Student placement software to help Primary and Secondary schools create well balanced class lists
Creating classes for the new school year is a time consuming task that teachers are asked to complete each year. Many schools offer their students the opportunity to request friends to accompany them into the new year. The task of trying to balance class size with student academic ability, behaviour, classroom participation and gender while ensuring that everyone has a friend is considerable.
Class Maker is an innovative software solution, developed to streamline this process and provide a number of balanced grade alternatives for teachers to choose from.
The program installs on your local hard drive, as is all sensitive student data. You do not have to store any student information on external websites, so your data is secure.
About Class Maker
Program Features
Students have the opportunity to nominate up to 5 friends who they would like to be with in the following year. Class Maker uses advanced matching algorithms to ensure that every student in the class has at least one friend.
The program also offers the option to relax these requirements by allowing some friend requests to remain unfullfilled.
Class Maker provides teachers the ability to separate or group individual students, over-riding the students' requests. Class Maker also provides the option for students to be placed with or separated from a particular teacher.
By default, Class Maker creates classes of equal or near-equal size. However, it also offers the ability to create classes of any size to suit the requirements of the school.
It can be important to maintain a mix of male and female students in a particular class. Class Maker provides the teacher the ability to produce class sets with any gender ratio required. For same sex schools this feature can be disabled.
Class Maker can also create multi-age composite classes for 2 or 3 different age levels for up to nine classes. This is useful for schools managing multi-age student numbers across classes, and where students need to be separated, kept together or where gender balance is required. Class Maker allows teachers great flexibility to quickly create usable class lists for difficult situations.
Class Maker provides an easy to use Microsoft Excel template for student input, which includes internal checking to ensure correct spelling of students' names. Class Maker outputs the sorted class data in Excel compatible format for easy viewing, manipulation and printing.
The Standard version, which can be used by all teachers at the same school for no additional cost, is available for the special annual licence fee of $299. The Extended version costs $399 annually, or you could take advantage of our Premium service where you send us your student data and we do the sorting for you!
By keeping our costs down (using your own device rather than an online computing facility), we can keep the price of the software down to the bare minimum for you.
Class Maker is available in multiple configurations for Windows. The Standard version designed for small to medium schools of around 500 students allows up to 100 students to be sorted into up to 4 classes per year level. For larger schools (over around 500 students), the Extended version allows sorting of up to 300 students into up to 9 classes per year level. The Premium service is designed for schools who would prefer us to sort the classes for you.
Every teacher at the school can have their own copy for no additional cost.
Class Maker allows you to "tweak" the class lists using an interactive Drag & Drop interface. This feature gives real time feedback on the classes you modify, including updated statistics such as gender ratio, ability scores, missing friends and incompatible student pairings. The student's name will change colour in real time if placed in a class where they have no friends, or have an incompatible pairing.
Click the link below for a demo version of the program which can sort up to thirty students per year level into four classes. Installation instructions are available on this web page by clicking the "Installation" button. You may need to "Run as Administrator" the first time you run the program. Simply right click on the icon and select this option. If you have any problems with installing Class Maker, please contact us and we will be able to help. Most problems are caused by Windows security settings which can be easily fixed.
Since the program and student data are kept on your local hard drive, there is no requirement to send them to a website. Even the supposedly most secure websites can and are hacked regularly, with sensitive data leaked to the internet. Outside of your school staff, there is no require-ment for anyone else to see your student lists, so there is no possible compromise of sensitive student data.
Friend requests
Friend requests
Teacher control
Teacher control
Manual class sizes
Manual class sizes
Manage gender mix
Manage gender mix
Multi-aged classes
Multi-aged classes
Easy to use
Easy to use
Value for money
Value for money
Configurations
Configurations
Drag & drop editing
Drag & drop editing
Download demo
Download demo
Data security
Data security
Student ability levels
Student ability levels
Teachers can add up to four ability types for each each student, grading each student on a five point scale (eg. A - E). The default descriptors are Literacy, Numeracy, Behaviour and Participation, however these can be changed to suit the school require-ments. Students can also be identified as belonging to two special groups, such as ESL/EAL or Accelerated, and Class Maker will monitor these ability levels and groups to enable teachers to make more balanced class lists.