Tech Thursday: Keeping Student Notes
End-of-semester is the best time for making notes about students' performance in your course for the future.
This is a low-tech workaround that, I think, saves time more than other higher-tech options. The end of the semester is the best time for making notes about a student's performance in your course. This is helpful for writing recommendations later, when several semesters have gone by and you may not really remember particulars of a student’s performance, but it's also helpful if you teach many courses in a sequence and you might end up having that student again in future semesters. I use these notes to complement the grade information, which of course you can always look up later.
One easy method is to set up a simple Excel spreadsheet with the student's name, final grade, a column for notes about attendance and participation, a column for notes about their writing (since that tends to be information that would be helpful to me if I have the student in a later class) and a column to note any concerns.
When all of this information is fresh at the end of the semester, it only takes a minute to type up these notes and enter them into the spreadsheet. It's much faster than any of the other, fancier, student tracking software options out there. Plus, these notes are really intended only for your own use, unlike notes from advising appointments or concerns reported to the school about a student. If you’re particularly into record-keeping, you could copy some snippets from feedback provided on assignments over the semester so that you have examples to draw on in the future. We put so much labor into feedback and grades that disappear into the LMS and are incredibly difficult to find after the semester has ended - keeping your own record is one way to hold on to some of this labor.
If you keep this going, you can simply add a new sheet for each new semester, and then you’ll have an easily searchable list for when a student comes back to you in later semesters to ask for a letter of recommendation. Or, when a colleague in your department says, “I think this student is struggling; how did they do in your class last semester?” you have something more to go on than their course grade and your possibly faulty memory.
Happy Notetaking!
Past Tech Thursdays
Student engagement: Climer cards / Digital exit tickets / Interactive quizzing / Online question management for classes & presentations / Wheel of Names (random name generator) / Providing audio feedback
Health: Two programs to reduce eyestrain
Zoom: Screen share in Zoom / How to Zoom in in Zoom
Research: Managing references / Find free versions of articles / Text Capture Apps
Using images: Extract text from images / Remove distracting backgrounds from photos / Using screenshots
Google: “Publish” from Google Drive / Google Classroom updates / “Make a copy” function in Google Drive / Working in shared Google docs / Collaborating in Google Slides / Turn Google Forms into a formatted document
Canvas: Canvas “What-if” grades
Productivity: Keyboard shortcuts / Text Expanders / Mailbird email program / Voice-to-text options / Custom URLs & QR codes / DropBox Paper for collaboration