Friday 19 February 2016

PLG - Efficient Tools

Looking at the agenda for today's session, I had flashbacks to my corporate job where I had roles that circulated around the use of spreadsheets. While I see the logic behind the use of such tools, I remembered dry conversations about Excel formulas and thought how would tools like these would be used in the teaching profession.

I had already had a glimpse of how my school utilise both Google Sheets and Google Forms - we use Sheets for jobs like timetabling and recording of students progressions but I had not really seen much use of Forms. The morning session had us split into ability groups where those of us who required a refresher on how to use Sheets were taken through the various steps and others were able to jump into looking at the various add ons that are available to the program. Something that used to frustrate me before was when you received information and fields like first name and surnames would be in the same cell and you would need to separate these out using a formula. We found an Add On called Split Name which adds to the application and then whenever you receive information that requires this to be tidied up, you can solve this with a couple clicks of a button.

Google Forms was something that I really wanted to look into more, especially with the linking with Google Sheets where you can manipulate the data. Some great insight I got was how to use these tools for teaching aspects such as marking and the tracking of assessment. Another great insight shared today was the use of Google Forms to gather prior knowledge before a lesson so you can tailor it to the needs of your learners.

I'm looking forward to working more with these tools to help streamline not only some of my own processes but hopefully we can use them to collaborate more within our learning space. Stay tuned!

1 comment:

  1. I had the same thing Heath, where I would get frustrated that you couldn't split or merge cells of data in excel. If only I had known about that at the end of last year, would have saved me a lot of grief haha. The blessings of advancing technologies! :)

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