GradeMyExam began in 2010 when my position at Moline High School changed from Technology Integration Specialist (or Computer Support Specialist) to Computer Teacher. It was a role I accepted reluctantly. I thought I could impact students and teachers with technology better in the former role. But, budget cuts and other circumstances put me back into the classroom. I decided that I would accept this role and provide students with an experience that would benefit them in the short term and long term. I developed a course called Computer Concepts (formerly Keyboarding). I have put my curriculum into a conduit that help my students and myself stay organized and focused. That portal is called iTeachTech .I add to it regularly and is still alive and evolving.
Being a computer teacher, I couldn’t see why I would give scantron quizzes or assessments, so I looked for a solution that would allow me to give quizzes and tests online. I had examview test creator available, but they were in the process of shutting down their online test center. Not being able to find a suitable replacement, I tried to reverse engineer the html export and e-mail component of examview. After I struggled with this, I found a worthy partner, Muhammad Adil Malik, who did most of the back end engineering. He is a quality programmer and did a great job helping me out. Together, we put the pieces together for grade my exam. I have been using the web application with my classes since the spring semester of 2010. I have used it with multiple computer classes, with several operating systems (Mac OS X and Windows XP and 7) and have found it to be quite stable. I the fall/winter of 2011, I retained Muhammed to add some additional functionality to help me with my assessments. GradeMyExam 2.0 included the ability to export the student test data into a csv file or to be able to view the student test data online. This provided the ability to do item analysis on the student assessments.
I enjoy working with computers. Teaching, programming, scripting, digital media are all part of my curriculum and daily practice.
I am married to Sarah who has her own public accounting firm specializing in governmental entities, especially schools. We have six children and one grandson. We own about 160 acres of farm land and have approximately 50 head of purebred hereford cattle. Our kids have been involved in 4-H for about 20 years and we show our cattle in about 7 cattle shows a year, including the Illinois State Fair.
As you can see, we have a lot going on. GradeMyExam is only a small, very small, part of my life. I will help as best as I can, but do not guarantee anything. There are a lot of extenuating circumstances. I am in no way, have a relationship with eInstruction, other than that they provide me, and every other school, a nice exam creation tool in ExamView. I have taken advantage of their export to html function and capitalized on it.
One last thing I have started is Fast Trax Stopwatch. This is a little stopwatch iphone application that is available on the iTunes App Store. It takes the average stopwatch and improves it with a vibration and beep feature that occurs when you start or hit split on the watch. When you are finished, it gives you the ability to save your data to dropbox or google drive for future reference. If you are using an iPod without wifi, it will store your data and upload when you are connected to a wifi network.