Keeping Track of those Grades with a Three Year Follow-Up Page in GoogleDocs

I've written about GoogleDocs before, but this week I want to encourage the use of it for an administrative purpose in schools that have programs which span the length of more than one year, when it is vital to keep clear of records of students’ grades over the years.

In Israeli high schools, students sit for their matriculation exams from the 11th grade (until now - they could begin in the 10th - but in light of new directives, bagrut-fever will be postponed, thankfully ;-).  There is the curriculum for literature, which some schools begin teaching in the 10th grade. High school EFL students also need to read four library books and get graded on the reports they write for them, and do a research project at some point in high school. All of these grades, accrued during the 3 years of high school, are used as part of their yearly grades (sort of buffer grades) when they sit for their matriculation exams.

As a teacher-counselor, I have heard more than my share of horror stories, ending up with the loss of students’ grades: teachers leave the country/ switch schools / leave projects in cars that got stolen . Not only teacher-triggered, foul-ups can also happen when students move during the space of these three years (more often than one would think) and their grades do not always move with them! Even in the simple case of moving from one class level to another during high school can cause records of grades to go astray. It has become harder and harder to reliably keep track of these grades.

A while back I started urging staffs with whom I work, to use a 3 year follow-up page. This entails filling out a page for each student when they are in the 10th grade. On this page, the teacher records all of the grades that need to be saved for their matriculation grades. The teachers were then asked to give these pages to their coordinator at the end of each year and the coordinators were advised to save them all in a large binder.

On the surface, it may seem like annoying bureaucracy. However, really, it is simply responsible professionalism, ensuring that the grades that students earn, are reliably saved and kept to be used when needed. Unfortunately there were teachers who did not fill these pages out, or coordinators who did not collect them. And pieces of paper sometimes get lost. There were additional complications if you wanted to fill out the record in the middle of the year, you would have to go to the coordinator, take all your pages and then remember to bring them back to the coordinator. A misfiling nightmare waiting to happen.

With the inception of GoogleDocs this whole procedure has become  much simpler and more user friendly. I have prepared a template out of the 3 year follow-up page (linked here - or just do a search on Google for “Googledoc templates”, and then write:“3 year follow up” - it will pull up the template I made) . Granted, the first time you fill out a page for each student is tedious, I admit. It makes it easier if you add any information that will be common to all (name of literature text, or teacher name even, for the first time you use it, then each time make a copy and add the student’s name).  But if you save these pages in a folder in an organized manner in your GoogleDrive you can then share the folder with your coordinator. This will enable the coordinator at any point of time to see what a student's situation is regarding these grades. It will also enable the teacher to be able to add grades as work is completed,  be it different pieces of literature or projects or book reports. Or, if the student changes teachers or moves to a different school, you can share it with the new teacher. And no more worries of mis-shelving a form! It’s digital! Just a search in your GoogleDrive and it will be found!

Providing the 3 year follow up pages have been organized into a folder, and the folder has been shared with the English coordinator, if something happens (say,if a teacher leaves, or the student has been  moved from another class) it is much easier to keep track of these important grades and to ensure that they do not go lost.

It is even possible to share each student's file with the students, themselves, so that the students know where they stand. By sharing it with each student, granting them rights to view or comment (NOT edit), they can stay up to date on the grades that are going to seriously impact their final grade.

It takes a while to get used to the idea. It takes some effort, especially at the beginning, but believe me: it is worth it in the long run. It is a responsible, logical, and professional way to keep track of grades and share them with whoever needs to see them.  

Digitally yours,

@dele

Postscript: This is my 15th blog posting. The 10th since resolving to see this as being a weekly responsibility of my job as counselor for ESL and Digital Pedagogy. And I have as many followers (just checked - yep - 15!) I share the blog all over (relevant FB groups, Google +, Twitter, email) and feel sort of pushy with it - like I’m asking for handouts, or running for office. But, in fact, I’m just trying to share my enthusiasm about the helpful digital tools I come across and find convenient and productive. So…. if YOU find this blog of any value, please subscribe! It will be great for my ego ;-) Also, do let me know if there is anything specific you would like to have me write about here!

Online Projects on Googlesites – Part Two Glorious Googledocs

The Glories of Googledocs

It is the middle of the spring break. My students were supposed to have completed their blogs by now.  However after realizing that most of them had not, I pulled them in for a mini-marathon session. I brought them into our English Learning Center, gave them a quick review of what they were supposed to have included in their project, plugged them into the laptops and told them to get on with it.

The research paper, itself, had been written in Googledocs. It has been a fantastic way of doing process writing. The umbrella topic was “Customs and Beliefs”. Each pair embraced an area that could be considered as falling under this umbrella topic, and devised a research question, querying a connection or relationship or influence of one aspect of the research question, upon the other. From within the research question, each one of the pair had their specific focus. For example, a pair who did their research question on “What was the influence of the Rastafarian beliefs on Bob Marley’s music?” divided the work between them, with one of them researching Bob Marley’s music, while the other investigated Rastafarian beliefs. They then had to draw conclusions by reading each other’s research. They wrote all of their work in one Googledoc, which was shared with me. As they forged ahead with their undertakings, I was able to access their docs, write comments, suggest  ways to clarify, improve, correct spelling and grammar.

 

Thanks to Googledocs, nothing got lost; it all gets saved automatically in their Googledoc within their Google Drive. If they made a mistake, they went back in time and looked at the history.  From within the Googledoc history, they could either reconstruct where things had gone amiss, or just completely revert to an earlier version.  Magic!

In the past, when doing a project like this, I used to to collect reams of summaries and drafts each session, review them at home, write my comments, and give the pages back to them at the next lesson. By doing it all online, in Googledocs, I have the capability of accessing the projects-in-progress any time I want. I annotate the Docs, and then send the students an email telling them that I had written critiques; inviting them to go back in and work revise accordingly.

Unfortunately (as also happens in other modes of project work, when you “set them loose” in the library, not all of them use their time wisely. Hence – we find ourselves in the middle of April and not everyone has finished their project.

Back up the truck!

Of course, all of the students had an automatic, inborn understanding of what Googledocs were and how they are used. 

NOT! 

Prior to embarking on the research project, as an “enabling” exercise to teach the students how to work on a collaborative document, we did a round-robin activity. We had just finished learning a story which we had described as being a modern day fairy tale. I defined a modern day fairy tale as being a fairy tale that has the aspects of a traditional fairy tale (good vs. wicked, magical creatures or enchanted aspects, fairy godmothers, etc.) however the story was set in a contemporary environment. The kids were then all taught how to open a Googledoc (of course, at the beginning of the year, at the same time that I told them what school supplies they would need,  I instructed them to open a Gmail account).

The class was then given approximately 10 minutes to begin composing their "modern-day fairy tales". After 10 minutes, they were instructed to share their documents with three other students. The other students had to pick up the tales from where the previous writers had left off. They ALL had to share their fairy tales with me.

A view of the Fairy Tales in my Drive

And thus, they all became acquainted with the wonders of collaborative writing through the glorious tool which is  Googledocs..... and we all worked happily ever after.  

The End.

Note: Embedded, above, are two tutorials which I made for different purposes, but since they teach how to open and share a Googledoc, I used them to teach my students how to do so for our project, if they were absent on the day I taught it in class (or just as a reminder). 

Online Projects with Googlesites Part One

Rebooting April 2014

Any one of the five people (and that's an optimistic estimate) who perused my last post, way back in October, read that I had promised to be more active and consistent with my blogs. Well I am rebooting once again, however now, I am steeled with oodles of inspiration. First of all, are some truly exceptional blogging colleagues (+Yair Farby and +Efrat Maatouk) as well as the urging of someone whom I consider a mentor (+Aviv Tzemach), who has stated that part of the job description of a counselor for teachers in digital pedagogy, includes running a blog.  To top it all off, was the timely appearance of +Jules Taggart and her “Blog Revival Challenge”, in which I am participating this week. The “Challenge” promises to turn my blog content from "blah" to brilliant in 7-days.  So…as a result of the “Challenge”, I have revamped the look of the blog slightly, changed the name to “Digitally Yours” and have now officially declared thesaurus.com as my best friend, to give my verbs (and adjectives, and probably nouns, as well) some “oomph”.

In my last blog, eons ago, I wrote about my intention to do an online research project with my 10^th graders, using a Googlesites Template. So now, 6 months on, I can report on how that has been going. Since I do not want this blog to be agonizingly long, I will break it into a few blog postings. For now, I will just bring you up to scratch on where we are as of Passover break.

Although we finished working on the projects in our lessons in February, in order to move on to other curricular endeavors, most of the students have not completely finished their projects.  Not that it would have necessarily been different if the projects had been done in the usual tree-killing printed-out-on-paper mode, but there HAVE been some aspects of the online project which has made it more challenging than previously, among them, the issues of keeping track (for both myself and my students).  

To start out, my colleague Lily and I devised what we wanted to see in the quintessential project website, and prepared a basic template. The role of the template was to enable the students to simply copy the template, with all the required webpages.  Based on that, the students were expected to design, decorate and in short: take responsibility and ownership of their  websites for their projects.

We invested considerable time and thought into what we expected the projects to look like, and I built a template on Googlesites. A few days before presenting the concept to our students, I approached the task of  preparing short tutorial webcasts to teach the students how to copy and edit their sites,  filled with the anticipation and excitement of doing something new and inspiring. Then came the sucker-punch.  To my horror,  I realized that I was locked out of my template! After a few hours of frantic emails back and forth between my Google-savvy colleagues, and fruitless attempts at catching the attention of anyone of import at Google, itself, I caved. I reconstructed what I had envisioned for the template, and saved it as a model site, while at the same time screencasting the procedure as I built it.

I believe I can honestly say that, putting aside the initial mortification of having been exiled my own house; of having something I had developed unceremoniously hijacked from under my nose and within my realm of cyberspace, in the end….. I probably gained more than I lost. Because the bottom line is that, not only did my students learn how to do a research project; they also gained the experience of actually building a website.

Easy it wasn’t. But I believe that at least a few of them feel pride in having learned how to build a website that they can show to others. And when their time comes, in two years, to present their projects for their oral matriculations, I do not expect to hear the excuse that their mother threw out their project… or that the dog ate it.

Digitally yours, 
@dele

P.S. Below is an example of one of the tutorials I produced for the purposes of teaching the students how to build a website. They can all be found on my class site: AdeleEFL. 

Blogging about blogger!

We have just completed the final session in a series of webinars about using Googletools in the classroom. Blogger is a tool that I have been drawn to for a long time (as you can see my sporadic blogging attempts from the past) but have not yet really made "friends" with. I think it might have something to do with "commitment issues" ...I am committed to so many things, that committing to a blog has been scaring me off. But maybe the summer is the perfect time to conquer them.

Most exciting is that I am looking for a tool to use with my students for working on a portfolio for a project - and I believe that blogger might be a good tool for the process part of the portfolio. I will try to work it out, while brainstorming with colleagues - in person as well as on Facebook. Will keep you posted!