Managing Comments

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Accelerus contains many features that make the writing of student comments for reports much easier and more efficient for teachers.

Teachers may type their comments from scratch for each student or may set up and/or draw upon banks of pre-defined comments when writing student reports. These comments may be used as the basis of more complex and personalised final comments for students. The comment banks are set up to contain special control text so that, when linked to a particular student, they show the student's name and/or appropriate pronoun.

The use of comment banks is not an all or nothing matter in Accelerus. A combination of comment banks and free-form text may be used.

Some of the features of comment management in Accelerus include:

Each school decides on whether comment banks may be used, who has permission to set up and manage comment banks, and to what extent. This is through comment bank settings and permissions controlled by each school.
There are two types of comment banks - school and teacher.Com CBWindowTeacher
Authorised Accelerus users, eg subject coordinators, may create school comment banks and assign these to the subjects they coordinate, making them automatically available to teachers of the subjects.
The creation and management of the actual comments occurs in the Comment Bank window, especially designed to set up comment banks in a structured way so that comments may be easily located.
Some of the features of the Comment Bank window include:
Tools to allow easy insertion of name/pronoun substitution text.
Spelling and punctuation checking.
Find and replace features.
The ability to preview and print out listings of comments.
The ability to import comments into an existing comment bank, merging these into one.
An export feature, creating a CSV file of the currently-open comment bank.
Not only may teachers create their comment banks for use in Accelerus from scratch, they may also import comment banks of two format types: MarkBook comment bank and comment CSV files.
Accelerus comment banks are all stored in the Accelerus database.

Where teachers use offline files for the assessment of their students, the comment banks created by them or assigned to their subjects are included in their offline files, so that they are always available for the teachers to draw upon. Changes made to comment banks are synchronised with the database, along with the result data in teachers' classes.

Every teacher has access to a Comment Bank Explorer from the Welcome Screen, listing all of the comment banks that are available to the teacher, and from where they may open comment banks.
Comments in Accelerus are usually written and drawn from comment banks by teachers in single student view, the link between the comment banks and the students in the teachers' class files.

Com SingleStudentView

Single student view contains many features to facilitate the writing of comments, including:
Progress indicators and character counts, to indicate how much of the allowed length for a comment has been used.
Edit mode which allows comment banks to be edited and added to while writing comments for students.
Two handy methods for inserting name/pronoun substitution text into comments being added to comment banks.
The ability to add a comment from text that has been typed for a student directly into a comment bank, so that it is available for use for other students.
The ability to toggle between the student's name or appropriate pronoun, and between given and preferred name, where allowed by the school.