Leveling Up a Skills/Standards-Based Gradebook with Numbers

A PE TEACHER'S DREAM

In the spring of 2018 Tyler Hamby (@tylerhamby13), my PE teacher at Hamilton/SOTA, came to me with a thought. After taking the Apple Teacher course, and a history of trying different grade keeping apps, he wanted a way to easily track his 300 students, and give parents access to specific details for each student. He wanted to give parents more than just a "2" to reflect what they've accomplished in PE. He wanted them to have a more meaningful picture that could reflect when their kiddo was amazing at throwing, but needed work on dribbling. He knew that there had to be a way to make this possible using the apps he had recently mastered.

Tyler had already created a spreadsheet that was able to track where students were at with each of the skills. What he now needed was a way to generate progress reports for each students.

Together, through a couple of hours of trial and error, we discovered the horizontal lookup function, and were able to create individualized progress reports that generate off of his initial spreadsheet.

In the Numbers document, on the first sheet, he is able to quickly mark down points for each student as he evaluates them during PE class. What makes this even cooler is that he is able to do it with his iPad, which is an easy tool to carry around during class, when you never know when an errant basketball may be headed your way.

The additional sheets (labeled student 1, etc. on the shared document) then auto-fill with the information for each individual student.

Now when report card time comes, all he has to do is share those individual reports with parents and they have a perfect understanding of where there student is at.

The system worked perfectly, and after sharing it with our co-worker and third grade teacher Maria Henry, she adopted the system for tracking progress with reading, and we realized just how far-reaching the grade book could be in a standards-based grading environment.

Recently, Tyler created a video that explains how to set up the gradebook for yourself, and shared it to Youtube and PE teachers groups on Facebook, where teachers have responded with enthusiasm. I am so excited to help share this awesome work and bring this awesome gradebook to all of my techy teacher friends who I know will love it just as much as we do! 

Check out the video instructions and download the gradebook (in the video description) here! https://youtu.be/gTkjdc9hYrc