All about terms and archives

How do I create a new term?

Each class you have in ThinkWave Educator must be in a Term. When you add a class to a term, all the meeting days will be automatically calculated, starting from the first day of the term, and ending on the last day of the term, excluding any Holidays. You can further change which days classes will meet using the Meeting Days feature on the Classes screen. If you have no Terms defined, one will be automatically created when you create your first class. To create a new term or modify an existing term, follow the steps below:

• Go to Options | Terms.
• Click the Term you wish to change or click New to create an additional term.
• Enter the name you wish to use, such as Fall 2000 in the Term Name box.
• Click the starting and end dates for the term using the calendar controls.
• Click Done when finished, or repeat these steps to work with other terms.

The information I use in one term is often included in another term. Can I copy information from one term to another?

• Go to Tools | Copy Term.
• Select the term you want to copy.
• Type in the name of the new term and choose the starting and ending dates for the new term.
• Check the boxes for which data you wish to copy: student enrollment, assignments, and/or lesson plan schedule.
• Click OK

How do I combine two or more terms to receive one final average?

The Combine Terms feature allows you to calculate grades for students across multiple terms. This feature is designed for teachers who have class structures such as the following:

• Reading (First Quarter) – 40%
• Reading (Second Quarter) – 40%
• Reading (Final Exam) – 20%

...and who need to compute an overall grade for classes that span multiple terms.

Note: If you do not need to weight individual terms as in this example, you may not need to use the combined terms feature. Midterm Reports may be adequate.

The way the program decides which classes to group together to create a combined result is with the Course Code. In the above example, each of the Reading classes would have the same Course Code, such as “101,” “Reading,” “First Period Reading,” or whatever you want as long as they are the same, and distinct from all other class’s Course Codes.

Enabling Combined Terms:

• Go to Tools | Combine Terms.
• Check the box for Use Combined Terms.
• Drag the percentage bars left and right to adjust the relative weights of each term.

Note: In the above example, the Final Exam is probably not a “real” term, but you should create a Final Exam term in order to separate it from the regular terms.

Viewing Results

• Go to Results
• Click on the Show Combined Terms button. The Combined Terms will be listed by course code. If you highlight one of the course codes, the individual classes that are being combined under that course code will be displayed below.
• To return to viewing results for individual classes rather than combined terms, click on the Show Individual Terms tab.
• An alternative for viewing results from combined terms is to go to Reports and to generate a Combined Grades report.

Note: The Final Grade Type for a combined class will be the same as for the last of the individual classes for that combined class.

When should I use the archive term feature?

The Archive function allows you to store old data in a different file for storage and safe keeping. Additionally, archiving makes your working file smaller which will improve performance. However, the archived term can only be accessed as a separate ThinkWave Educator datafile and cannot be applied to the current working datafile.

When a term is archived, it can no longer be included in your working datafile. When you archive a term, an entirely new .twe file is created with the name of the term and a .twe extension. You can open an archived term by looking for the name of the term with the .twe extension (e.g. Fall1999.twe). You can make changes to the archived term, but you can't copy any of the information from datafile to datafile.

Archiving is done one term at a time. To archive a term:

• Go to File | Archive Term.
• Choose the term you wish to archive from the drop-down field available in the Choose a term to archive field.
• If you want to choose a different filename to send your old data to than that shown in the filename box, type it or select it with the Browse button.
• If you want to remove students from your working file that have been archived and are no longer being used, check the box for Delete students that become unused.*
• Click OK to start archiving.

*Note: The Delete Students option will only remove records from your working file when:

• The students are no longer being used, AND
• The students were moved to the archive file.
This will ensure that all data that was in your working file will continue to be available, either in the working file or in the archive file (or both.)

How do I delete a term?

Each class you have in ThinkWave Educator must be in a Term. When you add a class to a term, all the meeting days will be automatically calculated, starting from the first day of the term, and ending on the last day of the term, excluding any Holidays. You can further change which days classes will meet using the Meeting Days feature on the Classes screen. If you have no Terms defined, one will be automatically created when you create your first class. To create a new term or modify an existing term, follow the steps below:

• Go to Options | Terms.
• Highlight the term you wish to deleted and click on the Remove button. (If the message appears: "Cannot delete a term which has Classes defined", you will have to delete the classes from that term before you are allowed to delete it.)