Tech Inquiry

Here I will be posting information on my tech inquiry project about FreshGrade.

FreshGrade Privacy

/ Kaitlyn Schafer / Leave a comment

One of the biggest concerns with any kind of social media platform, especially when it comes to children, is privacy. FreshGrade isn’t exactly the same as the most common social media platforms such as Facebook or Instagram, but I understand a cause for concern when information is being posted onto FreshGrade about a child, including their name, grade, school, and what they are doing from day to day. Because of this concern, I have looked into the privacy policy, and will try to summarize what I believe to be the most important points.

If you look at the privacy policy on the FreshGrade website (here), there is quite a bit of information you can read through, and it has emails you can use to ask questions about any concerns or questions. This post will mostly be a summary of what I thought was most important or interesting in this policy, but I encourage you to look through it yourself if you are interested in knowing all of the details. At the end of the privacy policy, it states that it was last updated in 2015, however this is what I was able to find on the FreshGrade website.

The policy starts with a few core beliefs, including not selling or using information for advertising, and not owning any user content (it is all owned by the users themselves). There is also an option to withdraw consent to the privacy policy at any time for any users who wish to. One of the most important considerations in this privacy policy is that
“personally identifiable information will be stored and processed in Canada, in full compliance with the British Columbia Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA), the Canada Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) and, where applicable, the British Columbia Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FOIPPA) and the U.S. Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).”

The page next defines what “personal information” includes. Personal information basically covers everything about a user (name, address, geographic location, date of birth, etc.) besides “aggregate” information which is data that helps them understand users without any identity attached to it.

Children under 13 are not allowed to use FreshGrade without parent consent. In addition to this, if FreshGrade ever discovers that a child under the age of 13 has been using FreshGrade without parental consent, they will delete any information of that student “as quickly as possible.” It does not clarify how long this may take.

Next, it goes through all of the information it can collect from users besides the obvious personal information. For example, they collect the IP address of the computer used to access FreshGrade, “your mobile device id, your computer’s operating system, the browser type, the address of a referring website, and the time and date of your visit and purchases.” Although these aren’t things would first come to mind as personal information, they treat this as personal information as well. Mostly, this information is collected through cookies, which you don’t have to accept, but your experience using FreshGrade will not be as complete as if you accept the cookies.

So far, most of the privacy policy has been focused on what information is being used, and next they explain how that information is being used. They break it down into four parts.

  1. General Services: This includes sharing information with other users as necessary, for example when a teacher shares information about students with their parents.
  2. Children’s Personal Information: This is used to create student account and send notifications to the parent or teacher about the student. The child’s personal information will be visible to the parent/guardian, the teacher, and possibly an administrator of the school.
  3. Aggregate Data: As mentioned before, aggregate data is not included in the definition of “personal information,” as it is not attached to any identity. This information is used for statistical data that can be shared, and to guide the updating of FreshGrade.
  4. Improve our Services: This one is fairly self-explanatory. They will use information to make their services better or to “detect, investigate and prevent activities that may violate our policies or be illegal.

The policy also says that they may share your information in other circumstances, such as in legal situations, to protect FreshGrade, users, or the public. It also says that information may be shared in the case that there is a business merger or the company is sold or acquired. This whole section “sharing of your information in other circumstances” is the first section where I feel there could be concern about the privacy of users. Recently in the news, there has been a story about “Turnitin,” a popular plagiarism checker. Turnitin is being acquired by Advance Publications (AP) for $1.75 billion. Now, all of the student work that has been put into Turnitin will also be available to this publication company. When users originally agreed to the terms of use, they were not agreeing to AP’s terms, but now AP will have access to all of their information anyways. Something like this could happen with FreshGrade as well, and there isn’t really a good way to predict if it will.

There is also a mention of third party websites, such as Google Drive or YouTube that could share information with FreshGrade about users where applicable. In these cases, it is important users understand the policies of any third parties that they may be using in conjunction with FreshGrade.

FreshGrade briefly summarizes their security practices, including encryption and confidentiality agreements for their employees. They also make it clear that users should choose a secure password, as they are not responsible for anyone unauthorized accessing users’ accounts through their own computers or devices. Parents of children under 13 also have the right at any time to access any information about their child, or to direct FreshGrade to delete it.

As with any technology, bugs and other glitches could happen, which they mention could potentially cause a problem with privacy. There could also be problems with slow updating in the event that you change or delete an account, however these changes are typically immediately updated. Finally they state that this policy could change at any time and users will have to accept any changes to continue using their services.

FreshGrade as Self-Assessment

/ Kaitlyn Schafer / Leave a comment

Above is a video by Shaw TV that shows a school in West Kelowna that uses FreshGrade. FreshGrade can be used by any grade of students, but this clip highlights how it can be used by intermediate students as more than an online report card, but as a way for students to get involved in their own learning.

FreshGrade is great for all ages, but in primary classes, it is primarily the responsibility of the teacher to choose what should be documented, upload it, and reflect on it or explain it as necessary. This can be a lot of work for the teacher, especially if paper report cards are also required. Even still, I believe it is a valuable tool to provide timely feedback to students and update parents, but it is definitely a different experience for primary teachers than it is for intermediate. With the older students, teachers can place some of the responsibility on the students themselves to document their own learning and explain what they are doing in class. They also have the opportunity to reflect on their own work, including how they feel about it and what they learned, including a self-assessment of how they think they did with any particular project or assignment. I believe this adds another exciting layer to the benefits of using FreshGrade.

Last semester, I was able to take an inspiring course on assessment and reporting. One of the most interesting aspects of assessment that I learned about, is that having students self-asses actually helps them learn more effectively. This is explained well by Kathleen Gregory, Caren Cameron, and Anne Davies in their book Knowing What Counts: Self-Assessment and Goal Setting when they say:

When students assess themselves they develop insights into their own learning. Rather than relying on feedback from one person — the teacher — and asking “Is this right?” “Is this enough?” “Am I doing it right?” “Is this what you want?” students begin to monitor their own learning and consider what part of the assignment meets the criteria and what needs more attention.

When students are involved in their own self-assessment, they provide themselves with regular and immediate descriptive feedback to guide their learning. They become more actively involved in a curriculum that otherwise can seem unrelated to their lives and personal experiences.


Gregory, Kathleen, et al. Self-Assessment and Goal Setting. 2nd ed., Hawker Brownlow Education, 2012.

Self-assessment can be done for any grade and in many different ways, but I believe this video really underscores how FreshGrade can be used as a very effective self-assessment tool, especially for older grades. Often, FreshGrade is viewed as an ongoing report card, but this shows that it is more than just that, as it is also a tool for learning.

Choosing a Topic: FreshGrade

/ Kaitlyn Schafer / Leave a comment
Image result for freshgrade
Image from: https://www.freshgrade.com/

One of our EDCI 336 projects is to do an inquiry on a technology that can be used in education. There are so many interesting possibilities, from Google classroom, to writing e-books, to video editing, and many more. It wasn’t easy to choose with so many interesting options, but I decided to look into FreshGrade. I have heard about FreshGrade in many of my classes since I started in this program, and have had a couple of guest speakers come into our classes and share information they have about it as well. Due to this, I have a good idea of what FreshGrade is, but I am still unsure how to really use it and what all of the possibilities are with it. For this project I will be working with a group of four people and we will be collaborating to learn all we can about this program.

FreshGrade is an assessment tool teachers can use to communicate student learning with both the students and parents. It is an app where the teacher inputs each student for their class, and the parents for each student are given a unique password so they can see only their own child’s information. The teacher can post what the class is doing as a whole, as well as how each student is doing individually in each subject. There can be formal assessment shared on FreshGrade, such as test scores, and there can be more informal, formative feedback shared as well. In older grades, students can take pictures and videos of their own work and share it if the teacher allows it.

Last semester, I was in a grade 5 class for an afternoon to help with experiments they had been planning for a few weeks. In this class, the teacher, the students, and myself took turns with the class iPad to take videos of the experiments as they were going on. In the videos, the teacher has the opportunity to have a discussion with the students as they are working to see if they have an understanding of the concepts being used, which is then shared on FreshGrade for parents to see and for students to look back on. The students can also document work that they are proud of and want to share.

In some schools, FreshGrade and other programs like it are allowed to replace formal report cards. It is a great replacement for many reasons, one being that it is more consistent. Rather than parents receiving 3-4 report cards each year, they receive updates every week, sometimes multiple times. Another reason it is a good replacement for report cards is because it actually gives more information than report cards do. Report cards are often based on some kind of scale (either letter grades or a “not meeting” to “exceeding” rubric), and then there are a few anecdotal comments to go along with that scale. With FreshGrade, parents can see pictures and videos of their child’s work, they get to see what is going on in the classroom, and in some cases they actually get to witness their child explaining their work, what they are learning, and how they got to that point. One more reason I believe FreshGrade is better than report cards is because it keeps teachers on track with their assessment. One of the aspects of teaching that I am most nervous about is report card writing. I have known many teachers in my life, and “report card season” is always a time of stress. Everything from the term builds up until you have to condense all of the work from each student into a document of just a few pages. In a school where FreshGrade replaces report cards, this assessment stress is largely avoided. Even if I will have to write report cards in the school I end up teaching at, I believe FreshGrade will be a good tool to keep my assessment organized for all of the students, making report cards much less stressful and time-consuming when I have to write them.

I am looking forward to learning more about FreshGrade with this project, because I intend to use it throughout my career, and this will also help me to have positive discussions with any principals, teachers, and parents who may be unsure about it.