Writing your own comment generator
01
June
labdien lurkers
teachers in western australian schools are required to write individual comments for all their students and enter them into that wonder product, sis. i thought it might be a timely reminder to revisit some old skills.
keywords : csv, data, field, spreadsheet, vlookup, concatenation, mail merge.
spreadsheets are really groovy. they can be used for more than just handling numbers, they can manipulate text. here is a quick and dirty example.
go to your info manager and ask them for a file of your classes in .csv format. it means the various fields of data are seperated by commas, and you can easily import them into a spreadsheet. smartie pances can have first name, family name and gender.
to demonstrate how a lookup table works, concider setting up a table that looks like this
female she She
male he He
the command =vlookup(a1..b3,2) would return a result of she for female and he for male.
the idea is to set up columns of your classlists with numbers for your comments. Use a number system to code in your comments like a1 for excellent comments, b1 for very good, c1 for average and so on. So you might end up with columns that look like
mark weber male e666 He is a very naughty boy.
now to join them together use a command like concatenate
=e1+” “+f1
to give you the result
He is a very naughty boy.
Another option is to use mail merge to merge the comments into a word processing document. from there, one may cut and paste comments into the dreaded sis data base.
hope this helps.
mark
1. Steve Adcock | June 2nd, 2006 at 10:50 am
Last year when I did the SIS reporting PD we were shown something along these lines. The department promised to provide CSV files with comments but what we got were shocking general statements that very few teachers will use. Thus teachers still have to generate their own. We did it as a whole staff but rather than us do the technical work we requested someone from central to come and sort it and they did. Not sure how people will go now as lots more schools are using SIS this year.
2. Richard Ure | June 8th, 2006 at 10:57 am
It is possible and desirable for this type of feature to be built into a single program which administers the school and gathers and shares assessment data for management reporting as well as parent reporting while focussing on issues like “is our assessment program delivering consistent results?”
Such a feature should also search and replace for the student’s name to ensure it is spelt correctly; a major embarrassment when a misspelling occurs. I’ve seen such a solution work.