Sakai Feedback Tools: Post-It vs. Gradebook

Sakai provides two tools for posting student grades and feedback, Gradebook and Post-It. In each case, individual students will see only the information pertaining to them. You may choose to use both of these tools or just one of them, depending on your goals. A summary of each tool is below. See individual Gradebook and Post-It tool tutorials for more information on each.

Gradebook

• Gradebook can automatically create column and enter scores from each test/quiz administered in Sakai.
• You can create columns manually, say for a homework, test or quiz given outside Sakai.
• You can enter/edit grades in manually created columns.
• Columns created from test/quizzes need to be managed through test/quiz tool.
• Only numbers can be entered in columns.
• You can set percentage ranges for assigning course grades (A, A-, etc)
• You can choose when to show students their course grade (if ever).
• Does not appear to have flexibility in setting formula to compute grade.

Post-It

• Its main purpose is for posting feedback, but can also be used for grades.
• You can post one or several files. For example, you may have a feedback file for each assignment. Or you may just have one file containing all grades, which you update throughout the semester.
• You use Excel to create the upload file, so columns can contain numbers or text, and you can use Excel formulas for calculations.
• You can start from a file downloaded from Gradebook and build on that.
• If you are using Sakai Test and Quizzes, grades from those will not automatically go into a Post-It file. However, you can download the grades from the Gradebook tool and copy/paste them into a Post-It file.

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