DFI - Week 4

Welcome to week 4 - our focus this week was dealing with data!

The focus of my blog post today is Google Sheets. 

Google Sheets is a tool that I find I am using more and more often in my teaching life. I started diving deeper into sheets last term as I was handed a piece of PAPER to track student attendance in a literacy programme I am implementing in my classroom. The stress of not losing the attendance sheet each week and then having to go back and count all the ticks made me think... in 2022 there must be a more effective way to do this!

I've decided to use Google Sheets as a way of recording this data for myself and my colleagues. All our data is now visible and easy to manage. Wooo! 

I learned a little about Google Sheets as I problem solved my way through trying to make the Google Sheet work in the way that I wanted. 

I found today's session was very helpful as I picked up a few tips and tricks that I've now used to tidy up this Google Sheet and make it more effective. Here are the three things I found most helpful:

• freezing the first column/rows (so that the children's names or the categories are always visible wherever you are working on the Google Sheet). 
• protecting sections of the spreadsheet (permissions can be given to particular tabs etc.) 
• grouping data (so that it can be hidden or viewed in groups e.g. classes, year level, gender) 

I have recently started using Google Sheets for my classroom planning. I find it very helpful to have all my planning in one place. It is so easy to flick between the tabs for each curriculum area. I pin this sheet to my top toolbar so that it is easy to find and refer to during my teaching day.  I also like how I can add a comment to a cell if I have something to reflect on from that particular lesson/small group. 

I'd love to know how other teachers are using Google Sheets for their planning... do you have any tips and tricks to make using sheets for planning more effective?

Photo of the DFI Term 2 Cohort.