Spelling Assessment for Microschools

The Microschool Assessment Problem

A microschool usually runs lean: one or two lead teachers, a small mixed-age group, a flexible or year-round schedule, and no IT department to lean on. The instruction is often excellent — but the assessment layer is improvised. Spelling gets checked on paper one week, in a free quiz app the next, and tracked in a spreadsheet that only the founder understands. When a tuition-paying parent asks how their child is progressing in spelling, there is no clean record to point to.

Ezergrade™ is built for exactly this gap. It is the honest assessment and record-keeping layer that sits alongside whatever spelling program your microschool already teaches from — not a curriculum, not a practice game, and not a heavy learning management system you have to administer. One word list becomes a real test, graded automatically, stored in one place a parent can actually see.

One Word List, Every Way a Small School Needs to Test

Microschools rarely test the same way twice — a multi-age room means some students are ready to type, some test best on paper, and some are out the day you run it. From a single word list, Ezergrade delivers the same test in whichever way fits, without re-entering a word:

• Class test. The lead teacher runs the test together — Ezergrade's audio dictation reads each word aloud, so every student hears it at the same moment, under the teacher's control, with the screen watched throughout. The teacher isn't dictating — their hands stay free to supervise the room.
• Self-paced. A student plays each word themselves, as many times as they need, while the teacher monitors progress in real time — useful in a mixed-age group where students work at different speeds.
• At-Home Practice — done at home, still graded. A student who missed the in-person class completes the test at home on their own device before a deadline the teacher sets, Honest Input™ on, with results landing in the same gradebook.
• Paper. For the youngest learners, the teacher reads words aloud or uses Voice Automated Testing — no student devices needed — then photographs the answer sheet and Ezergrade grades it into the same record.

Every mode is saved to the same gradebook. See the full workflow on the How It Works page, or read how a live spelling test runs end to end.

Built for Schools Without IT Infrastructure

Most assessment software assumes a school district behind it — managed devices, an IT admin, and a class list sync nobody at a microschool has time to configure. Ezergrade assumes the opposite:

• Nothing to install. Ezergrade runs in a browser on whatever devices the school already has — Chromebooks, iPads, laptops, or a mix.
• No student logins. Students join a class test by entering a class code — no accounts, no passwords, no per-student provisioning for a lead teacher to manage.
• Student number as a first-class field. Every student carries a number alongside their name, so two children with the same first name never get confused on a result sheet.
• Optional Student ID Lock. A test can require each student to match their number and name against the class list before joining — useful when a small room is sharing a few devices.

Browser-based joining also means remote testing works out of the box: a student home sick or a hybrid-schedule learner enters the same code and takes the same class test as the room — with Honest Input™ active and the teacher watching their answers appear in real time, exactly as if they were at the next desk. Sick days and closures stop being missed test days.

Google Classroom Integration

Many microschools already run on Google Classroom. Ezergrade connects to it directly so your class list and grades stay in sync without manual re-entry:

• Class list import. Connect your Google account, pick a Google Classroom course, map it to an Ezergrade class, and import students with editable student numbers — no typing a class list by hand.
• Sending grades back. After a test ends, push each student's score back to Google Classroom as a coursework item, so the grade you record in Ezergrade appears where families already check it.

For a small school without a separate gradebook system, this turns Ezergrade into the spelling-assessment piece of a setup you already use.

Honest Input™ — So Microschool Grades Mean Something

When students test on shared phones, tablets, and laptops, autocorrect and spellcheck quietly fix misspellings before the answer is submitted — and a small school ends up with grades that reflect the device, not the child. Honest Input™ disables autocorrect, autocomplete, autocapitalize, and spellcheck on every answer field, in every way to test — and in supervised modes also detects and logs a student leaving fullscreen or switching to another app or window.

In class test and self-paced, the full assessment screen checks is active — fullscreen lockdown, focus and window-size checks, drop-out alerts, a record of who left log of every exit event, and an optional Secure Mode where a student who leaves the test cannot resume until the teacher approves. Ezergrade cannot detect a second physical device, and it does not pretend to. The honest position is that it stops the most common real-world sources of inflated spelling scores and surfaces the rest for the teacher's judgment.

One Gradebook Parents Can Actually See

For a tuition-based microschool, a clean, credible record is part of what families are paying for. Ezergrade stores every result automatically, regardless of which mode was used:

• Student name and student number
• The class, the word list, the date, and the way to test used
• Each word, the student's answer, and whether it was correct
• Overall score and percentage, with wrong and blank answers flagged

Results export to CSV — one row per student with their number, name, score, percentage, and every word-answer pair — ready for a parent conference, an end-of-term report, or your own records.

Who It's For

• Microschool founders and lead teachers who need a professional assessment and record system without standing up an LMS or an IT department.
• Small mixed-age programs that test the same word list different ways for different ages — a class test for older students, paper for the youngest.
• Tuition-based schools that need credible, parent-facing spelling records to show progress across the year.

Ezergrade is built for Grades 1–8 core, with optional early phonics support for Kindergarten through teacher-led audio dictation and paper mode.