Ignite Your Teaching
Ignite Your Teaching
Save Time Writing Report Cards
In this podcast episode, I introduce Simply Graded, a game-changer for teachers during report card season. Discover how this powerful tool simplifies and automates the report card comment process, saving you countless hours. Learn how Simply Graded uses advanced formulas in Google Sheets to streamline the workflow, making it easy to generate personalized, comprehensive comments for your students.
Watch the video: https://youtu.be/4yItIZzjFqQ
Key concepts covered include:
report card inefficiencies
automating comment generation
creating personalized comments
Using Graded effectively
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It's report card season, so what does that mean? It means that we need to somehow figure out how we're going to find the time that it is going to take to finish up all of our last minute assessments and find the hours that do not exist in a day to write our report card comments. The problem is is that the biggest time suck that is involved in writing reports is not probably generating the comments. The biggest time suck is the inefficiencies that exist in using the report card writing tools that we are given in order to write comments. It also does not help us to use comment banks and to automate many of the repetitive tasks that we are required to do when writing report cards. Now, there's a reason for this, and that's because the people that designed report card writing tools did not do so with the end user in mind, the end user being that of the teacher. I know this because I have a few friends that are software engineers that work for these companies, and when asking them why they don't consult with teachers, they were confused and wondered why would we? You're not the one paying the bill, which means the people that they are consulting with are not the people that are writing the report card. They're not actually teachers who are writing report cards, which is not surprising to me, because when you actually go to use those as a teacher, you realize just how inefficient. People do not understand the workflow required to use their software in order to generate a report card, so it's no wonder that it's inefficient, Takes us an immense amount of time, has us repeating steps multiple times, tweaking with word counts, copying and pasting unnecessarily and changing things very manually when really the technology should be working in our favor. It was this that frustrated me the absolute most, that made me want to come up with something that didn't rely on a tool the board gave me in order to find efficiencies. I, as a mom of three very active kids, full-time teacher and full-time business owner, do not have time to waste copying and pasting or doing anything pretty much manually when there are things and tools, technology, software, inventions that should make this process much more efficient. So what did I do? Well, I do what I always do and I created the thing that should already exist but doesn't. And that's when, sitting at a restaurant with my husband, we designed Simply Graded. Simply Graded is simply just a spreadsheet on steroids Using complex formulas. We allowed this software on Google Sheets to automate the tasks that these softwares should do for us, Things like I enter a student's grade and it automatically pulls the comments from my comment bank and puts them together in a completed and assembled paragraph ready to go.
Speaker 1:What I think most people overlook when they're thinking about how we build comments is, especially for things like language and math. Those comments are not just a one-time thing. We are combining comments that are related to reading, writing, oral and media. We're combining all of those together to make one coherent comment that reflects a student's overall language learning skills. So we need tools and software that allow us to say, give students a C in reading and a B in writing, and a D in oral language and a C in media, and for each construction, for every student's comment, that's going to look a little bit different. So we need a tool that will put it all together and Simply Greeted is that tool.
Speaker 1:The pivotal point for me was coming back from a maternity leave and realizing that the time that was required for me, with three very young kids at home, the time required for me to put together report cards from scratch, was approximately 40 hours. That is, 40 hours not of me just writing comments. That is, 40 hours, most of it me wasting time fiddling with half done products, half done report card writing software tools that just make my life, making this report card ten times harder than it needs to be. So we created a tool, this tool that allows me to use formulas that simply ask me to enter a class list of my students, identify their pronouns, Then create a comment bank that is deep, that allows me to use a wide variety of comments based on what my kids need, allows me to personalize these comments and tailor them to whatever specific expectations my principal at the moment feels is necessary. So I can customize the comments, I can add personalized details in each one of these comments, and allows me to create a holistic comment that accurately reflects each student's level of achievement on all of the different strands within language, within math, within science and social studies and builds the comment automatically, simply by me entering grades. So I want to take this time for the remainder of our video and I want to share with you just a brief walkthrough on how Simply Graded works and if you think that it's going to work for you, I would encourage you to check it out.
Speaker 1:Welcome to Simply Graded. I'm so excited to be able to show you this report card comment helper tool. It will help you to quickly and easily make your report card comments for your students by simply entering your class list. Entering your grades, it will automatically populate your comments. So let's get started On this first page. This is where all of the information that you will have accessed. There's also a video tutorial walkthrough on how to use it.
Speaker 1:So the first place we're going to get started is here in the class list. You'll notice. The first thing you see is that there's already students populated, but there are people like Chandler Bing and Carrie Bradshaw and Charlie Brown. These are just sample students. In order to change this, you're simply going to select the cell and enter your students first name, last name, and a drop down will help you identify the he, him, she, her, they, them pronouns. If you happen to have a student that uses a pronoun that is not already listed, you can edit this section by simply clicking the edit tool and adding another option here. You can also use their preferred name in this column as well. Entering your class list accurately is important because the information for the comments are pulled from the information you put here.
Speaker 1:Next is our report card comment bank or comment library. This link has already been pre -populated with some sample general comments. These are not grade specific comments, but just generalized comments based on what we already have here. So a general comment on fractions and decimals. We encourage you to personalize these comments to suit your students' needs. We've also made available pre-made grade level comment banks for grades three, four, five and six, which you can also access. Our pre-made comment banks. The link will be in the show notes.
Speaker 1:Now, if you want to add more comments, maybe you want to have comments for term one, term two, progress reports, feedback. Maybe you want multiple algebra algebra one, algebra two. You are welcome to now add extra. You simply click insert one row below. Make sure in this drop down you tag it as math so it can be used. Give it a title. Maybe we'll call it data management 2. And you can add your comments for data management 2. And it will be available to you when we go to this math section.
Speaker 1:Next, we also have comments-based generalized comments that are surrounded the Ontario curriculum. However, you can change this to reflect your own curriculum. You simply change the title, write your comment as it reflects. You can add any other comments, any other rows, as long as you take it with language that suits your needs. This is a really flexible comment bank library that allows you to change, add, store all of your comments, Even if you wanted to have 36 rows of language comments for every time you do a different grade or anything. If you have a split grade, you can add more comments. Below you can have all of your language grade five comments, all of your language grade six comments. All of this can be stored within this one bank, which is given a lot more flexibility and is a great addition to the 13.2 version. Again, general comments for strands, not specific. To find specific comments, you can find those in our grade comment banks.
Speaker 1:Once you have updated, personalized and tailored your own comment banks, you are ready to now build your comments. This is where you go into these color-coded tabs along the bottom In language, in this gray section, your class list, as you changed it, will already show up here pre-populated, along with their pronouns that they identify with. To tell the program which comments you want to use to build your library. You are to build your comment. You are simply going to click these drop-down menus and select the grade that you want to use which comment you want to use for your students. So say you want to do comprehension, and you can reorder them in whatever way you would like to order them and they will be built. The comment will be built based on how you order them in this row here. Now, when you select N A, there will be no comment populated.
Speaker 1:As you select a grade, you'll notice the comments will start to be built along the side and you will also have a character count here that will automatically be updated as you add more comments. If there's comments you don't want to use, you'll simply make sure you select NA and it will be not included. If, for example, you're teaching a split grade, you would select perhaps grade 5 would be these three comments and grade 6 would be these three comments and you would just build your grade 5s on this side and your grade 6 comments on that side. You can also just build your grade 6 comments, copy it out, then build your grade 5 comments and change it up and copy it out here. Once your comment is built, you'll simply select this box, hit Command C on a Mac, control C to copy on Windows and copy it into a Word doc. Copy it into your report card rating tool and it will allow you to have the comment ready to go, perfectly organized, with names and pronouns, all ready to go. Next, you can do that with all of the other subsequent subjects. The only thing that is currently not possible is to add additional rows along the top. We do have limits on how many rows are able to be added on top here to build your comments.
Speaker 1:Also included in Simply Graded is your Learning Skills Comment bank. Another comment bank for learning skills on the levels here where we have responsibility organization, independent work, collaboration, initiative, self-regulation. If you would like to rename those, you're welcome to. You can also add new rows and change the different criteria under each one of these titles. So you want to add different criteria? You can create your comments and it will be available to you in the generator.
Speaker 1:So once you have your learning skills comment bank generated, then you're going to go to your learning skills generator and you're simply going to give your students marks for each of these categories. If you want to decide you have different criteria, you can change it and it will change the comment. Pick a conclusion and now you have your learning skills comment ready to go Now. The one area you need to be careful of is this protected sheet. This protected sheet allows you to have all of your formulas work. It's important not to change or update this or to delete rows, because this is what everything is based on. So where you see the lock, leave it as is. In a few simple steps, using Simply Graded, you can go from class list, personalize your comment bank to building your marks and copying out your comment in a much simpler, easy and straightforward way, so that you can save time, get rid of some of those inefficiencies and you can have your comments built in no time at all.
