As part of my job, I work with students who take courses online with our school. As a result, many students are working from home or completing these courses on their own time, while meeting with us on a regular basis throughout the week. To be efficient, and also maintain communication, we wanted to have a way to log regular student progress, while also communicating weekly progress to parents and counselors. This could have easily been accomplished by creating a Google Form, with a place to enter:
Student Name
Date of Meeting
Progress Comments
However, this would mean that every student entry would be entered in the same form, and likewise, would be logged in the same Google Response Sheet. This simply would not work, as we wanted parents and students to have the ability to view long range progress and track performance.
This meant the creation of a Google Sheets Template that I would copy for each student, and then share or email to the parents and counselors each week. The problem this created was that, when meeting with students each week, much of my time was spent entering comments, grabbing the link to the document, going to Gmail, typing up a message, and then pasting the link into the email. First World Problems, right?!? Even with a Canned Response in Gmail, this still amounted to a lot of wasted time that could be spent counseling students.
In comes Google Apps Script. Now I have a simple button on each Google Sheet that I can click after entering comments. This button takes care of all the extra steps I used to spend as described above. Watch this video to see what I mean. Modify the process to create your own workflow and apply it to your own specific tasks. Give me some feedback in the comments section and tell me how you are using this idea.
For all the technology coaches out there who have a hard time finding coding curriculum for students, Google has answered your prayers. Google CS First is a free online program that can be completed as an after school, in school, or summer school program. It operates through clubs that are setup by volunteer educators and through free curriculum that employs Scratch to teach students the fundamentals of coding.
Originally developed for students in grades 4-8, the curriculum is designed so that everyone from the most experienced tech geek to the inexperienced newbie can make it work. All curriculum materials are provided for free - Yes I said FREE! - and additional support print materials can be shipped and provided at no cost. Teachers interested in starting a Google CS First Club can get started by following this link. As I said, no experience is necessary. You just need a desire to teach and time on your hands to provide training. If you are curious about the materials, you can preview them through the Google CS First website. Topics include:
Art
Fashion & Design
Social Media
Sports
Game Design
Animation and More...
Additional Training Materials and a Getting Started video are available on the Google CS Website.
