user guide (teachers) the english tracker by schools development group is licensed under a creative...

User Guide

(Teachers)

The English Tracker by Schools Development Group is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.Based on a work at http://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/

Version 1.1 Issued 11 th August 2014

The English Tracker : Teachers The Schools

Development Group (2014) 2

Slide No

Contents Summary of Content

4 – 9 Introduction and Rationale An Overview of The Maths Tracker

10 Diagram Visual overview of how the Maths Tracker is organised

11 An Important Note Hints about saving data.

13 Title Page Hyperlinks to associated web pages

14 - 16 Enabling macros This must be done to read the programme

17 - 24 Custom Menu : Students Tab View and update your student info and grades

25 - 28 Custom Menu : Achievements Tab View and update student achievements

29 - 33 Custom Menu : Reports Tab Create spreadsheets for your class, groups or individual students

34 Custom Menu : Tables Tab Create lists of Content Descriptors and Checkpoints for any year level. Create Student Groups in this tab

36 Custom Menu : Query Tab Sorting and Filtering data

37 Custom Menu : Utilities Tab Printing and page set up

38 Custom Menu : Save/Quit Tab Save and Quit

The following slides are for all users of The English Tracker.



Introduction

The English Tracker has been developed as part of a joint project between the Schools Development Group and the Department of Education of WA.

The Schools Development Group is a not-for-profit organisation established in 1980 due to a need to provide exchange on co- operative teaching approaches and school design improvements. The activities of the Group have come from identified needs in public education by educators and parents in schools as well supporting education specialists. Visit www.schoolsdevelopmentgroup.org for more information.

The English Tracker is a culmination of two years work. The working party comprised of Administrators, Classroom Teachers and Literacy Specialists from schools across the state including Huntingdale Primary School, Highgate Primary School, O’Connor Primary School, Southern River High School, Duncraig Senior High School, Como Senior High School as well as Consultants from the Department of Education (WA).

Rationale and Aims

The purpose of The English Tracker is to provide teachers with a resource that assists with planning, teaching and assessment of the English contained in the Australian Curriculum (v7.0). It contains the Content Descriptions taken directly from ACARA documents. Each Content Description has been linked to checkpoints that have been carefully written as student behaviours that are observable and recordable.

The English Tracker has the facility to monitor student progress through the content and their assigned grades for each semester. It also has the capacity for teachers to write brief anecdotal notes about their students. An important function of The English Tracker is to be a resource that collects comprehensive data on literacy development for a whole school, year level, class and individual students. It is possible to roll the data over from year to year, thus providing a valuable means of effective communication between the admin team and teachers within a school.

Modes and Sub-Strands:

The English Curriculum can be organised into:

•Modes: Listening & Speaking Reading & Viewing Writing

• Sub Strands: Language Literature Literacy

The English Tracker will allow you to filter to the content into either modes or sub-strands, or a combination of both. For example, Reading and Literature …..

Checkpoints and Teaching Points

There are checkpoints written for each Content Description. These checkpoints are observable behaviours that can be thought of as ‘tickable moments’ in the classroom.

Some of the checkpoints have teaching points that have been written by experienced Literacy Specialists. These are designed to provide further clarification of the Content Descriptor and often give examples that the teacher may encounter. These teaching points will be printed on the Year Level Overviews and be visible as a ‘mouse over’ on Student Achievement reports.



Moderation and ConsistencyThe accuracy of any whole school monitoring system is always dependent upon the

quality and consistency of teacher judgement. Moderation between teachers is essential if consistency is to be maintained. It is envisaged that the English Tracker will provide the catalyst for professional conversations around the planning, teaching and assessment of Australian Curriculum English and can be used as a basis for collaborative planning and the analysis of whole school strengths and weaknesses in the teaching of literacy.



A few notes:

• This program requires you to enable macros on your computer in order to read it. This is not possible if you have your security settings set too high. The setting needs to be medium.

• It is important that schools devise protocols for the effective sharing of files. The Admin version of the programme should be kept on a secure drive for admin use only and the teacher files should be kept on a shared drive that is accessible to all teachers and admin. The teacher files may be copied and updated elsewhere (eg at home or on personal laptops) ...but it is essential that all changes are re-saved into the shared drive and not re-named. Admin staff need to take care to only make updates to teacher files if it is the current file to safeguard against lost data.

• Always import teacher data before making any changes from the whole school admin copy. When you export any new teacher feedback files back to shared

drive, this will overwrite any existing teacher feedback files.

The English Tracker Schools Development Group TEMPLATE

School Admin CopyContains data on all students in the school and is to be stored in a secure drive with Admin access

only

ReportsGenerated about achievement of Whole School,

Year Level, Classroom, Groups and Individual Students

Teacher CopyContains data on student in one class only and is

to be stored in a shared drive with Admin and Teacher access

Student data copied from

Integris

Import

Export



An important note to Teachers ....


Development Group (2014)

You will be provided with a copy of this programme in a shared drive at your school. Your version has data for the students in your class only.

You will be able to update information for your students and also keep brief anecdotal notes about them. This could be done in hard copy and or in digital form.

There will be times when Admin staff will need to make changes to your file. For example, when a new student arrives, a student leaves or when they receive a new version of this programme. They may also require the data you have saved and will need to import it back into the master copy (see diagram)

For this reason, it is vital that the file in the shared drive is the most recent file that you have saved. You can copy the file and take it home or onto another computer for your convenience.....but please make sure you re-save it back into the shared drive on return to school. The necessary admin changes will then be made to your most current file without loss of data. Your admin team will devise a system to alert you to when a change is going to be made. ALWAYS BACK UP YOUR DATA!

11

Open The English Tracker...

In order to use the document, you will need to enable macros. Please ensure that the security settings on your computer are set to “medium” ....macros cannot be enabled if the settings are too high.



Title Page

• The Title page can be accessed at any time by clicking the Utilities tab and selecting “View Title Page”

• There are hyperlinks to related resources at the bottom of this page. These include the websites of:

Schools Development Group Department of Education SCSA (K – 10 Outline & WA Curriculum page) Australian Curriculum v6.0

Enabling macros

When the programme is opened a security warning will appear. 1. Click ‘Options’ . 2. Select “Enable this content on the security warning pop-up. 3. Click “OK”

1.

2.

3.

Enabling macros

A new tab called “Add-ins” will appear across top of page. Click this to view a custom toolbar menu containing the following tabs:

•Students•Achievements•Reports•Tables•Query•Utilities•Admin•Save/Quit

Add-ins Tab

Enabling macros

This custom menu contains all functions that you will need to operate and maintain The English Tracker, including saving and closing the document. It is not necessary to use any of the other standard Excel functions (....in fact it is BEST not to)

The following slides will detail the function of each tab of the custom menu.

1. Custom Menu : Students Tab

(i) View Student data – by surname

This will display raw data of student details. It will also record when changes have been made to students details and who made those changes. This is a spreadsheet and can be filtered and sorted in any way. Click Query tab for sorting methods.

NEVER make any changes on this page. Use the next 2 selections on Student tab.



The English Tracker v 1.1 has the capacity to group students into 8 different groups. Schools have the choice to label these groups as best suits their context and needs of the students.

As a suggestion, Admin could ‘pre label’ in 3 or 4 of these groups before exporting the Tracker to the teachers. For example, “ESL”, ‘Indigenous”, “Special Needs”etc… This would leave4 or 5 groups unlabelled and allow teachers to group their students according to working maths groupswithin the classroom. Groups are always flexible ….and students can be in more than one group.

Student Groups – Update Student Attribute Data

To label groups, Click on ‘Tables’ tab and select ‘Student Group’ Type in column B to change the title of each group.



To update attribute data (ie assign groups) 1. Click on “Students’ tab2. Select “Update Student Attribute data”3. Highlight a student4. Click yes (or no) for a particular group5. Click green “Update attributes” after each student.6. When finished, click Close. there will be a “Y” next to

students name in columns K – R as appropriate.

Students can be grouped by either admin or teachers.



Using Student Groups

Choose ‘Reports’’ Tab and Achievements Summary.

Choose the group for which you wish to run report.

A report can be generated for identified groups of students. Click Reports, Group …..



The report will be labelled with name of group and the date of the report.

This function is useful for the provision for differentiation and IEP / GEPs

If you click Reports, Export report being viewed into new workbook…… you will create a new excel document that can be cut and pasted, highlighted, add/delete columns etc……to suit your own needs.



Student Grades Data

1. Use ‘’ Students’’ tab to “Update Student Grade Data”

2. Input grade data. You are able to select multiple students at one time.

1

2



1

Using “Reports” tab, Select “Grades reports and Charts”

View data by chart



In this view, if you double click on the numbers in the grade chart, you will see which students attained that grade.

This is a pivot table. Advanced users of Excel will be able to re-sort this table and drag categories around to compare groupings and data.



2. Custom Menu : Achievements Tab

(i) View

This page keeps a log of any changes made to student achievement. It will give you information about date of change and the person who made it. This is raw data only.



(ii) Update for selected student and multiple checkpoints

Use this page to update achievements of checkpoints for a single student. This is useful when you get a new student.

1. Select the student. Click OK



4. Use the comments box for any anecdotal notes. 5. Click green tab and then close



2. Make selection of content.

3. The date achieved is month and year only (will be recorded as 1st of the month)

(iii) Update for selected descriptor and multiple studentsUse this page to update achievement of a selected descriptor checkpoints for multiple students This is useful when you finish a unit of work and have a group of students who have achieved a descriptor.

1.Select relevant descriptor details

2.Select date

3.Add any comments if appropriate

4. Select students. 5. Click Green tab and Close. The English Tracker : Teachers

The Schools Development Group (2014)

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1

2 3

4 5

3. Custom Menu : Reports Tab

(i) Achievements Summary

This tab will generate a report on the achievements for an individual student, a group, a class or a year level.

This page is useful for teacher planning. It can be printed and used as a pencil and paper hard copy in the classroom. A report on an individual student can be used effectively as the basis of an IEP or for use in parent/teacher interviews.



Make selections to generate a report according to the desired parameters. Click OK. An excel document will be generated. It can be saved in another folder and/or printed like any excel document. There is an option “Export report being viewed to new workbook” in the Achievements tab. The English Tracker : Teachers

The Schools Development Group (2014)

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Sample report for whole class(This is an Excel document and can be saved and/ or printed) )

The red arrow indicates that a comment has been made by the teacher.It will appear when mouse is hovered over it . Using the Utilities tab, it is possibleto set up the printing of comments.

Surnames blocked for confidentiality



Date of reportautomated

Date of reportautomated

Year Level Overview of Checkpoints

This tab will generate a list of sub strands, content descriptors, and checkpoints forchosen year levels. There is NO STUDENT INFORMATION attached.

This is useful for programming and planning.Teaching points will be displayed if they are written for that checkpoint.



Export report being viewed to new workbook

When you have generated a report it is possible to save a copy to a new workbook in a desired folder.

1.Generate the report through “Reports” menu.

2.Click “Reports” then “Export report being viewed to new workbook” and save in the Reports folder created in initial set–up (or to a folder of choice for Teachers) .

3. This report is an excel document and can be changed, modified and used as any other excel document......

or printed as a hard copy.



4. Custom Menu : Tables Tab

This tab will show a list of all content descriptors and / or checkpointsin the entire English Tracker. These lists will be useful for planning.

It is for reference only. It may be useful to sort the tables according to year levelto obtain an overview of all checkpoints. Do this by using the Query tab and “Sort data being viewed” or “auto filter”.

It is also where you can personalise the names of you student groups.



• A note about checkpoint coding:

Each checkpoint has a 6 digit code. Kindergarten is K and Foundation is P in this coding.

Checkpoint Code Means:

K00001 Checkpoint 1 for Kindy

K00026 Checkpoint 26 for Kindy

P00010 Checkpoint 10 for Foundation

Y01013 Checkpoint 13 for for Year 1

Y06056 Checkpoint 56 for Year 6

Y10015 Checkpoint 15 for Year 10

Y10A45 Checkpoint 45 for Year 10A

Checkpoint codes are useful for communication between teachersin planning documents and collaborative meetings.



5. Custom Menu : Query Tab

Use this tab to sort or filter data.

When a report has been generated click“Query” then “Sort data being viewed” or “Autofilter data being viewed”

The data will always default back to custom view on closing the report.



6. Custom Menu : Utilities Tab

View Title Page This tab will take you back to the title page

Printer selection and Page set-up Gives options for printers and page set up for reports.



7. Custom Menu : Save/Quit Tab

Always use this tab to save and close the programme. (Rather than using regular Excel menu)



user guide (teachers) the english tracker by schools development group is licensed under a creative...

Documents

english tracker

custom menu

maths tracker

tables tab

reports tab

savequit tab

students tab view

achievements tab view