Its the start of a new year and I’m getting my class timetable from our school system. I like working with colour coding so I can see what years I’m teaching. I used to do it manually but today I looked into how to do it using conditional formatting in Excel. It’s a bit odd but it seems to work. You have to add it based on a formula and the formula I used is this:

=ISNUMBER(SEARCH($A$1,"9"))

..to look for a cell that contains “9”. Note: $A$1 is the first cell of the block I have selected. And I make the background colour change to yellow.

I’ve added 4 other rows depending on what Year groups I’m teaching (eg 10, 11, 12 and 13)

It should also make it easier to change the colours if I think they’re a bit naff!

Another useful conditional formatting rule I discovered to highlight those students who missed marks in each question is shown below:

See how the max mark is shown at the top of the column (row 8) and the student marks are from G12 across and down. It just makes it easy to spot patterns where students haven’t got full marks.

This is the copy of the Jupyter Notebook I was working on Google Co Lab to show the Year 10/11s for the basics of Python programming. But alas Google Colab is blocked in school. However there is a way of publishing the notebook as a GitHub Gist. And the link below should show the gist (which is linked to the Colab notebook. Confused? I know I am!)

It’s back to school time and as usual I’m extracting data from Socrative reports.
Socrative.com is great when it comes to auto marking multiple choice content but if I have a few manually marked questions then it becomes painful in both adding up the marks and giving the students feedback as to where they can improve.

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