Hello and welcome to mr Tompkins edtech. In this video series I will be showing you how
you can use Microsoft Excel as a classroom teacher, head of department or school senior
leader. In each video will be covering a number of
techniques which are all very useful in their own right, but when put together will enable
you to create feature rich and dynamic gradebooks, giving you a much better overview of your
classes performance. These tools and techniques easily scale to larger groups and projects
and you will be able to build your own data analysis tools spanning entire year groups
and whole school cohorts. I’ll be showing you how to use conditional
formatting to automatically highlight students who meet certain criteria, for instance above
or below expectations, I’ll be explaining the vlookup and xlookup functions which can
be used to combine data from 2 or more separate spreadsheets, or to convert marks into grades.
I’ll introduce you to spinners and combo boxes and how you can use these to create
dynamic student summary pages, where you can quickly focus in on just one student from
your class or cohort for a more detailed overview. I’ll also show you how we can create these
flightpath graphs for a quick visual representation of a students progress.
Whilst this series is aimed primarily at teachers, the skills are very transferable, and will
be useful for anyone looking to improve their knowledge of Microsoft Excel. I recommend
watching the videos in sequence – you can find a handy playlist here which will play
them all one after the other in the right order.
I’ve also made a handy excel workbook to accompany this series, filled with examples
of the excel formulas we will be covering, so you can see them in action. You can download
the workbook from the link in the description below this video. I highly recommend that
you do this, as actually practicing the skills yourself will make it all much clearer to
you and also give you a useful reference to borrow formula from when you are making your
own spreadsheets. This Excel workbook is made up of a number
of different worksheets, each corresponding to a video in this series. Each sheet and
video outlines an excel function or technique, along with advice and examples of how to use
these in constructing your emarkbooks. I have also included some short tasks to try out
these techniques by yourself. You can keep track of your progress using the Task List
found on the first page of the workbook. Make sure you tick the box at the bottom of each
task as you work your way through. Once you have worked through the video series
and workbook tasks, you should hopefully have gained some clear ideas about how you can
develop your own gradebooks and some very useful skills to implement these ideas. Developing
a good emarkbook that allows you to effectively track your students progress takes quite a
lot of thought and time. It will most likely evolve and develop over weeks and months rather
than in a few days. So please keep the workbook as a handy reference and refer to it as and
when you are developing your own emarkbooks. Now this workbook contains everything you
need for this course, so go download it before starting the next video – link down below.
As a special extra perk for those of you who have signed up on my Patreon page or have
become a channel member here on YouTube, you’ll gain access to an enhanced version of the
course workbook which additionally contains one of my own complete gradebooks and student
summary page, jam packed full of useful formulas and interactive and dynamic features which
you can use as a template when creating your own gradebooks. If you’d also like to become
a member to help support the channel and also gain these extra perks and rewards, just click
on the join button below the video to become a channel member, or follow the link to my
patreon page and sign up there to get the link.
I’m going to be using the latest version of Excel in these videos. If you are running
an older version, don’t worry – these tools and techniques have been in excel for
years and everything I’m going to show you is still going to work for you. You might
just need to do a bit more hunting around to find some of the tools as Microsoft does
like to move these buttons around a bit from version to version
I would welcome any feedback on how useful you found the videos and the course workbook,
which tips were the most useful to you, which could use more examples or explanation, or
perhaps even techniques of your own that you think should be included! Just use the comments
below each video to share your thoughts. If you find the videos in the series useful,
please do give them a “Like”, it really helps me out, and if you are not yet a subscriber
why not tap the big red button below and then hit the bell to get notified when I upload
the next video in this series. Click over here to start the next video in
this excel series. Or click the thumbnail below it for the full series playlist. You
might also like this other great edtech tutorial down here. See you on the next video.