Features of Grady Profile

Grady Profile is a suite of programs that enable schools to create and maintain artifact-rich, reflection-rich, assessment-rich student portfolios. The suite includes four programs:

Personal Profile, where students enter and review information in their own portfolios (artifacts, reflections, self-assessments) and where parents examine their child’s portfolio; password protected, only students and authorized guests (such as parents) may open it.
Profile Manager, where teachers manage a class full of portfolios, examine content, assess individual performance, enter feedback, print reports, etc.
Master Tailor, where administrators, curriculum people, teachers and others concerned with the organization and layout of the portfolio, customize it for local requirements; for example, it is the place to specify benchmark criteria and standards.
Administrator, for system and network administrators to perform a variety of maintenance operations.

The major features of Grady Profile include

Student Ownership

In Grady Profile, students own their own portfolios and are expected to contribute to their construction and maintenance. While the role and responsibilities of the student will vary with the student’s age, maturity, and the school’s educational philosophy, all students should have a say in what artifacts are included in their portfolio and should have an opportunity to include their own appraisals of their artifacts.

Personal Profile is the component of the Grady Profile application suite specifically designed to be used by students.

Grady Profile offers a variety of ways for students to express themselves, including text fields and sound recordings. (Sound is particularly valuable for very young students and students who have difficulty writing.)

Artifacts: The heart of any portfolio is its artifacts. With Grady Profile, anything that is available as a computer file – or that you can make into a computer file – can be used as an artifact in a student’s portfolio. More Information

Reflective Practice

Educational theory teaches us that the key to learning that sticks with the student – learning that matters – is reflection.

Reflecting on an experience is more
important than the experience itself.

– Jan Phillips
The College School

In Grady Profile, it is standard practice to provide either textual or vocal reflection with each artifact included in the portfolio. Additional opportunities for reflection may be at the assignment or project level. More Information

Evaluation to Standards and Benchmarks

Traditionally, standards and/or benchmarks are applied at the subject level. That is, students will be expected to perform (and will be measured) against standards and benchmarks in each subject area.

However, Grady Profile includes a special type of data field (called a descriptor block) that supports rubric-based evaluation. The source of these rubrics can be standards documents, district-wide or school-wide objectives, or rubrics you have developed associated with a particular lesson plan or learning unit.

Descriptor blocks store your evaluation of the student's performance. But in addition, they support student self-evaluation and live links to student related or relevant student artifacts. More information

Project Portfolios

In addition to individual portfolios, Grady Profile also supports project portfolios for cooperative and collaborative learning. If you divide students into teams and implement small group projects, then you'll want to create portfolios for those projects. All of the team members will be able to open the project portfolio and use it to document the project and to display and evaluate the artifacts they produce in the project.

Obviously, a project portfolio will have a different structure and content than an individual portfolio. As a trivial example, the demographic data often included in an individual portfolio would be inappropriate in a project portfolio — you'd want to replace it with a list of project members and a discussion of the role each played in the project.

Grady Profile includes special support for you to set up a project portfolio, including defining its members and setting up the security environment so that they can all open the portfolio, using their passwords from their individual portfolios.

In addition, when the project has been completed, Grady Profile offers you the opportunity to add the (selected) content of the project portfolio into each team member's individual portfolio, so their work on the project becomes a part of their portfolio record.

Multi-Year Records

In a typical portfolio, there is an important distinction made between current and historical data — you and your students want to focus on current content, but still want access to historical data.

Grady Profile supports this distinction with its concept of timeframes. The timeframe is your academically significant time period — in most cases a school year. But in a high school or college, the timeframe might be a semester or quarter.

The point is that Grady Profile organizes data by timeframe. And, unless you choose to look at historical data, the current timeframe is displayed.

In this way, the current data (which is what you normally want to see) is readily available, separated from past data, but without losing the access you need to historical data.

Customize Structure

Grady Profile supports your need to organize a student's information in a way that makes sense to you and allows you to find it easily.

Each school year or semester is a timeframe.
- Within that timeframe, the student works in a variety of subject areas, which we call domains. For example, a school might create domains for Language Arts, Mathematics, etc.
  - Within a particular domain, you'll want to create subdivisions for each major area of the domain. In this example, Language Arts has been subdivided into Writing, Reading, Speaking and Listening.
    - In some cases, a particular topic (and the associated page of content in the portfolio) will be sufficent for your purposes.
    - In other cases, it won't. For example, if your topic is Writing, you may want to include several examples of the student's writing, not just one. In this case, you can create multiple example cards for a particular topic.

The point about all this is that the structure of your student portfolios is up to you. There is no “right way” to organize a portfolio — only the way that makes sense to you and your school.

Customize Content

The structure of a portfolio refers to the set of pages it contains and how they relate to one another. An equally important question concerns what is on each page.

In Grady Profile, the process of deciding what goes on each page, where each field is located, and what its properties are is called tailoring.

Grady Profile allows you to perform tailoring at a number of levels — you can define the appearance of each page of a portfolio on an individual student, class-wide, school-wide, or district-wide basis. More information

Customize for Individual Students

Every student is a unique individual. Consequently, you should expect each student's portfolio to be unique. Some students will write four drafts of an assignment; others will have two. Some students will interpret an assignment artistically; some analytically.

Just as the students differ, so will the structure and content of their Grady Profile portfolio. Grady Profile was designed with this type of flexibility in mind. Trying to “shoe horn” all students into a single rigid structure does the students a disservice and discredits the portfolio process.

In fact, the flexibility of Grady Profile makes it an excellent vehicle for the implementation of IEPs. Some progressive school districts are looking to create personal education plans for every student, not just students with special needs. Whether you’re looking to create a full-fledged IEP for a student or simply augmenting a portfolio to match the needs and interests of a student, Grady Profile has the flexibility you need.

Special Support for Oral Reading…

Sound recordings are important artifacts for a variety of purposes, including speaking, foreign language, and music activities.

However, oral reading is a special case, and Grady Profile provides special support for reading aloud.

As you can see, in a reading sample exhibit, you can view the source material the student read while listening to it.

…and Speaking: Another use of reading sample exhibits is to capture speaking samples. In this case, you can use a picture instead of text as the source material and simply ask the student to talk about it.

Hyper-links in Grady Profile: Grady Profile can link to other cards within the portfolio. Click on a small chain-link icon to open the linked card in a new window. For example, when discussing an evaluation of a benchmark, it can be useful to provide a link to the page with the artifact that demonstrates the student’s relevant performance.

Cross-Platform Operation

Grady Profile is a fully cross-platform program.

The Macintosh and Windows implementations of Grady Profile are functionally and visually equivalent.
A student profile can be created, opened, or modified from either Macintosh or Windows computers.
Grady Profile supports a Macintosh, Windows, or mixed network configuration.
The product is distributed on a dual-platform CD-ROM and is licensed for cross-platform use.

on Windows:

on Macintosh:

Network-Shareable Data

Grady Profile is designed for a building-wide installation. Student portfolios and other shareable data files are located in a single network directory structure.

Applications can either be installed in the network shared directory and run from there, or installed locally on each client computer. (The latter option means more work for network administrators, but better performance for classroom teachers and students.)

Some files (a few support files and Windows DLLs) need to be installed locally on client machines, but the bulk of the files (and all shareable data) can reside on the network. We provide an Administrator Program to monitor network operations. More information

Multiple Classes: All student profiles are stored in a single common folder (on the network server). However, each teacher running Profile Manager sees a roster containing a list of the students in that teacher's class.
This occurs because there is a “class-file” for each class in the building. A teacher with multiple classes will have multiple class-files, each of which contains a list of the students in that class.

Tight, Multi-Faceted Security

The content of a student portfolio – particularly one full of evaluations and assessments of student performance – is very confidential. (Remember, the student owns the portfolio; the reasonable security concerns here are those of the student.)

Grady Profile takes security very seriously, and implements a comprehensive password-based security system, which controls what operations a user may perform, which data are accessible, and what kinds of access are permitted.

The system supports a number of safeguards, always giving you the choice of how much or how little to implement:

Minimum password length and other features to help assure that passwords are difficult to compromise.
Controls over password lifetimes, forced password changes and password reuse.
Inactivity time-out to prevent data from being compromised if the authorized user does not log out.
Operational privileges: Who can create a new card? Who can add an artifact or delete one? The security area lists every operation and lets you determine person by person who may or may not do each one.
Access privileges: Should everyone have full access to every field? to every card? to every Domain? You can allow No access, Read-only or Read-Write access for a single field, a card or an entire domain. For example, you can set it up so that only people with Counselor privileges can see the counselor data which may be a single field on a card, or an entire domain for Counseling. No one else would even see the area because it would not appear on the program for them.

The security system can be tailored to the needs and policies of individual schools — most schools will not wish to activate all of the features, but they are there.

Standard and Ad Hoc Reports: Users may print reports of individual pages of a portfolio or may print a report containing a selectable collection of these individual page reports.
Additional reporting capabilities are also available as an add-on option, including a full-featured ad-hoc reporting system. More information.