As Alice Keeler says, “Google Sheets is always the answer!” So when one of my teachers came to me looking for an answer, I went with a Sheet.
The scenario
The teacher would like to have her students self reflect on all the skills covered (through “I can…” statements) at the completion of a unit. When meeting with a supervisor, he suggested making it an on-going process and not at the end of a unit. He also suggested instead of seeing a list of 8-10 skills, which may seem overwhelming, have it chunked and display at appropriate times. The teacher would originally do this on paper, she even tried switching over to poster paper so she could reveal each skill when she wanted but knew there could be a better way.
Enter the Tech Coach
She reached out to me and scheduled a time to meet. We discussed what she wanted to have the students do, showed me the handout she used for a previous unit, and contemplated ways to enhance it. What we came up with is embedded below.
We took the skills of an upcoming unit and set it up in a Google Sheet with 3 tabs: “Skills”, “Input”, “Formula”. “Skills” would be visible to the students; the other two would be hidden. The first skill would be displayed. The student would then need to copy a “✔” from cell ‘H1’ and paste it into one of the levels of confidence. This would signify their reflection on where they feel they are at based on the “I can…” statement. I also suggested the student should provide some sort of evidence on why they believe they are where they are at; maybe through a link to a screenshot of a problem they solved or a screencast explaining how they solved or where they got stuck solving a problem. Once the check mark is placed in a level, the next skill would appear. This happened because of things going on ‘behind the scenes’, so to say. The check mark would appear in the “Formula” tab triggering a formula setup to ‘COUNTIF’ a check mark appears in one of the cells for the levels of confidence. The formula would then display a number, as long as the number is greater than “0” the next skill statement would be pulled from the “Input” tab and displayed in the “Formula” tab. The “Skills” tab is pulling what is displayed in the “Formula” tab, so when the next skill is displayed it will populate on the “Skills” tab for the student.
Want to try out a ‘Student’ version?
As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I want to utilize Google Classroom on this blog more as a means for other educators to see real examples. This activity is linked to an “Assignment” in a Google Classroom I created for this blog (Code: mfq04n). If you try to sign up with your school account and get an error message, it is probably because your school’s domain is locked down and you can’t join outside of your domain. You may have to join with your personal Google account or create a free Google account.
Want a template of this Sheet?
Click on this link to see a preview and to make your own copy of this template.