Something like Engrade: A record keeping tool we use at our co-ops

[Sweet Home Alabama]

I work at our local homeschool co-op, and for several years now, we have been using Engrade to keep grades and attendance records for our students.  We can also email through Engrade and keep a record of correspondence between teachers, parents, and students. 

Engrade is part of McGraw Hill, and they are not offering this service anymore beginning next year, so my co-op has to find something to take its place. So far, all that has been researched is proving to be very expensive compared to Engrade.  Parents only pay $7/student currently, but all the record-keeping programs our director has research runs into the thousands of dollars- way over our budget.  I believe that we are trying to target around $300/month overall, but truly, cost is very much a factor.  We need to keep the cost as low as possible. 

I thought I would ask all of you very wonderful, knowledgeable ladies if you could make any recommendations.  I know we've checked Blackboard, but I don't remember any other names.  We are trying to get something lined up to begin using for the next school year (2019-2020).

Thanks for any help!

PS... Cross-posting on the other boards.

 

Edited January 14, 2019 by Sweet Home Alabama

[RenaInTexas]

I am not 100% sure about all of the features, but check out:

Google Suite for Education - free for homeschool co-ops

Canvas - free for teachers, not sure about schools/co-ops

[ScoutTN]

Seconding Canvas. Very easy to use.

[merylvdm]

I use Canvas for my online classes (and my co op classes). It has a lot of functionality but isn't super user-friendly. But if you Google for answers you can usually do what you want to do. It allows rubrics, peer reviews, weighting grades, dropping lowest grades, etc. We also used Engrade but stopped when they started charging. Now the teachers use a mixture of options but about 1/2 of us use Canvas