Jul 14 2009
=IF(J3>0.9,”A”,IF(J3>=0.8,”B”,IF (J3>0.7,”C”, IF(J3>0.7,”C”,IF (J3>0.5,”D”,”F”)))))
I decided in June that since my children were keeping me close to home this year, I would take whatever tech workshops the OCDSB was offering this summer. It was a great decision, I enjoy my weekly trips to Confederation Learning Centre computer lab. Today’s workshop was about Excel. It was called “Advanced Excel” and I don’t mind saying that I was a little nervous about the “advanced” part of the billing. Fortunately, it was all good. I actually figured some stuff out on my own! We imported text, learned about Pivot tables (really cool) and how to tweak some formulas (the IF ones are my favourite). It was a morning well spent.
It was a predominantly secondary teacher crowd. I think there was only one other elementary teacher there. I don’t normally get to hang out with secondary teachers. Our tasks in the workshop were to import student records and have Excel organize the data, sort it and play around with the numbers. The records that we imported included marks like 23/25 for different assignments. We worked on having Excel calculate averages, percent, highest score and lowest score. The secondary teacher beside me was really enjoying all that she could do with the program to organize her marks and classes. I was finding it neat too but I don’t know that I will be using Excel the same way she does.
Over the past few years, I have experienced a lot of change around assessment and reporting. With the reporting that we do, and the comments that we write, anecdotal records now hold more information for me than marks. My mark book that used to have things like 23/25 or 72% has been replaced with copies of rubrics with levels 1,2,3,4 and scrawled comments. I wrestle with how to marry my achievement chart based comments with a final A, B, C or D. I try use Excel to keep this data in some order. While the workshop today was looking at coming up with an overall average to create a final percentage mark, I think that I will be looking at finding the “most recent, highest scores”. I am looking at how to organize my data to sort different level readers into guided reading groups. I am thinking of doing “IF” formulas that colour code my level 4s as red, 3s as blue, 2s as green and 1s yellow in order to differentiate my program. I wonder if I can do that. =IF(J3i=4=red) … this is going to take some thinking. I didn’t ask at today’s workshop, didn’t want to sound too elementary, pretty colours and all.
I really enjoyed today’s workshop and learned a lot about Excel that I will put to use in ways that make sense to me. But, I wish that I had spent some time speaking with the secondary teachers to find out the mysteries of their jobs and assessment methods. I have always known that elementary and secondary schools are not the same. I began to wonder about how different we are. It made me think about how we don’t really have a dialogue between elementary and secondary teachers. I hope that someone out there sees the “big picture”. I really hope that we are doing things at the elementary level that support our students as they go on. Perhaps we at elementary could learn a few things from our secondary colleagues and vice versa … Oh, oh sounds a bit like crazy talk, too much time spent with IF,OR,NOT,TRUE,FALSE, and AND.
