4 Ways You Can Save Time Writing Report Cards

Are you writing your report cards right now?

Is it taking you forever?

With a busy life and no extra time I need ways to make writing these simple.

I hear the nightmare stories of ineffective report card programs that only make this harder and more difficult than it needs to be.

I also here how teachers are writing these one by one from scratch in a word doc.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

There are a few tips that you can use to help you write your report cards that saves you time.

Create Report Card Comment Banks

A comment bank is a saved group of comments that you can use at 4 different achievement levels.  You save your various comments as you need them so that you can use them over and over again.

To create these set up a word document or a spreadsheet with at least five columns.

In the first column list all of the subjects, or expectations you want to create comments for. Then in the next columns write comments for each of the 4 achievement levels.

Writing a comment bank yourself takes time but after a few years of teaching you will have a reliable comment bank that you can draw on to write your comments year after year.

If you want to jump the wait and grab done for you comment banks to get you started then you can snag Madly Learning’s comment banks here

Follow a Report Card Formula

When we can find a routine, a structure or a framework to follow then simply repeat it, we get faster as we complete more tasks.  Think of this like an assembly line to create yourreport card comments.

Think of your reports as stages or steps that you can follow.  Then complete this work in batches.

To batch your report card tasks look at things you can do that become repetitive.

1. First, on a class list assign a grade to each student in your class.
2. Next, pull the comments for each student from your comment bank.  Do this one grade at a time, copy and paste the comment for each student that gets a B, then an C etc.
3. Then edit the comment if you need to add names or pronouns depending on your districts report card software
4. Move on to another subject and repeat.

Now one of the great things about batching is that in this day in age with all of the technology at our disposal we can use tools to help us speed up this process so that it doesn’t have to be so manual.  You can create this in a google sheets or microsoft excel page and then use formulas to replaces names, and pronouns for you.

This is how I built our report card comment helper Simply Graded.  This is a spreadsheet on steroids and will generate the comments you need based on the grades you select all with the proper pronouns.

Technology Is Your Friend

Report cards take a lot of writing, so let’s use technology to help! Use of AI tools can help you to speed up your work, however what it is even better at is rewording your report card.

Unfortunately, AI is not yet great a writing a complete report card comment, that is ready to copy and go.  However it can help in these other ways.

• Use AI tools like Chat GPT to write comments for your comment bank.
  • Prompt “You are an expert teacher in Ontario who is writing a report card for a grade 5 student. Write single-paragraph report card comments in simple and plain language with 300 characters based on the learning expectation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Use a three part comment framework of, learning objective, example, and next step. For this, comment use the example task: students read case studies on various cases from the Canadian supreme court and matched it to the charter of rights and freedoms”
• Sometimes, our writing can sound disjointed or wordy based on how we think as teachers.  So to help you ask Chat GPT to rewrite your learning skills to make them flow better or to write them in parent friendly language.
  • Prompt:”You are an expert teacher who has written a learning skill comment that needs improvement. Rewrite this learning skills comment for the report card so that it retains the same information but improves the flow of the comment in parent friendly language.”

Don’t Reinvent The Wheel

Ok let’s be real here.  No matter which way you look at it, report cards suck and take way too much time.

So let’s work smarter not harder.

I was tired of the hours of unpaid and inefficient time writing report cards.  I saw that most of my wasted time was due to the inefficient ways that report card programs were written that were wasting precious time, manually doing things that could be automated and repeating steps that were over complicating my flow.  What was even more frustrating was talking with a lead software engineer for one of these softwares and realizing that through our conversation, teachers were never consulted when creating these programs and nor were they considered important.

Its no wonder the products don’t work for teachers, we were never consulted when they were making them.

So frustrated, I decided that I wanted something designed by a teacher, and able to be used by teachers.  Sitting on a date with my husband, lamenting my frustration, we brainstormed Simply Graded, a report card helper and comment generator.

My report card frustration and stress is significantly reduced with this tool.

How It Works

1. Open the File You (Time: 0 Min) – start with the report card comment bank full of pre-written and fully editable comments across 4 levels of achievement.  These are provided in a fully editable Microsoft Word document (don’t have word? – no problem upload you file to google docs and it is fully compatible).
2. Edit the comments to suit your needs (Time: 10min – 1 hour)  If your principal is specific to how you write your report? No problem, re-word the comment frame to suit your requirements.  It is here that you can also add specific examples from your own classroom to reference in your comments.  If you completed special project in math or an experiment in science, simply add a reference to that inside your comment bank.
3. Import your comment bank (Time: 20 min) – You can add your personalized comments into our Simply Graded Report Card Generator tool.  This is as simply as copying the comments you want and pasting them into the cells of the simply graded report card comment library tab.
4. Set Up Your Classroom (Time: 10 min) – Inside our Simply Grade tool, it’s time to set it up for you classroom.  Simply type out your student names and identify their pronouns
5. Enter Your Grades (Time: 1 Hour) – For each subject or learning skill you need to make a comment for
   

   

   use our Simply grade tool to identify what grade each student received for the subjects you are commenting on and our tool will pull each specific comment from the comment library and combine it all together and pop out a comment for you.

6. Copy to Your Report Card Tool (Time: 30 min) Simply copy the generated comment into your report card writing program provided by your school board and you are done.

Check it out for yourself

If you want to save yourself some time in writing report cards then you need to check out this tool.  Grab it below in a bundle with your grade level comment bank too! 

Report Card Writing Bundle