Teaching in Higher Ed

Two Basic Excel 2007 Tips for Grading Efficiency

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The upgrade to Excel 2007 brought with it some great new features to make managing data easier. When creating Excel-based gradebooks in the past, we would have had to do a lot of manual set up to create design features that are now just a few clicks of the mouse away.

I highlight two such features here, but encourage you to share other tips for grade tracking in Excel 2007 in the comments section.

AUTO TABLE FORMAT

Excel1

Excel has 44 built in auto-formats for tables. To use one of these great-looking formats:

  1. Sort your data (under the data tab)
  2. Highlight your data
  3. Choose format-as-table from the home tab and select your desired format

I find this makes the data more easy to read on screen, since each row is kept more visually separate. It also makes printouts much more appealing and professional.

CONDITIONAL FORMATTING

Excel2

Another great feature is the ability to see visually how each person did in comparison to the others. You used to be able to do this in Excel 2003, but you had to program in the conditional formatting (for example, you might have indicated that if someone scored below 70% that you wanted the font to be displayed in a red color).

Excel 2007 makes this much easier, plus you have far more options available in terms of your formatting.

Excel3

In my example, I selected the red/yellow/green arrow formatting, to quickly see which students scored the best and worst on the final exam. To create custom formatting:

  1. Select the collumn you want to format
  2. Choose conditional formatting from the home tab
  3. Indicate which custom formatting you wish to use

This only scratches the surface of what you can to in Excel to track data, but I know it is better to give information in bite-sized pieces. Give it a try as you set up this next semester's gradebook and feel free to share other tips in the comments section.

Wordle Makes Ideas and Concepts Visual

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Wordle

IMAGE: created using www.wordle.net

I just discovered Wordle, which is a free, web-based tool that allows you to make your ideas visual. You can paste in a paper you've written, a journal, an article, or even a URL to your blog. Wordle then takes all those words and analyzes which ones appear more frequently. The more often a word shows up, the larger it appears in your ‘cloud.'

The cloud above is from this very blog… but you can go and try it yourself with your own words.

Social Media and Pedagogy

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Socialmedia

We recently gave a class for a client on managing across generations. In preparation, I put together some trivia from decades past and present. It reminded me of how far we've come in terms of technology, but our educational models sometimes seem so far behind.

Students today won't tolerate passive learning. I suspect one-way teaching methods were never very effective, but generations past didn't fight against it in the same ways they do today. Now, social networking sites and blogs are becoming increasingly popular, but can be misaligned with a learning strategy when they are used purely as an attempt to be hip.

As teachers/professors, we can't just start using these ‘new-fangled' tools and expect students to learn any better than they are now. We have to utilize them in the right way… in alignment with what we are trying to achieve. We have to also completely change the way we're evaluating learners' progress in our classes.

The CommonCraft Show puts out these wonderful videos that take challenging concepts and make them easier. Check this one out on social media and consider how you might integrate this concept in to helping people learn. Also consider Common Craft's teaching methods and how they do eLearning different.

I'll be writing on this subject more in future posts, but would love to hear your best practices in the comments section.

Overcome writer’s block – or not!

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For my friends at work (or not) on their dissertations, I found this article on the 43folders blog with some great ways to overcome writer block. It is more than a few years old, but I imagine the techniques still work today.

Me?

I'm finding all sorts of great ways to waste time and procrasinate the inevitable work on my dissertation. Here's a list, in no particular order, of my recent time wasters that you may enjoy, too:

Write a blog

We use TypePad as our blogging service for both Innovate Learning's blog and this blog. You can get a free membership to TypePad (as well as many of the other blogging services), but we make use of the custom templates, including the ability for inserting header banners like the ones you see at the top of each of our blogs, not to mention the great ability to publicize your blog available with our around $15/month (at the time of this writing) membership.

Picnik

Edit a photo

Many people store their photos on an online sharing system such as Flickr. However, there are limited photo editing options available on those sites and most of us don't have the patience to learn Photoshop. Try Picnik as a great means to edit your photos for free online. It is incredibly easy to use. Upload your photo, or link your account to be able to access the photos you already have stored in an online service, such as Flickr. Then you can change the coloring, remove red eye, crop, resize, place text, and add frames around the photo. All our banners and photos that you see at the top of our blog postings were done using Picnik. While it is a time waster, in terms of avoiding working on my dissertation, it is an efficient tool that saves time over when I used to do stuff in Photoshop and other photo editing programs.

Feed the hungry

Free Rice helps you feed the hungry in other countries, while you show off how much stuff you know by answering questions.

Use Slate.com's Career-Specific Time Wasting Advice

These tricks should get you started on wasting your time, but if you want advice that is specific to your vocation, check out this advice from Slate.com.

Best wishes in your procrastination.

Overcome writer's block – or not!

By | | | XFacebookLinkedInEmail

For my friends at work (or not) on their dissertations, I found this article on the 43folders blog with some great ways to overcome writer block. It is more than a few years old, but I imagine the techniques still work today.

Me?

I'm finding all sorts of great ways to waste time and procrasinate the inevitable work on my dissertation. Here's a list, in no particular order, of my recent time wasters that you may enjoy, too:

Write a blog

We use TypePad as our blogging service for both Innovate Learning's blog and this blog. You can get a free membership to TypePad (as well as many of the other blogging services), but we make use of the custom templates, including the ability for inserting header banners like the ones you see at the top of each of our blogs, not to mention the great ability to publicize your blog available with our around $15/month (at the time of this writing) membership.

Picnik

Edit a photo

Many people store their photos on an online sharing system such as Flickr. However, there are limited photo editing options available on those sites and most of us don't have the patience to learn Photoshop. Try Picnik as a great means to edit your photos for free online. It is incredibly easy to use. Upload your photo, or link your account to be able to access the photos you already have stored in an online service, such as Flickr. Then you can change the coloring, remove red eye, crop, resize, place text, and add frames around the photo. All our banners and photos that you see at the top of our blog postings were done using Picnik. While it is a time waster, in terms of avoiding working on my dissertation, it is an efficient tool that saves time over when I used to do stuff in Photoshop and other photo editing programs.

Feed the hungry

Free Rice helps you feed the hungry in other countries, while you show off how much stuff you know by answering questions.

Use Slate.com's Career-Specific Time Wasting Advice

These tricks should get you started on wasting your time, but if you want advice that is specific to your vocation, check out this advice from Slate.com.

Best wishes in your procrastination.