Blended learning has become a popular teaching method. Teaching today has moved more into the digital world and less into the paper world. My students do not have access to 1:1 technology every day. I want them to be able to access class notes and lessons online from anywhere so I created an online table of contents using Google Sheets.
Watch the video or read the transcription below for detailed instructions on creating a table of contents suitable for blended learning classrooms.
Blended Learning Video Transcription
Hi Everyone,
I wanted to share with you how I organize the sheets that I hand out to my students. I love Google Classroom, but I don’t like the news feed style of the organizational system in Google Classroom, and the “about” folder doesn’t work for my students.
What I decided to do, was make an interactive table of contents using Google Sheets.
All you need to do is create a new Google Sheet, which if you are a Google Apps for Education school board or district, it comes with your package.
You give your spreadsheet, so I have Lesson Number, Lesson Title, Date, Location, and then I put my lesson number here, so in order of the unit. I give my lesson a title, I date my lesson, and then location links to Google Drive folders, that have my resources in them that students need for their class.
This really helps when students are absent, or many of our students now have accommodations and they have assistive technology, then they have access to all of the sheets that were handed out in the class. They don’t have to scroll through a news feed. All they have to do is go to the table of contents, and find the date, and then click on the assignment, and then everything is there.
What this means for me, is that I never have to worry about making sure that I save all those extra copies of things. If students lose it, and I’ve already given it to them once, then it’s their responsibility to go online, and either print it off or read it from the internet.
Here are some tips when working with Google Drive.
If you highlight something. And then you pull down, it will number everything for you. And when you are working with the date, if you hit “Ctrl + Semicolon”, it will insert the day’s date for you. And how I get the location, is when I’m in a folder that I want, or sheet, I just go to “get shareable link” I click on it, and then I go “Ctrl + C” for copy, and it will paste, I just hit the button.
Here is an easy way to organize your students, and your digital paper, in a very chronological way so that students can just click through on their devices. My students didn’t have 1:1 Chromebooks this year and they were able to access everything from their phones.
And one last tip. At the very bottom of the screen, you can have different tabs, so if you are a rotary teacher (and I teach multiple subjects) I can have a table of contents for Geography, I can have a table of contents for English, and I can just continue to make new table of contents for all of the subjects that I teach.
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awesome thanks for sharing. i am getting set up for a 1:1 middle school ELA class next year and I used to keep a table of contents in the front of their binders so this is so great to see that I can keep the format for a digital notebook.