Category — Microsoft Office

I’ve written here about how you can use Microsoft Word’s mail merge feature to create individualized assignments for your students. So when my students work on projects, they each get their own version of the problems, each with its own semi-randomly generated numbers. This helps to avoid cheating and helps to promote true collaboration between the students.

Today I turned that Idea around and streamlined the grading/commenting process on a recent student assignment. Instead of writing tons of notes on each student’s packet which they won’t be able to read because the margins are to small, and instead of spending 10 minutes per student with my calculator out doing the arithmetic for a complicated rubric, I created a giant grid in excel.

All of the students’ scores on each problem in the project packet were entered and then merged into the final rubric with a section for notes that I typed out at the end.

For me, this was great for 3 reasons. 1) Students can better understand my feedback because it is clear and typed. 2) It saved me a lot of time since I didn’t have to make 70 individual documents for the rubric. And 3) I got all of the grading data in one place. I noticed that a lot of students struggled with one aspect with the third problem in this assignment, and I never would have had any chance of noticing without having all of the data in excel!

The ‘Mail Merge’ feature in Microsoft Word is designed to help people who are sending out massive mailings to individualize each letter.  For example, if you are sending out a letter to 250 customers, instead of saying “dear valued customer” as the opening, you can have 250 documents generated with “dear mr. smith” and “dear mr. jackson” and “dear ms. arnold” etc.  It is an incredibly powerful tool for administrative tasks, but more importantly, it can be used successfully in your classroom.  Here’s a short video explaining how to do it in excel 2007.

How is that useful in the classroom?  You can create multiple versions of the same assignment/project and use the mail merge to create individual assignments for each student.  For example, I recently completed a CSI project with my students where they were asked to use the physics topics we’ve been studying to solve a car accident mystery.

Each student received a packet with the crime scene information.  I used excel to randomly generate 80 different versions of the problem (check out this resource for using random numbers in excel).  The kids, of course, were amazed, and accused me (though I don’t think this is really an accusation) of being one of the biggest nerds alive.  We nerds are taking ownership of that term. What’s nice is that with Excel, I kept the random numbers and calculated all of the individual answers using excel formulas.  Each student was assigned a specific packet number (see image above) and I could use this number to look up their answers in Excel to check them when they were done.

Anyway, why the hell would anybody go through all of this trouble!?  Well, I’ve found there are a few reasons why this works for me.  First of all, showing students that you care about each one of them individually (even though I just used random numbers) always gets them to care more about the project.  Secondly, since each student has their own problem with their own answers, it forces them to ask me questions in a more general way, and to think things out more.  For example, a student can’t ask “what’s the convertible’s final velocity?”  because I don’t know the answer.  Instead they have to say, “I’m having trouble finding out what the convertible’s final velocity is.  How could I start?”  Which is a much more productive help request for the students to learn to solve problems on their own.  The most important advantage of doing this mail merge individualization is that it prevents cheating.  When I assign a big project like this, if all of the students have the same numbers, than anyone could just copy off of anyone else.  Thus, it would be difficult to allow the students to work together.  In this case, the students were encouraged to collaborate because help has to actually be help and not just copying.

I’d note that this isn’t specific to science and math, since excel can work with text instead of numbers.  In fact, in this most recent CSI project there was a line about whether or not it was raining the night of the accident which was different for different students.

Try it out, you might find it helpful and the students will appreciate it.  Here’s some additional resources on mail merges, and the actual CSI project that I assign with names changed because they are teachers from my school.

CRIME SCENE INVESTIGATION WORD DOC You can see what the project looks like with the mail merge fields in it. The packet is accompanied by a separate packet which scaffolds the students through a solution process.

Formatting Numbers – Word can sometimes act kind of funky when merging numbers and it can give you like pi*10^7 decimals when you want 1. This will help you to format the numbers after merging.

As a physics teacher, there are so many problems for the kids to solve that involve situations I can’t actually show them. For example, when two cars collide, the students have to sort of imagine what that looks like. I can’t actually slam two hummers into each other in the classroom. Well, ever since I started giving my lectures completely through PowerPoint I’ve been using animations in almost every slide.

Note that the chopiness is a result of the screen cast video and not the actual animation, it is pretty smooth.

Setting up an animation like this is actually really simple. It’s as easy as making lines of text appear one after the other in PowerPoint. I’m using 2007, but if you have an older version of power points, check this out. It’s essentially the same thing.

In PowerPoint, click on the picture/object that you want to animate to select it. Then click on the “Animations” ribbon near the top of your screen.

This ribbon is mostly focused on the transitions between slides, but if you click on the “Custom Animation” button, you can animate individual objects.

A new panel should appear on the right side of the screen for custom animations. Make sure your object is still selected and click on the “Add Effect” button in the custom animations panel.

Here you can animate the object in multiple ways. It can spin, grow/shrink, appear/disappear, etc. You can click on “Motion Paths” to make the object move on the screen. There are several options here. You can make it move right, left, up down. If you select these you can adjust the object’s motion path by clicking and dragging on the ends of the motion arrow that appears on the slide.

You can also make your own custom path. With the custom path, you can draw out the exact path that you want the object to move.

If you want to change the time it takes for this object to complete the path, or change whether it starts smoothly by accelerating from rest or just jumps straight into flying around the screen, you can make adjustments to the animations by right clicking it in the custom animation panel and selecting “Effect Options.”

Take a look at the final star power point here

Using these animations, no matter what topic or class you are teaching, can help in a myriad of ways. Students can be considerably more engaged if they aren’t just looking at a bunch of words on the screen. Not to mention in topics like science and math, students can gain better understandings of physical or spatial topics if they can construct their learning from a physical reality, something they can actually see. It also opens the door for a little humor in the classroom. I’ll often pantomime pulling a rope from the side of the screen as an object slides across it. I’ll even blow from one side of the screen loudly, pretending that my breath is pushing the object along. The kids love it.