and some, such as Weight, can use many.
There are several common mathematical methods for doing calculations that total results with different weights. SM-Marks Online is able to do the popular methods, so it is important ensure that SM-Marks Online is set up to correctly do the weighting calculations that you expect. This can be set in the Edit|Preferences|Calculation methods command. If you are not sure about the mathematical issues, you can leave SM-Marks Online with the default preferences.
As well as weighting, SM-Marks Online has calculations that give the sum of the tasks, change the task maximum, assign grades and positions, and do complex linear mapping. Some calculations, such as Standardise have default values, but these can be edited in each calculation, or permanently changed in the Preferences command.
To print information from a markbook there are several print commands. For a list of students in each class, there is the Print|Marks command. When printing, SM-Marks Online generally prints what is shown in the table. This means that a sorted class list can be printed, by first using a Tools|Sort students|Numerically by task command and then using Print|Marks.
With all the print commands, a Print Preview is shown, then choosing the Printer icon on the toolbar opens another tab or window in your browser showing the information cleanly without the menus and toolbar. The Print command of your browser then sends the information to the printer.
With the Print|Marks and Print|Class roll commands for higher quality printing, click on the PDF icon on the toolbar to open another window or tab in your browser with the pages as a PDF file. These are printed with the PDF plugin of your browser or viewer.
The Print|Statistics and Print|Student statistics commands are useful when either class or individual student statistics are required. All Print commands make use of the tagging feature of SM-Marks Online. Students, and tasks can all be individually tagged to restrict some commands to only the tagged items. Tagging is done with the mouse by clicking on the flag next to a student or task name, or with the commands in the Action menu.
For example, if some students are tagged, only those students are printed with the Print|Student statistics command. When estimating results, only the tagged tasks are used to find the estimate. Tagging is also used when moving students from one class to another.
Many commands are not mentioned in this overview. If you are not sure how to do a particular operation, or have a specific question, browse the How do I section and the menu sections for possibilities.