Product Review of JumpRope

This is a K-12 classroom app used for mastering the grading process. JumpRope gives you easy access to up-to-date information about behavior, standards-based performance, and attendance. We created JumpRope with the belief that educators need to work with modern tools that will help them to be creative. We built the features to be easy to use, fast, and powerful.
Website: https://www.jumpro.pe/
What Users Love About the App
“We’ve been very frustrated with the lack of a standards based reporting tool. This product seems to be solving that problem. We needed a way to break free from our traditional grade books and communicate with students and parents about students’ proficiency with the standards rather than just assigning grades. This allows us to assign specific standards to our units, provide anecdotal evidence as well as assessment data, and track the progress of our students’ learning in an authentic way.”
“This takes a few minutes to set up, but it’s painless and easy as there is a guide that makes the process fluid. You pick how the grading scale is formatted, percentage or rubric, then off to the races. Adding students will be a bit time consuming (you can choose to import them in bulk), but once that is done you can comment and it even keeps track of attendance. A wonderful tool to keep track of student progress + extras.”
“JumpRope’s standards-based gradebook forces teachers to plan with the end in mind. As a result, units and curricula are tighter and more goal-oriented. Especially useful is the ability to log comments about behavior, interventions and follow-up, which can be shared with other teachers and staff at the school site.”
“The ability to log comments and then share them is unique to other online grade programs I have seen. If teachers are required to show evidence of students progressing toward or meeting the Common Core State Standards, this tool is a good resource and worth the time to learn the setup and navigation.”
“This tool helps teachers think through lessons with the end goal in mind. This is best practice with backwards design around the standards and objectives. There are three overarching features of JumpRope: planning, grading, and reporting.”
What Users Dislike About the App
“This would fit into a teacher category; it is not something that would excite students at all. The information can not be imported into another online grade or tracking program. This makes using the tool redundant for me, since I would have to re-enter in our official system all the assignments.”
“I really like this product, but the setup was a bit confusing at first. It is not a simple tool. For example, when trying to import standards to my first unit, it took me awhile to get the hang of how to search for Common Core standards. You can’t just browse by grade level; you have to search by key words.”
“There is a lot of work on the front end of this. You have to build your entire unit standard by standard and make sure your assessments match the standards. That’s a lot of work. The tool forces you to align your assessments completely to standards and articulate how each standard will be assessed. When I had to align them in Jumprope, I realized I had some murky spots in my courses.”
“It does not allow for teaching accountability even with the HOWLS. it is not user friendly and takes away a visual element of graphics that is needed. Teachers have so much work to grade (especially English) that to data mine the 25 standards in one assignment and grade all of them is a time waster. Plus, students and parents do not always understand the standards’ use of language.”
“Jumprope is a scam as a data mine for big business and doesn’t actually help inform teaching or learning. a four point scale is too broad: 4-point rubrics are detrimental to understanding learning of a concept or assignment. It doesn’t allow teachers to dive deeper and go beyond the standards, so the teaching can become stale.”