Can you please change the wording for the status of practice type activities?
Practice type activities are typically server graded. When a student has a partially completed activity Buzz shows a black paper icon in the gradebook. When the student, or especially a parent, clicks on the activity they see something like the image below.
This says the status is "needs grading" which is very misleading. This often leads to angry emails from parents asking why I haven't graded their student's work. The reality is that the activity is completely server graded and the student just hasn't completed it yet. A simple change in wording from "needs grading" to something like "incomplete" would go a long way towards clearing up these misunderstandings. You could even change the paper icon to a different color or a different image to differentiate an incomplete practice activity from an assignment that is truly waiting for teacher input.
Comments (2)
This is also something that has plagued us for years. The parent observer in reviewing the grades screen sees all of these black paper icons and thinks that the teacher is just incompetent and can't keep up with his/her grading when in reality, the student has opened the assignment but hasn't completed it. I get push back on this every year when I do my parent presentations about how to use Buzz effectively. I can't give them a good answer. As you can see, even the verbiage that the system uses indicates that we're waiting on the item to be graded, but that simply isn't the case. In fact, neither the teacher nor the parent can see anything but what the student has submitted. There's no way to tell whether they are halfway done, missing one problem, or have barely started. It's very frustrating. Given this pandemic, it's time we do something about this frustration.
Thanks for considering tackling this task!
I too have had this issue! Students often use Buzz's default "needs grading" to avoid completing assignments and not being truthful to parents. "Need Attention" may also be an option for the status. Please update!