Using online forums to decrease teacher's administration burden

Photo courtesy of Shena Macdonald

Working online has certainly streamlined my administration and improved my record keeping process. I will have to locate some of the tutorials I have prepared for teachers' workshops, but using spreadsheets to add up marks certainly is effective. Some of the functions may not able to some teachers, but have a look through and maybe you will find something you would like to try.

One of the main reasons I started marking on excel spreadsheets is that my handwriting is really ugly and felt embarrassed scribbling feedback on the learners' scripts. However I know that summative and formative feedback is very important for learners' development (I will write more about this in another post).

One benefit of marking on excel was that it added up my marks for me and reduced the number of calculations errors. Sure we sometimes enter a faulty formula, but excel certainly saves me hours of calculator work.

An unexpected bonus of marking on excel was that I had records of all the feedback I had given learners. This was great when I had to compile reports on problematic learners. It also helps me track learners progress and assist them with fixing areas.

Thus, I was loving using excel, but was unsure how to get the feedback back to the learners in a legible format. At first I printed my spreadsheet and cut into strips, but this wasn't very useful as it didn't tell learners which marks linked to which sections.


Screen Shot of a Mail Merge Labels

Mrs Moore had been printing our exam marks on labels since I was at school, but using mail merge to transpose spreadsheet marks into labels seemed complicated and I was hestitant to try. However, Mrs Moore is a patient mentor and after a few lessons I managed to get mail merge right and I now use it for everything. I wouldn't say I am a Master at it as the merge sometimes does some strange things, but I am certainly happy to keeping trying and often bug my husband for some expert excel advice and that helps alot. However, the effort it takes to learn the system and the cost of the stickers certainly pays off in time saved. It definitely saves a lot of time and errors during exam time, when you have to add classwork practical marks to their exam scripts. I think it would certainly benefit other departments that have term marks made up of multiple sections. It also helps the learners with checking their marks and they love getting extra stickers to put in their homework diaries.

I will add some more images, notes and tutorials to this post when I get a chance, but for now I have to go make lunch and tackle some marking :-)