Blended learning has become a popular teaching method. Teaching today has moved more into the digital world and away from 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. I am very grateful to the co-worker who shared this idea with me.
Before making your table of contents, you’re going to want to set up your student (and teacher) sheets in your classroom Google Drive.
Setting Up Your Classroom Google Drive
First, create a folder and give it a name for the subject. Think about how you like to organize your folders. For this tutorial, each grade, topic, and strand will get its own folder, for example, Grade 7 Geography Strand A, Grade 7 Geography Strand B, Grade 8 Geography Strand A, etc.
In this folder, you can have the teacher and student pages for each lesson. So, for the Introduction, click on it to open the folder and then create a folder that says Student Pages. You can then separate your student pages from your lesson pages.
Now, you can create your table of contents. Here is a video that details what you need to do to do this. Watch the video or read the instructions below for detailed instructions on creating a table of contents suitable for blended learning classrooms.
Creating a Table of Contents Using Google Sheets
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 newsfeed 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.
First, you will have to create a new spreadsheet using Google Sheets. This will show up as an untitled spreadsheet, so you will want to give it a name by clicking into the box that says ‘untitled spreadsheet’ and writing the name of the sheet.
This name will be for the entire collection of sheets, so all of the classes you teach and want to create a table of contents for.
At the bottom of the sheet, you will see tabs. This is where you can create a new tab for each subject you teach. Press the + (Add Sheet) in the bottom left corner and then give each tab a name by double-clicking into the tab and writing the class name:
If you teach many subjects, you can view what each of your tabs is by clicking on the three lines (All Sheets) next to the + (Add Sheet).
Now, we can set up the table of contents for each class.
In row 1, you can write ‘Lesson Title’ in column A, ‘URL Link’ in column B, and ‘Date’ in column C. These will be the headers for your Table of Contents. You can make these any font you want, bold them, change the size, fill them with colour, etc.
As the year goes on, the sheet will start to become full of lessons and links. Because of this, we want to make the header stationary; this means that no matter how far down a student scrolls, they can always see the labels for each column.
To do this, select the dark grey line above the one with your cursor:
Then, pull it down so it rests between the 1 and 2.
You are now ready to start linking your lessons!
Write the name of your first lesson in the first space under ‘Lesson Title.’
Now, you will have to go into your classroom Google Drive to the folder you set up for this specific class.
Go into the Google Drive you set up for your classroom and open the folder you want to link. You can either link the individual PDFs or the folder for that particular lesson (ONLY the student pages – remember to separate the student pages from the teacher pages when setting up your Drive).
To get your link, click the three dots in the corner of the PDF, select ‘Share,’ and click ‘Share’ in the next menu.
You can now click on the dropdown under ‘General Access’ and select ‘Anyone With Link.’ This means that anyone with the link will be able to view the page. On the right, you’ll see that it says ‘Viewer.’ This means that anyone with the link can VIEW the page, not edit the page. Now select ‘Copy Link.’
Go back to your Google Sheets table of contents and select the space in the next column for that lesson. Insert (Ctrl + v) the link. You can also insert the date in the next column (Ctrl + semicolon).
And now your first lesson is linked!
From here, you can continue to set up a Google Sheets table of contents for each of your classes. It might take a little bit of time, but once you’ve finished, everything will be organized for your blended learning and ready for the year.
Are you interested in learning more about using a paper table of contents? Check out this post: How to Help Students Be More Organized.
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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.