MarkBook Comments Screen

    MarkBook^®     section 10-1

MarkBook Comment Banks for Anecdotal Reporting

One of MarkBook's most powerful features is its ability to create, store, size check, spell check, and electronically transfer sets of anecdotal paragraphs. Chapter 10 is devoted to describing these features. Once familiar with these MarkBook capabilities, you will be able to quickly create meaningful, robust, and accurate anecdotal reports for your students. At official report time, MarkBook will rapidly transfer/merge these paragraphs electronically into other report cards.

Not all jurisdictions require anecdotal reporting. In this case, you may elect to ignore MarkBook's comment construction capabilities or use very simple comment selection just for MarkBook's own printed Student Reports as in section 9-4. Other organizations require a very detailed anecdotal paragraph for each student and may even require each teacher to enter/transfer this paragraph into some other "electronic report card"!

One click on Comments in the upper menu bar will open the drop down Comments menu as shown in this screen image. Select the Normal Mode to build comments for each student individually as in section 10-3. Select the Transfer Mode to paste your finished comments into other software applications such a data base receiving screen, a web screen, or directly into an Electronic Report Card. Transfer details are in section 10-8.

The upper two lines (English in this example), create/transfer comments for a single subject or Mark Set. The next two lines create/transfer comments for reports covering multiple subjects or Combined Mark Sets. These two "Combined" lines will be greyed out if there is only one Mark Set in use for the current class. See section 4-3 for details on Mark Sets.

The Comment Bank Editor permits access to any available bank. Each bank may hold up to 7500 comments covering a wide range of items. There is no limit as to the number of banks. Often, schools and districts create committees to build and share banks. In many cases, these banks are subject-specific. The MarkBook installation CD has a zip file to install multiple comment banks.

One large generic comment bank is already installed in your MarkBook directory. The structure of any bank is seen in the following Notepad image. Its format is ascii text (also known as DOS text or plain text). There are three fields per line including two descriptors at the beginning of each line such as ATTEN and + or BUS and STR1. The fields are separated by commas. The third field is a sentence/paragraph sandwiched in quotation marks. There is a hard return at the end of each line to start the next line. The file has the extension .bnk. The one installed is called comment.bnk and there is a partial printout of it in section 10-2. As new banks are built, give each a different name with the .bnk extension.

MarkBook's Comment Bank as seen with Notepad

MarkBook's Comment Bank as seen with Notepad

These banks use special characters to merge first name and gender pronouns for each student. For instance $ merges the student's first name. Once one or more suitable banks are created, users may easily merge multiple lines from the bank with each report as in section 10-3 and section 10-5 of this manual.

Manual: Go to section 10-2 to see a partial printout of a MarkBook comment bank.