It's that time of year when tracking and report writing are coming thick and fast. I'm currently in the process of writing 150 Year 9 reports, which is just the tip of the key stage 3 data iceberg looming on the horizon.
I will do a series of posts on how I've found workarounds for things that have taken me time in the past. In this blog, it's about 'effort' grades for homework. I know not all schools require this, but if they do it can be a bit of a nightmare data gathering exercise - so here's where I recommend putting google sheets (or whichever spreadsheet creator you prefer) to work instead.
At the bottom of this blog I have created a short video talking you through how I use these formula, so if visual/audio is better than words, please do scroll on down!
Prep
Whenever my students do a homework I put a 1 in my mark book. This is purely a marker that they have completed the homework, not if they've done it correctly etc. This is purely done because I am asked to inform parents how well they do in their homework tasks.
Formulas to the rescue
I use different formulas to make my life easier. The first is the sum formula. In L3 I ask it to add up all the scores for homework completed to date
=sum(B3:K3)
If you're using google sheets it may well try to fill in the rest of them for you straight away. If it doesn't hover your mouse over the corner of the cell until you see a +, then click and drag down.
Now I know how many homework tasks each student has done I then know which grading to give them. So next I use 'if' formula to look up the grade and put in the appropriate descriptor for their attitude to learning. If statements can be quite complicated to get your head around, but once you have, they're brilliant time saving devices.
So what we want is for it to look up the number in L3 and then put in the appropriate descriptor. I will include my formula below so you can copy, paste and adapt it, but a few things you need to remember:
You need = at the start, so that it know you want it to do the work
You always need to start each instruction with 'if'
Always put a bracket before the cell you want it to look up
>= will tell it to look up if the number greater than
<= will tell it to look up if the number is smaller than
, are used for breaking up the instructions
" " are necessary around what you want it to say
At the end of the formula you need to close all your brackets - so if you've put in 4 instructions, you need 4 end brackets last of all.
I know that's a lot of information in one go, but if you're getting error messages it's usually one of these that is wrong, so use it to trouble shoot.
If the box L3 is greater than the number 8, please put in the word Excellent
If the box L3 is greater than the number 5, please put in the word Good
and so on and so forth.
Finally you will want to copy and paste these words across to your school data spreadsheet. A word of warning here: Don't do normal paste - it will try to copy across the formula and not the words you've chosen.
1. Copy as normal (e.g. ctrl c)
2. Go to edit, paste special, values only (or ctrl, shift, v)
If you have questions please do post them below. If you have even better solutions than what I have come up with, again please comment below. The more we help each other reduce workload the better all our lives will be.
Teacher Happiness I have been very fortunate over the last few weeks to go to a number of talks. From ResearchEd in Maidstone, to Festival of Metacognition in Birmingham and then this week to the Festival of Education at Wellington College. I'm really luck that my school recognise how important training is for me to stay motivated and enthused in my teaching, and how much they are willing to support that. (To be fair I got free tickets for both the festivals in Birmingham and Wellington, which I think helped my case a little!) Over the next few weeks I'm going to be ruminating on what I've learnt, and how I can put this into action in my lessons. Also how I share what I have learnt with my colleagues. But to start with I want to write about a talk I went to yesterday - 'The 7 Habits of the Happiest Teachers I know'. I decided that this next academic year I'm not only going to have a focus on improving my practice in the classroom, but also to improving my own w...
Choosing What to Fail At - A Guide to Keeping Your Sanity It is a well known fact that a teachers work is never done. There will always be something else we can do to help our students make progress, or to fit a school agenda, Ofsted criteria etc. In an ideal world our work life would be balanced between teaching and being able to do all these things, but of course education does not live in an ‘ideal world’. Understand your reality During the last academic year I decided it was time to move schools after 16 years at the same one. I was putting in applications, going for interviews, completing an NPQ and the full time job, as well as being a Mum, writing articles etc. Boy did it get busy. Just writing that list I wonder what on earth I was thinking! I got a dream job, and moved to a new school and a promotion to leading my own department at the start of the academic year. I love it!! But it’s hard work. I cannot do everything that needs to be done. I cannot do it quick enough to l...
Context I am constantly collecting up resources. I get really passionate when I find something that will help me teach, and often get inspired to write entire new schemes of work from what I find. But often I find things at times that are not convenient. I have one of those brains that loses things (including the plot) very quickly, and therefore there is no guarantee I will ever remember that gem of a resource again unless I find a strategy to help me remember. For a long time I created a 'resources' folder in my email inbox and placed things in there. But I could count the number of times I actually opened that folder on one hand. I'd go in and there would a wide range of different topics, I'd be confused by the subject lines that made perfect sense at the time (or had none because I was in too much of a rush at that moment - the 'I'll sort it later' mindset). I'd feel so overwhelmed that I'd rather start google searching again, not being able to...
Comments
Post a Comment