Five Ways to Turn Up the Power of Google Sheets

Google Sheets can be much more than a simple spreadsheet application. Turn up the power of Sheets with these five add-on's!

Flubaroo

Attched to a Google Sheet, Flubaroo is a powerful grading tool. Not only can it grade assignments that in a Google Sheet, but if you have the student email, you can return their grades to their shared folder.  Using one of my favorite application in Pear Deck?  You can send your Pear Deck results to a Google Sheet and use Flubaroo to grade them.

Doctopus

Doctopus is a great way to distribute classroom assignments in a paperless classroom. Students simply look in their "Shared With Me" folder for their assignment. The thing that's great about Doctopus (of which Google Classroom recently added) is that it provides a way to differntiate assignments among the students in your class. Want student "A" to do all of the questions on the worksheet while student "B" should only do half of them, it's easy to send out separate assignments. Once the due date for the assignment has arrived, you can "ingest" the assignment for grading and return the digital copy.

Goobric

Goobric takes that rubric you have on a Google Sheet and attaches it to student work for easy grading. It works hand in hand with Doctopus. Once you've got the student work in Doctopus, attach the Goobric, grade and return--it's really easy to do and makes grading simple.

Rostersync

Rostersync is heaven sent for those that are typing rosters into a spreadsheat to use for different applications such as grading apps. It works in conjunction with Google Classroom in that it pulls your roster from Classroom or vice versa sending a roster from your spreadsheet to Google Classroom. It works great when you want to set up a class with Doctopus.

Autocrat 

Autocrat is a document merge app that takes information you have on a spreadsheet and moves it to a Google Doc or PDF. For example, you've asked the students to sign in using Google Forms when attending an after school study session because want to give the students a certificate of participation. The Google Form is connected to a Google Sheet for easy reference. You can take the information on the Google Sheet and create certificates of participation using Autocrat. It's also great for use at staff meetings. The staff signs in through a Google Form that's tied to a Google Sheet. Use Autocrat to create a certificate of attendance.

Differentiate With Doctopus

This is a public service announcement: Doctopus is great!  
Doctopus is a must for the differentiated classroom.  Those of you who know Doctopus, know how powerful it is in differentiating work among your students.  Those of you who are unfamiliar with Doctopus, it is a Google Sheets add-on that brings easy differentiation to your class.

Some classes today are integrated to include both regular education students and special education students.  Obviously, a classroom such as this has students with different abilities.  This is where Doctopus comes in.

 A key to conducting an integrated class is differentiating the work.  In the old “paper” days, you may have had to print different copies of an assignment for different students.  Today, in a paperless classroom, printing worksheets is a thing of the past.  With Doctopus, one need only send work to a student's Google Drive wherein they open it and use it in class.

The instructor simply creates as many differentiated assignments as they need in their Google Drive.  Using Doctopus, you can send the differentiated assignments to the students of your choosing.  Doctopus is a must in an integrated classroom.

The first thing you want to do is add it to Google Sheets by opening a Google Sheet and clicking on the Add-ons tab.  Doctopus is easy to use.  Simply create a roster of students and import them into a Google Sheet.  Using Doctopus,  choose which students get which version of the assignment.  Along with differentiating work for specific students, Doctopus allows you to differentiate among groups as well.  If you're not familiar with Doctopus, you owe it to yourself to check it out.  Like I said earlier, it's a must have in your classroom.  It will make preparing assignments in your differentiated classroom a breeze.