Exploring CodeHS Tools: Gradebook + Progress Views

Welcome everyone. Thank you so much for being here with us today as we continue our 2026 webinars on CodeHS tools. We're taking a deep dive into the gradebook and progress apps today, and we're so excited to be here with you to explore these great tools that are a part of our Pro suite here at CodeHS.

So, while you all get settled in, we'll do some introductions, talk housekeeping items, and then we'll get to the good stuff.

My name is Stephanie Bennett. I am a PD specialist here at CodeHS. I've been with CodeHS for about two years now, and I'm joined by Carlos. Carlos, would you like to introduce yourself?

Sure. Hello everyone. Carlos Duncan, also a PD specialist as Stephanie stated. Prior to working for CodeHS, I was in the classroom and taught for 15 years. Taught CS, CSP, AP CSP, and CSA as well. I also had the pleasure of being a curriculum specialist as it pertains to computer science. So I'm very excited to be here with you all. Hopefully I'll be able to share some of the great tools that we have here at CodeHS where you can implement these in your classroom. Thank you.

All right. So housekeeping reminders as we get started. We appreciate you being here with us today. If you have also brought your AI notetaker, please just make sure that's muted and won't be able to post in the chat or send any emails afterwards to the group. Always appreciate that consideration.

Just a reminder also that live attendance is required for our certificate PD hours here at CodeHS. So, we're thankful you're here to learn about these tools. If you have any questions as we go along, we'll ask you to use the Q&A feature in the Zoom window. So, there at the bottom of your Zoom window, you have a chat option and you have a Q&A option. Just to make sure that your questions don't get lost in our quick session here today, please use that Q&A icon and app within Zoom to make sure your questions make it to Carlos and me as we work our way through the gradebook and the progress tools here today.

If you are new to CodeHS, we encourage you to sign up for an account. Teacher and student accounts are free. Our wonderful curricular materials are free for schools and teachers to use. Check it out. Just try us out, sign up for an account, and see what we're about.

While you are doing that, or if you already have a CodeHS account, go ahead and log in and get set up. Maybe if you have the screen real estate, it might help you to follow along here today to put Zoom up on one half of your screen and the CodeHS platform up on the other half of your screen. That will just allow you to build some muscle memory as we're here today, and you can click along where Carlos and I are clicking and practice navigating the CodeHS platform.

All right. So while you are getting signed up for an account or getting signed into your account, I will tell the folks out there who are new to CodeHS a little bit about the company.

We do provide comprehensive K through 12 computer science curriculum, and that is available to teachers and institutions across the United States and even afar. We provide that curriculum free of cost, and it's all web-based. So, a little bit of an equity driver there as we see it, in that anywhere a student has a device that can connect to the internet, they can learn computer science. Definitely encourage you to try it out with your students in the classroom and see what resonates with them.

We have a breadth of computer science curriculum for you to choose from. So, if you're teaching cyber, if you're teaching coding, if you are teaching digital literacy, or even approaching AI literacy and tools with your students, we've got you covered. Hope that you enjoy sifting through all that great curriculum and also exploring the teacher tools, some of which we are here to talk about today.

We do provide a lot of the LMS features that you're already familiar with from working with edtech platforms in the past. We have the ability for students to submit assignments, for you to grade those assignments, and to provide feedback to students via communication and conversations apps. You can also send announcements to your whole class through our platform. Again, just reiterating that all of this is web-based—no additional downloads or plugins needed.

All right. Well, with that in mind, I'm going to hand it over to Carlos, who's going to walk us through the gradebook app.

Great. Thank you, Stephanie. I'm going to go ahead and share my screen. Here we are. I am hoping... Stephanie, are you seeing... I'm just making sure that you all can see my slide presentation.

I was previously seeing your CodeHS platform, and now I'm seeing the speaker notes. There we go. See it there.

All right. Excellent. So, now you can see it. All right.

So, the gradebook, this tool that I'm going to be explaining is a very important tool. When I was in the classroom, one of the things that I prided myself on was making sure that I had a clean gradebook. So when my admin or my dean of instruction came around to do those gradebook check-ins, my gradebook would be set. It was also a good tool for me to be able to have conversations with my students as well and be as efficient and accurate in explaining exactly where they were and where they needed to be to meet those expectations.

At CodeHS, we have an app that is called the gradebook app. The gradebook app itself is located on our platform and is set up this particular way. This is a rendition of that. You'll see in the gradebook that we have our navigation panel. In order to get to that, you would go under the grading header under the navigation panel over to the left of your screen for those that are following along with us, dropping down to that very first tab that says gradebook. You would click on that, and that would bring you to a screen that should look exactly like this, with the exception of various classes, courses, and students.

Here is an overview of the gradebook. The gradebook itself has multiple tabs that you would be able to utilize in your classrooms to help as it pertains to grading, as well as when having conversations with your students pertaining to their grades.

The overview itself is broken down in this way where you have the assignments located across the bar in the middle of the actual webpage, and then off to the left, you have a list of your students. You'll notice that in the inner parts of that, you'll see that there are some letter grades in this example, as well as some percentages, total points earned, and so forth. The overview itself is going to be a good place to actually get to know things as it pertains to your students, how you want them to be graded, the assignments, as well as being able to alter or customize your gradebook for your particular view.

You can use our edit tool to manually adjust grades and assignments. In this particular GIF here, you'll notice that we have our gradebook. We're in our overview view, and we've extended this to where we're able to actually take a look at this by section. We can look at this by student as well as by module and lesson. In this example, you'll see that we are doing some altering or adjusting of our grades along this bar here where it states points. You can also go inside where you see your actual grades and make adjustments there.

There is a key that will actually help you to understand exactly where your students are as it pertains to those particular assignments, and it also helps you follow along in regards to those assignments being graded, reviewed, returned, or not touched at all.

You can filter by section, student, module, and lesson. Here's an example of that where you can adjust this by student if you wanted to look at a specific student, or if you want to look at a specific module or lesson. Again, there is a key there that will help you understand where your students are as it pertains to those assignments.

Here is a view of the module. In the module view, there's a little bit more that you can expound on. In this particular view in gradebook by module, you can set this so you can view the scores out of a percentage or a certain mark. For instance, in my classes, I would give them a total amount as it pertains to points, as well as the percentages themselves. If you're that type of teacher where you want your students to see a percentage as their grade, this is also a place where you can do that.

In doing so, you can also expand this to group and view your gradebook from an assignment perspective. Looking at the assignment, setting those points or setting the score itself as either out of a certain amount or a percentage, you can go into those particular lessons or assignments where you can do a dropdown. You'll be able to see an actual timestamp of when the students submitted, as well as their start time. There's also some information in regards to time spent there as well.

Again, you can also view this as a lesson. You can go directly into those lessons as the GIF shows you, where you can view your student and view the lessons that they've worked on. Once again, this is a good tool and a way of seeing how much time has been spent on that particular lesson, as well as the submission by student, which is one of the tools that I used most in my classes where I wanted to see exactly where those individual students were. This is a good tool in reference to helping understand if there is a need for a reteach for those particular students. You can see where they are in reference to how they're doing and progressing through the actual lessons.

You'll also notice that you can view this as a section, where you can view that particular student and it gives you this bigger overview in regards to the letter grade, the percentage, and a breakdown in regards to how it was graded, the time it was graded, as well as the assignment itself.

Also by assignment, I want to point out that this is where you can do a bit more modifying or customizing. Here you can go to a section called grading settings. When you click that dropdown, it'll open where you'll be able to set points for those particular assignments. This is located in the "By Assignment" tab. You can also choose if you want to include this in your gradebook or if you don't want it to show up. This is where you can also look at the assignment grader if you want your eyes on it before a grade is administered (which would be the teacher view), or you can select auto where, as soon as the student has completed it, they will automatically receive a finalized grade. You can set the due date, and if you have grading categories or grading weights, you can select those here as well.

In "By Assignment" and adjusting the assignment settings, you can make those adjustments. This is also a place where you will be able to do some grading. This is where I point out Fast Grade, which is one of our Pro tools. Fast Grade is just a quicker, more accurate, and more efficient way to do grading. When I was in the classroom, prior to using this type of landing page or grading process, I utilized a tool that was outside of my integrated gradebook where I had to jump back and forth. It worked, but it was really difficult. Oftentimes I would find myself having to double back. But here, you are able to make adjustments to those assignment settings as well.

Then there are the settings, where you can get a more extensive look in regards to how you would like your gradebook to appear. You have various tabs where you can go if you want to include or exclude things in your gradebook. For example, I did not want to include videos in my gradebook, so I would go ahead and uncheck those so they would not appear. This will remove all unchecked types from your gradebook, and they will not be included in the computation of your grades.

There are also display settings, which control those things you want displayed within the gradebook, specifically in regards to quizzes, exercises, and formative assessments such as free responses and check-for-understandings. You can also show a flag on late assignments in this area so that when individual students turn in assignments, you get those indications in the form of a flag in your gradebook.

So, as we sum this all up, why does this all matter? Part of it goes to an understanding of accuracy. You can view your students' code and solution code in that Fast Grade tool side-by-side to send feedback and assign a grade all in one window setting. Customization allows you to set up your gradebook exactly how you want it on CodeHS and track your students' grades. This is a really good tool when you're trying to have sit-down conversations with your students; it's more accurate in showing them where their grades are and where they need to be.

And of course, better feedback: set high expectations for learning and easily communicate student growth. This is where you can have conversations pertaining to where they are, where they need to be, or even recognizing that they are excelling and considering challenging them with the curriculum. Those are three big reasons why this matters, as well as how you utilize these tools. With that being said, I'm going to pass this back to Stephanie so she can go over progress monitoring.

Thanks. That gradebook is kind of a beast—there's so much customization that teachers can do to make that work for them. Thank you for sharing all the ins and outs of the gradebook.

I am going to walk you all through a similar, related tool, but a little bit more streamlined and paired down. We have our gradebook app, but we also have a progress monitoring app. You can see that it looks very similar to the gradebook—the same setup Carlos showed you, with assignments going across horizontally in the middle of the screen and your students going vertically in a column. There's a symbol showing what all of these colors mean as far as your students' work, submissions, and your grading. But you don't have the distraction here of all the numbers and calculations. This might be a place for you to sit down with students, talk about their progress through the course, where they're at with their learning, and connect on what's working in their computer science learning and where they need to focus more time.

As far as colorations, the gradebook items and progress app items also reflect on the student side of the platform. So students know what they've submitted and what has been finalized in the gradebook and progress app.

We'll share with you the key for the various assignment types:
- Dark green teal: A student has submitted their work, and it has been graded and finalized, either by you or by an autograder.
- Lime green: Students have submitted an assignment and think it's complete, but it's waiting on you, the teacher, to grade and finalize it.

You don't have to grade an assignment right away or mark a grade right away. In fact, we have a really amazing tool that I love in our grading tools where you can send work back to students for a second, third, or fourth try if they really need it. Once you send work back to a student, on their platform, your gradebook, and the progress app, it will show up as pink. Once students have resubmitted that work, it will turn maroon, indicating it needs your teacher eyes to be graded before turning teal as finalized.

The other two colors that will be helpful at a glance:
- Gray: Indicates that an assignment has not been opened by the student.
- Yellow: Indicates that an assignment has been opened, but not yet completed and turned in for review.

The progress app is useful for a couple of reasons. Again, this gives you a quick bird's-eye view of student progress and allows you to have conversations with students about their work, how they're feeling, and their confidence as they learn computer science. You are very quickly able to hold students accountable by identifying those who are falling behind and those who might be ready for additional extensions or challenge activities.

These color bubbles are very motivating for students when working through CodeHS. Many students will get hung up if one of their assignment bubbles is yellow and not dark teal, and they will definitely let you know about it. It helps students stay on track and continue learning computer science.

Before we wrap up, I want to show you where to find these two tools on the site. Moving over to my CodeHS homepage here, I'll jump into one of my demo sections. I can see the students enrolled in my section here. To find the gradebook, I'm going to open up the left-hand navigation in this grading toolbox and select the dropdown menu. The gradebook that Carlos was showing lives here, along with all those customizable features and the settings app to get it working for you.

The progress app lives just below the gradebook app in the left-hand navigation under the grading toolbox. Clicking on the progress app gives you that colorful picture of your students' progress in the course. All of this is clickable, so you can easily jump into an assignment or a specific student's work. Definitely click around to see what you can find in the gradebook and progress app.

All right. Well, this was a very quick session today, so we are headed to the home stretch. Please stay in contact with us at CodeHS—we love to hear from you. We do have additional PD available; check out our listings at codehs.com/freepd. We also have a library of our previous webinars, which I will put in the chat for you so you can check it out if you'd like to learn more about a specific course or tool.

Thank you so much for being here. We will provide you with a certificate of completion for your time today. We'll upload the Zoom attendance to the CodeHS site, and a certificate will automatically be emailed to you within about 48 hours.

We always ask for feedback at the end of our programs, so if you wouldn't mind filling out our feedback survey, I'll drop a link to that in the chat. We are always looking to improve, and Carlos and I would love to hear how we did today and what topics you want to learn about in future CodeHS webinars.

Thank you so much for your time today. It's been a fantastic and quick 25 minutes. We hope to see you again soon. Bye, everyone!