DeRep is a web based service enabling you to work on the move from any computer at any time. There is no worry about losing your work as your work is continually saved.
At the core of DeRep lives Atrimark. Atrimark enables fast and efficient base report generation by grading a student against a list of chosen attributes. This leaves you to focus on those sections of the report that will always be specific to the student.
As good as a school report comment bank can be, it can never top writing your own specific comments. The base school report generated by Atrimark is fully editable and there is even a section dedicated to writing those specific remarks that could never fit within a comment bank (See "Specific comment recycling" for added functionality around this")
Within DeRep you have the option to write your own comments for Atrimark to use. Writing your own comments does not require any careful positioning of symbols either, just write a comment for a student named "John" studying your registered subject, assign your comment a grade and attribute and press save. Atrimark will automatically do the rest of the work for you, meaning your comment can easily be used for any other student.
Specific comments written by you are automatically checked by the system to ensure correct pronoun use. Any queries which the system has will be highlighted for you to either edit or ignore and the comment can be re-used from then on for any other student with confidence that the name and personal pronouns are all automatically adjusted.
An entire class of students can be imported in one go from Excel, Calc, Word or Writer. Alternatively, each student can be entered separately.
When grading one of your students in the Atrimark system, before pressing "Generate Comments" you can instruct which comment bank for Atrimark to use. This can be DeRep's, a mixture of DeRep's and your own or preferably just your own. If you choose to use your own comment bank but DeRep cannot find a comment needed for a particular grade then the system will fall back to using one of its own.
One of the issues with large banks of comments that can be shared is the difficulty in maintaining consistent quality. DeRep uses a "buddy" system enabling you to share comments but only with people in your friends list. Meaning you will not end up seeing comments written by random people in your reports.
Class specific and student specific comments you enter into the specific comments section are automatically made available for other student reports in your class (corrected to suit the current student you are writing for). Meaning each specific comment you write essentially builds up a hyper custom comment bank tailored to the class you are writing for. This feature is soon to be expanded to allow cross class specific comment recycling.
DeRep was not only created with teachers in mind but also parents. When talking to many parents one issue that came to light with regard to school reports was the lack of detail about the topics covered. So, we built an introduction area for each class. We of course put more thought into the introductions than just a simple block of text. Each class can have a general introduction applied to all reports, however should the teacher wish, they can customise this general introduction on a student by student basis.
We are a close knit team here at DeRep, we care for the product we have created. So we of course want to ensure that you enjoy DeRep as much as possible. Any problems you may have, improvements to the system you might like to see we are always on hand to help.
As you progress through a class of reports you can easily keep an eye on the quantity still to write as well as jump to any particular student with a single click. Meaning if you wanted to focus on all the best students in your class first you can.
As DeRep is cloud based your school reports will always be available for you at any time and any place you have an internet connection. You can download your reports in a single document when ready or opt to just copy directly from screen.
As all good modern browsers come complete with a very sophisticated spell check functionality, this of course means so does DeRep. Just ensure that you have your spell check set to your countries language and let the web browser do the rest.
Each school has different styles and limits when it comes to writing school reports. To assist in ensuring your reports do not go over the character count your school may allow, DeRep continually counts your report length as you go.
When using the Atrimark grading matrix, you can lock comments, reshuffle the attribute list, remove attributes from your current list and add new ones in. Atrimark was designed with customisability in mind!
