About Gradefully

I'm a teacher. I built it for me, but you can have it too.

My students call me Mr. DM. I teach science and computer science at a small French-language high school in southern Ontario. I built Gradefully to track my own students' achievement and to write my report cards. I think it's really good. You should give it a try!

Why I built it The five rules What it actually does
Fabien Dupont-Mattar, OCT, founder of Gradefully
From one teacher to another

Why I built it

For the last 10 years I have tried all types of gradebooks. At first, I tried the software that my board gave me. You know the ones: enterprise student information systems that look like they were built in 1997. That didn't work.

Eventually my system was a mix of graded work in folders, a spreadsheet full of weighted-average formulas I was afraid to touch and sticky notes on my desk with impromptu observations. Can you relate?

Report-card season was when that lack of organization would hit me. I would sit down with all three piles and try to turn them into one honest comment per student, times fifty students. I really think every student deserves a personalized comment. I would spend nearly 15 hours writing per report-card period. And every teacher I asked told me the same story.

So I built the thing I wanted. Gradefully keeps the marks and the feedback in one place, so the evidence is already together by the time a comment is due. You can enter a grade and leave a short raw comment attached to it that only you see. Then Gradefully drafts that comment from the evidence, in the language of Growing Success: strengths, next steps, learning skills.

I used to draft my comments with other AI tools. But as teachers we have to handle student data carefully, and that was the part I could never get comfortable with. So it became the thing I was strictest about while building Gradefully: student names are replaced with codes before anything reaches the AI, and put back only on your screen. What gets sent is the assignments, the marks and the note you wrote. Your private anecdotal log is never sent at all. The privacy page walks through every step.

When the comment comes back it is a draft that you can review. You read it, change it, and decide what goes on the report card. It gives you a solid starting point. In Ontario, the grade is the teacher's professional judgement, and I am not going to build software that quietly takes it.

Gradefully saves me over 40 hours a year on report cards. Now it gives that time back to other teachers across Ontario and Canada. Spend it to refresh and be the teacher you want to be, full of passion and enthusiasm.

I am still in a classroom, so I know what works and what doesn't. I am constantly improving Gradefully to be the best student achievement tracker for teachers, not for admin.

Fabien Dupont-Mattar, OCT
High school computer science teacher and founder · Ontario
How it gets built

Five rules I set early

  1. Protecting student data comes before everything else.

    Your gradebook lives encrypted on Azure servers in Canada. When you ask for a comment, student names are replaced with codes before anything reaches the AI, and put back only on your screen. The drafting itself runs on OpenAI in the United States. They hold a copy for up to 30 days to check for abuse, then delete it. We are working toward zero retention, which removes even that copy, and toward Canadian servers for the drafting step. Nothing is sold, shared or used to train an AI model, and you can export or delete all of it from inside the app at any time, even if your subscription has lapsed. How that works, step by step.

  2. It does one thing really well.

    Gradefully tracks student achievement and reports it. That is the whole job. It is not a student information system, so there is no attendance, no scheduling and no fee tracking in your way. Staying small is what makes it quick: weighted averages you set up your way, progress reports as PDFs, and the thing you need one click away instead of six. It runs in your browser, so there is nothing to install and it works on the laptop you already have.

  3. A feature has to reach a student.

    Every part of the gradebook is there to get a student help sooner. The class view flags who has slipped below 60% and who has work missing, so you see it right away. A clear comment does the same job at home, where a parent reads it and knows what to do next. If a feature does not end up helping a student, it does not belong in here.

  4. A student deserves a comment from their teacher.

    Fifty students should mean fifty different comments, not one comment with the names changed. The draft is built from the marks, the notes and the learning-skills ratings you actually recorded, so there is no invented anecdote and no filler about a student nobody observed. A voice profile you build once keeps the wording in your words and in the style your board expects. You read every draft, change what you want, and decide what goes on the report card. In Ontario the grade is the teacher's professional judgement, and this tool leaves it there. Growing Success (2010), p. 39.

  5. Full support for French and English.

    Ontario classrooms run in both, so the app does too. You write in the language you teach in and the comments come back in that language, built for it rather than translated. The whole app is bilingual, not just the comments, so a French-language teacher is not working around an English tool all day.

Plainly

What Gradefully actually does

A gradebook

Handles grades as percents, levels, or letter grades, categories, weights and averages for every class you teach, and the app does the arithmetic.

See the features

A comment writer

Report-card comments drafted from that gradebook, built around strengths, next steps and learning skills. You review and edit every one. Set up your voice profile once and use it for your career.

See how it works

A private anecdotal log

A dated place for the things you notice: the phone call home, the lunch-hour help, the incident. This log stays in Canada and is never sent to the AI.

Read the data map

Plus some little classroom tools that I find useful

It has a random name picker, a random group maker, and a timer. I was tired of copy and pasting my list of students in a web tool. This way the list is already loaded and you just use the tool.

There are also free tools that need no account at all: a grade curve calculator, a learning-skills comment builder, and guides on writing Ontario report cards. They run in your browser and nothing you type is uploaded.

Straight answers

Where things stand today

Who runs it
A small independent company in Ontario. No school board, publisher or ministry owns any part of it.
Who it is for
Ontario teachers first, elementary through high school. The assessment language follows Growing Success, so it fits Ontario reporting.
What it costs
Every plan starts with the same 60-day free trial, with no credit card. Prices are here.
Where the data lives
Gradebook in Canada, AI drafting in the United States, both written out in full on the privacy page.
What we do not claim
Gradefully is designed around MFIPPA and PIPEDA. It is not certified against them.
Where to reach us
info@gradefully.com for anything, support@gradefully.com for the app, privacy@gradefully.com for a privacy review.
Teachers say

Three Ontario teachers

Gradefully works! I started my report cards a week later than usual — no stress. It saved me a huge amount of writing time.

AP
Amelia Proulx
Teacher · Ontario

It's very useful — easy to use, and efficient for writing report cards and giving feedback tied to the curriculum expectations.

SC
Sarah Craig
Teacher · Ontario

It makes my life easier. Compared to my old Excel file, Gradefully saves me a good ten hours per semester!

TW
Terra Webster
Teacher · Ontario

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