Keeping track of all the details about all of my students has always been a challenge for me even in the best of times
And remote learning has made juggling everything even more challenging and weird at least for me
So over the past few months i've developed a couple of notion databases that have really helped me to stay
On top of the progress of all of my students and I want to share that with you today
My name is michelle
i'm
a part-time graduate student and full-time educator
And my goal is to design some better systems to help you achieve your goals for the past four years
I've been working in a non-traditional education space but being home for remote learning has made my classroom even more non-traditional than usual
Even when I was meeting students regularly in person, I had a hard time keeping track of all their different needs and strengths
What they were working on what their schedules were like and all the other details
I tried all kinds of tracking systems and solutions and nothing I could come up with really worked for me or helped me that much
Fast forward to march and everything got a lot worse for me
Staring at the computer all day and barely ever leaving
My house was making my head spin and I was really concerned that I was gonna lose track of some of my students
So that's when I cobbled together this system in notion
And i've been working on it for the past couple of months and i'll probably still keep
workshopping it
But I wanted to share it with you today in case you're having some of the same challenges that i've been having
It's hard to say what's going to happen in the fall for school
But I think there's a chance that a lot of teachers are going to need help organizing
all of their thoughts in the digital space
first of all
If you haven't heard of notion, definitely check it out. I started playing with it about a year ago
And i've really enjoyed designing systems that work for me
I
Like how notion talks about itself as being different from some of the other like more traditional digital platforms
That have modeled themselves on our old analog systems
And I think that really is the best part of notion that it lets you be creative to design solutions to your own problems
In my last video I shared the solution that I created to keep track of all my graduate school assignments and replace
My old paper planner assignment tracking system i'll link that up here if you want to check it out
Okay, but now to my student tracking system
basically
It consists of two related databases one for the students and one that records every time we meet and what we worked on
During that session i'll give you an overview of each of them and talk about the magic of how they interrelate
Because of the students that I work with and the setting that I work in
My students are older and they have a lot of different goals that i'm trying to keep track of
Depending on your setting and your population you might want to keep track of different information
This is just a framework the basics for me. Here are their name and their age?
Um, this is actually a formula that calculates based on their birthday
Which is super helpful for me and since they're all doing different things
I like to keep track of what their goals are their contact info which obviously here is blank but in my real version
Their contact info is in there and how they prefer to be contacted
And then this last column over here shows the relationship to the other database in this system
And that lets me have this roll up over here that shows me how long it's been since i've met with them
Based on that relationship and then in this column this checkbox is automatically checked or not
Depending on whether or not i've met with them in the past three weeks
If i've met with them in the last three weeks I consider them an active student
But for your purposes that might be longer or shorter and obviously meeting these days is a loose term
uh
You know might be a phone call or facebook message or meeting up on zoom speaking of which let's go over to the progress calendar
so this is what that relation and the other table links to this is the space that I use to keep track of my
Interactions with students depending on which student it is and what they're working on what I record here might look different
But at the very least I use it as a space to record a summary of what it is that we talked about
when it is we're going to meet next and
what it is that they need to be followed up with about and that's been so helpful to me because then whenever
It's time for us to meet again
I don't have to think about like, uh
What what did I ask them to work on? I can just go in there and look I can also leave myself reminders
In there that notion will nudge me to follow up on in case there there's assignment deadlines or anything like that. I want to communicate
For some students I even share this page while we meet on zoom and i'll archive any of the screen
annotations and keep notes of what we did while we met and then afterwards I export it as a pdf and
Email it to them so that they can have notes of what we talked about
And this can be viewed as an overview of a calendar with all the students on it
Or you can look at it in this view which shows just one student's meetings
My favorite part of this whole system is the sort that i've made for the student database
And this has helped me be really intentional about my outreach efforts to students
This is a sort that only shows active students and it's sorted so that the student that i've met with the longest ago
Is at the top of the list
This has been really helpful to make sure that every single one of my active students is getting regular attention
I don't have a ton of active students right now because it's summer but I
anticipate that in the fall
Just a couple weeks from now i'll have a lot more students on this list and it's going to be a lot harder to remember
When was the last time I talked to each one?
And here you can see that if I have contact with the student and I record it over here in the progress calendar
Over here in the student side. It'll move the student down to the bottom of the list
So that's how i've been using this system for the past couple months and it really has been very helpful to me
I can imagine that a similar setup would be really helpful for parent contacts
Or really any kind of client work that regular follow-up is important for if you're interested
There's a link to a blank version of this template in the description of this video
So, please feel free to duplicate it into your workspace and adapt it
However, you like if this was at all helpful to you
Please like the video and subscribe to my channel so that I can share more of my tools and solutions with you
And please let me know in the comments how you're planning to keep on top of everything with school this year
Whether it's with notion or with something else. Thank you so much for watching and i'll see you next time