When you teach...sheet happens.

Some teachers prefer having a spiral bound grade-book.  At the beginning of the year you write all your classes at the top of the pages.  You use your best handwriting to list your students in alphabetical order.  Some grade-books are color coded using different colored pens, colored pencils and riddled with post it note tabs. Towards the end of the year pages are folded over, Names are crossed out for a student who left and new names were added to the bottom of the list (new students who threw off the alphabetical order you used to have). The is a coffee stain from a late night of grading that has permanently warped the pages for periods 3-5.  Good intentions- now a mess.
So here is a solution- Sheets.  I would know. Some people call me the queen of excel sheets.  To be honest, I am not.  I use Google sheets as a glorified chart.  But there are a few tricks I have used and the organization is always clean, neat, and yes, color coded. Now as an intervention specialist, in my situation I don't have a grade-book per say, but I do have a lot of data and the organization is similar to what a teacher with a grade-book likes to have.  Without further ado- here is a sample of my top priority saved sheet.  Of course, names and information has been changed.  I'll show a sample of each tab and have some nifty directions too!

Tab 1- Goals and Accommodations

In my first tab I have some basic information about my IEP students, what intervention specialist I should contact, what lab they belong to (or homeroom teacher would be appropriate), a list of their accommodations and IEP goals, plus testing information. This sheet is shared with other teachers and is a great go to reference for teachers that don't like to comb through multi-page documents to find out accommodations.

Tab 2- Advisory Check-in

So this one is a great one for a traditional teacher grade-book. I use it to track my weekly conferences with students but the "check in" dates could easily be changed to assignments. Reasons to use sheets instead of tabs?  When students leave a classroom or new students are added, rows can be deleted or added to keep the alphabetical organization. You can see I have changed the months to different colors.  I really like this feature and could work for assignments by having each unit a different color.

If you hover over the top row where the cells are labeled A, B, ... you can click on the downward arrow for additional options. The choices I use the most are sorting and hiding. If I wanted to sort my sheet alphabetically by first name I would select column B and choose sort sheet A-Z.  If I wanted the sheet sorted by student ID, I would select column A and sort sheet A-Z.  If I thought I had too much information on the screen and I didn't need to always see the student ID the first name and the Lab (homeroom) I could select these columns and choose hide.  The information is still there but will not appear until I select unhide.  Nifty, right?

Want another tip? Freeze. So the information usually at the top and along the left side is usually important- you want to see it all the time. If you highlight a row or column (or even multiple rows or multiple columns) you can click on VIEW, FREEZE and then select which rows or columns you want to freeze.  These freezes cannot occur in the middle of a page but you can select as many rows/columns you want frozen starting from the top (like rows 1-3) or the left side (like columns A-D). This is a nice tip when you want to always see student names on the side or assignment names up top.

Tab 3- Due Dates

Alright, so my next tab is Due Dates.  As an intervention specialist I have lots of due dates that I need to keep track of. So far, everything I have shown in this post are my "glorified" chart tricks. One of the things that I like to use is automatic color changing codes. When I enter a date (or you can use grade values too) I can set the cell to change colors if the date is next month, this month, or past due.  The values can be set for different ranges so if a teacher wanted all grades below 60% to turn red- sheets can make it happen.  Click here to change cell color based on date proximity- great website!

My sheets are organized, quick to change from tab to tab (as opposed to flipping pages), easy to copy and paste information from one tab to another (like student names rather than rewriting them), and since I use Google Sheets, I can access the information anywhere at anytime.  This can be great when teachers want to work from home (happens all too often, am I right?), or even on my phone during fire drills.

I have other sheets that I am sure will appear in future posts but I'll let you process this for now. ;)

Feel free to comment with any sheet tips or if there is something you want us to detail in a future post!

#nextgenHS
@MrsBKelley1