A great idea about the number and then retiring it.
I used to swoon over a nice analog attendance book, but by the time I started teaching, it wasn’t really worth it. I did use a notebook for informal notes while teaching though.
Having built my own solution, I have become the resident nerd I think. Even today I just linked my data to a separate table so I could get a line graph of how my grades change over time. And for my attendance sheet, I used regex to determine if a kid was online in class for more than 20 minutes. All things I can look up in a convoluted wain out system, but now I have created a way to have in one dashboard.
I feel like when you get a runners high
You may feel good when you start, then you struggle then euphoria. That’s my exce formula journey haha.
How awesome to be the resident nerd! Sounds incredible!
The notebook for informal notes sounds terrific. I like it. You could correlate the page numbers with your lesson plans so you could refer to them the next year, eg. You can put so many neat things in there. I’m somewhat artistic so I’d buy a really nice notebook and add doodles, photos. Jazz it up as you like it to make it interesting.
We had the state of Illinois totally revamp our lesson plans one year. I spent the entire summer doing a database as I knew I was not going to have time for my creative writing during the school year. I must have used Filemaker.
I had radio buttons, pull down menus. It was really pretty neat.
Come the school year the principal was sending me teachers to help them with the lesson plans. I could do mine in 20 minutes! Those teachers on the same grade level, I offered to let them have a copy of my database but not a one was interested. OK. I tend to think they did not understand. But I went through it with them.
Anyway, about the numbers, I had the kids put their number on the corner of all their work. I could put the work in alphabetical order so easily. I had little kids- third graders… before turning in a test I’d say “Touch your name. Touch your number.” right before collecting papers. I wrote them lightly in pencil in the corner of file folders, you know official records. Worked like a charm!
There was this absolutely awesome inexpensive book about getting organized that gave me scores of ideas. “Work smarter not harder” is my motto. I’ll look around Amazon and see if I can find it. It is the type of book which you can take the ideas and apply them to other areas of your life. Actually I’d like to get a copy for myself.
That’s one of things I try to teach my students, to work smarter not harder. I’ll be really interested if you find that book as this comes naturally to me, so I’m not sure if I’m that good at teaching it.
And I feel a project coming on. I’ve revamped my lesson planning recently, but started getting stressed with tracking. I need a happy weekend project revamping that side of things and get it more automated.
That’s awesome that you are feeling inspired. I am too and I’m retired . I truly miss teaching, the kids especially, the creative aspects of the job.
The book I was referring to is a resource book for teachers, Graeme. But I am certain you are creative enough to turn it around so your students can use it.
Hey, we could write a book! I rather like it!
You could probably start a mini course of just how to work smarter not harder. Jot it down maybe in a mind map (whatever comes easiest to you) and/or do it more than one way in order to generate more ideas.
Or you could teach the concept, give a few examples and let the kids brainstorm them. I’d bet they’d come up with interesting concepts that you and I might overlook or that you may not articulate as you just do it automatically.
It would depend on how old the kids are but I’d bet third graders even could handle it to a certain extent.
How do you do tracking?
I liked automating as much as I could and as in doing the Illinois State Lesson Plans nightmare, I actually enjoyed doing it (the database aspect) during the summer but couldn’t stand even the notion of doing it in the middle of the year as it is just busywork for already overburdened teachers.
For the last few weeks I have been tracking basic behaviours on paper. Basically, with online teaching continuing, the new year bringing in new systems, and generally having the toughest time in teaching, I needed to get something simple and useful.
I now want to make it better, and it’s going to be based around Google Sheets since we use Google Classroom and Forms extensively, so Sheets will move data around easily. I just need a few hours to think about what I need to track, then a few hours to program it all.
I’d like to use Numbers, but Sheets has some superb database-like formulae (IMPORTRANGE, FILTER, SORT, etc), and a JavaScript backend. It can be incredibly powerful and versatile.
I’ll second your love of Google Sheets. It has pretty powerful JavaScript scripting capabilities (that can access any of Google’s products), the formula set seems to be mostly on par with Excel at this point, ignoring Excel’s add-on packs, and I use the regex functions within sheets all the time. I wish it was more secure – can’t put anything sensitive in sheets.
Like @oldblueday , I too love google products, but not being a Google school, I don’t use it for student data.
I recently discovered regex in numbers and it was a game changer! I also like that numbers seems faster, especially on initial open (which is a surprisingly important thing I’ve leaned about myself)
What about Excel Online? Is that comparable to Google Sheets in terms of how powerful it is?
Google Sheets is still a little limited in terms of features compared to the desktop version of Excel. The cell limit is a dealbreaker for me. Nothing currently matches the cell limit in Excel 2007 and later.
He was referring to Excel Online. Somebody in that topic suggested that he use Excel 2007 or later (which doesn’t suffer from the same issues as the online version).
For my own stuff, Google’s cell limit is not an issue. But, in my role as Data Champion I find myself creating proof-of-concept ideas and recently hit the cell limit for one of those. I was able go through and trim sheets to get it working, but I did hit it.
Pivot Tables are a bit lacking in Google Sheets, but apart from that I have no idea what Excel does better these days from a functional point of view. I’m not saying there aren’t things, I just never come across them. And I never really got the hang of getting Pivot Tables to show me what I want in a concise manner anyway.
The deal-breaker for me with Excel is the lack of macros in the web version. I use scripting for a lot of things and so Google Sheets is the only sensible option for collaborative work I think (assuming I want to stick to the spreadsheets I’m a relative expert on, rather than move to a database that I am shaky on (though relatively an expert still I suppose!)).
At a certain point datasets can get so big that no you just have to abandon spreadsheets and turn to tools that are purpose built for big data, or write your own. I’ve got a .csv file that I’m working with right now that has 21 billion lines (I had to let wc -l run overnight to get that number).
