Day 1 - Data, Printers, Spreadsheets

Finishing up My Personal Wellness instruction with the Freshmen. Using iPad to record student preparedness for the lesson. Entries for all 343 students went into a Google Spreadsheet. Entering data into a spreadsheet is a lugubrious process. The only feasible strategy: Turn on  editing for all rows in that class (14-27 students) before they arrive in class, then circulate the room entering each student's information on his/her respective row and click "submit" for each row as you go. It's clumsy, but it beats walking around with a laptop, and it is easier than a phone.

The upside? If we did this for each student for each of the 24 My Personal Wellness lessons, picking one indicator as a measure for performance for each lesson in the unit, we would have an incredibly rich performance baseline for our entire freshman class on a wide range of skills ranging from writing, to following instructions, to web design, to spreadsheet entries, etc.

My iPad is not configured to a printer. I don't know if this is something we have explored at the district level. I put in a work request to address the issue. During class (still MPW project with freshmen), due to ongoing printer issues in the labs, approximately 15% of students were unable to print their bibliographies (created in GDocs via EasyBib). I asked those students to share their work with me so I could print it. Obviously, I had to use a Windows machine for that.

I received an email inquiry for a list of NEAS&C committee members, grouped by standard. The information is  on the NEAS&C website. Each standard's page includes a list of members in four columns, but the request specifically stipulated that the information be delivered in a spreadsheet. On a computer, it was a simple enough task to execute, albeit with a fair amount amount of manipulation - copy names from website,  paste in spreadsheet, drag specific names that dropped into columns 2, 3, and 4 into the first column, then sort each column. But on an iPad, it is a lot more complicated. I considered doing using Google Spreadsheets, but then I remembered that you can't paste across columns. So I tried Numbers, and for just a minute I thought I couldn't paste at all, but then I remembered that you have to paste in the function field, rather than the cell, and, of course, that won't allow you to paste across columns either. I quickly realized that would have  to use a desktop to fulfill the request.

Apps Acquired:

• Outline - OneNote Notebook (someone tweeted this)
• ImagePro - Google Images (was looking for a smiley face emoticon)
• PicSearch - Google Images (but then I dumped it for above)