routines

My seating chart is on my iPad, and I love it. I made a template of that chart for you: download the spreadsheet for Numbers or Excel.

I created the seating chart as a spreadsheet. When you add points below a student’s name on the seating chart, they automatically appear in a column (called Participation) on the spreadsheet. You can import this spreadsheet into Numbers on your iPad. Then, you simply walk around your classroom and add points (or notes) to the seating chart, and the automatically appear next to the student’s name on your spreadsheet.

This template has five seating charts, and one main spreadsheet. If you’re a

• single subject teacher: use one seating chart per class period
• multiple subject teacher: use one seating chart per content area
• music teacher: use one seating chart per instrument group

Feel free to change the size and layout of the seating chart–it’s just a spreadsheet. If you don’t know how to link cells in a spreadsheet, just watch a YouTube video on it. You can always be low-tech and print out this template, but I think it works best if you have save it on your iPad, so that you can always have an up-to-date gradebook in your hands. You can easily add this spreadsheet to Numbers on your iPad via Dropbox or iCloud.

If you have suggestions or requests, please add them to the comments below. Feel free to share this template–I licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

You don’t look to look all over the earth to find information. You don’t need to  scour the internet to find information. You don’t need to search through one million Google results to find information.

You need to learn where to look for information. Here’s how to be smart about finding information online:

• If I want to learn how to do something on my computer, I go to YouTube and find a tutorial.
• If I want a good teacher web site, I go to Delicious. Odds are, someone already found a great website and bookmarked it for me to easily find.
• If I want a great photo, I go to Flickr and legally use one.
• If I want general knowledge on a topic, I go to Wikipedia, where thousands of people have already edited a thorough summary.
• If I want a review of a product, I go to Amazon and see what other people have said on the product page.

Before you do a Google search, think about what you want your results to look like. Googling “imovie how to slow motion” gives you 85,000 results. Searching for that on YouTube gives you 32 results, and you get to watch somebody show you how it’s done.