Keep Track of Students Completing Work in Google Sheets
You’ve asked students to complete several things digitally. Digital, unlike paper, can be completed at different times. This can make it challenging to keep track of what students have and have not done. Google Sheets can help with keeping track.
Template
Google Sheets
If you want to make your own from scratch, go to sheets.new and create a new spreadsheet. Paste your class roster into Column A. I like to freeze the first column and the first row. To the left of column indicator A notice the thick bar. Hover your mouse over this and you will see your mouse turns into a hand. Hold down your mouse and drag the freeze bar to the right. Or, use the View menu to freeze rows and columns.
Set Column Headers
For each thing you want to check off, type this in row 1. I number all of my assignments so this makes it easy to find assignments in a list of assignments.
Highlight Check Off Area
Highlight where you want the checkboxes to go and use the Insert menu to insert “Checkbox.”
Get Fancy
You can certainly get fancier with your checkoff spreadsheet. You could build it into a full on gradebook, but you probably have a gradebook. Not everything we have students do is, or should be, graded. You need to keep track of who turned in permissions slips, formative assessment that is not graded, etc..
Distance Learning
If you are suddenly in a situation where the students are not at school you will need a system for keeping track of any work you ask students to complete from home. Google Classroom or Microsoft Teams can help you with this reducing the need for a checkoff spreadsheet, but again not everything is an assignment. If you’re asking students to send you a chat message or an email to check in each day you will want to mark that off. Many tasks we want to keep track of but are not needing to grade them or add as an assignment in Google Classroom or Microsoft Teams. It may just be needing to mark off sub tasks. On the essay, which is an assignment in Classroom or Teams, did they submit the topic sentence for feedback? Did they make updates you requested? Did they add 5 sources to the bottom before they started the paper?
2 thoughts on “CHECK OFF Student Participation”
Hi Alice! I absolutely love this!! I have been using it to track all of my online complete/incomplete assignments. I have a question: can the cells be formatted with a color? I like to color code my things after I’ve entered them into the grade book. Thanks!
You definitely can! Go for it!!