Newsletter

It’s hard to believe, but the school year is almost over! We know how hard you work all year, and you deserve a break this summer. Review these frequently asked questions and answers to close out your school year and set yourself up for some hard-earned rest and relaxation.

All assignments in Gradient are designed to be reused as often as you like, with as many classes as you like. There is no need to clone, simply assign to your new classes and students next year! However, if you plan on making any changes to your answer key, we recommend making a clone of the assignment and renaming it. Changes and modifications will cause existing student data to be affected. More information on cloning assignments.

You have two options for removing assignments from your Assignments list. One option is to move the assignment to the Archive, which will remove the assignment from your view, but keep student data visible in Reports. The second option is to move the assignment to Trash. This will remove both the assignment and student data from your view. If you are part of a school or district subscription and are sharing an assignment with other teachers, you will need to stop sharing the assignment, then proceed to archive or trash the assignment.

If an assignment was shared with you as Joint Owner, you will continue to have full access to the assignment and your student data. If the assignment was shared with “Can Administer” settings, you can continue to use the assignment as long as the teacher is active. If you need the ability to edit the assignment, you can also clone the assignment, which will make you the owner of the new cloned assignment. If you need access to an assignment that was not shared with you, or if your colleague was deactivated, you can ask a Gradient Leader at your school to reactivate and use Help Desk to access their account to share the assignment with you.

• Keep your assignments list organized by creating and adding Assignment Labels. This allows you to tag your assignments with multiple labels for sorting and organizing.
• If you’ve cloned assignments, you can also keep track of different versions by adopting a naming convention that works for you, such as adding the school year to the beginning or end of the assignment name.

Review the End of Year Checklist to make sure staff have access to Gradient through the end of this current Academic Year and Term. Also verify that the right Gradient Leaders are associated with their appropriate schools and have membership to the right access groups.

Granting access to features within Gradient to your school and district leaders will have some new options next year! This includes a new PLC Group permission allowing teachers to share data within their PLC teams for faster insights around student learning. Learn more about this and other new features by attending the Product Updates webinar on June 7th or set a calendar reminder to review the Product Updates page when you return in the Fall.

Existing staff will have access to Gradient over the summer but new staff will not have access until the new Academic Year has started and new rosters are imported (via Clever, ClassLink, or manually).

Ever wonder if Gradient is a tool you could be using or if there’s more you could be doing with it? Hear from Gradient teachers as they discuss how they use Gradient creatively to meet their needs. Discover the question and assignment types they use most and why. This 30-minute session will feature Q&A time and will be recorded for registrants.

For schools using an import file for rostering (instead of roster syncing via Clever or ClassLink) a new file template has been created to minimize errors and the workflow for mapping a file has been replaced with a more informative process.

NOTE: The new import file template can be accessed here (this change also applies to current CURL script and SFTP importers).

Current Gradient Leaders were emailed about this update in April 2023 with recommended steps:

• Register for the End of Year Wrap Up Smart Session on May 10th at 1PM ET
• Schedule time with a Customer Success Coach to plan for the changes

As of April 2023, new Gradient for School subscribers are already using this new combined import process and file template.

The update for school subscribers also changed the file template individual subscribers use to import students into their classes. Read more here.

Labels are useful for organizing assignments by unit, topic, subject area, etc. Multiple labels can be added to categorize an assignment under a variety of keywords. Check one or more assignments and select Manage Labels from the toolbar to add or remove a label with ease. This allows assignments to be filtered by the assigned label(s).