The beginning of the school year or each semester brings a series of opportunitites to take advantage of this capacity. A brief example below will take you through the process of capturing and transforming student data supplied by this institution's WIN system with student names and other useful data. As school districts move to similar information systems, K-12 teachers will carry out similar activities.
Fortunately the general rule in computing of "type it only once" can often be applied. Our student information system (WIN) is a good example of one of the Internet's or Intranets' thousands of online databases. Beginning with your web browser you can copy the data from the web's table display and move it into a table in a word processor. From the word processor table the data can go to a spreadsheet for further manipulation of the data and from there to a database where you can new fields for your own personal comments and the collection of additional data.
How would you like to:
Have a word processor file in table format with a typed list of your students and pertinent student information as: STUDENTID; STUDENTNAME; CLASS; MAJOR; E-MAIL?
Have this student information entered into a spreadsheet so that you can be setup to enter student grades?
Use this information to make class attendance sheets with space for their signature following their name?
Have this data entered into a database for student record keeping including grades and your comments?
If you practice these skills for your own professional needs, you will understand better the use of spreadsheets and databases and be in a position to invent other uses for them that will model their professional application for your students.
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The University's online WIN system will give you the student data. You may have already printed it out but in this procedure you will also copy the data directly from the web page and move it into other computer applications. You need to know how to process the data to make it more useable in other applications.
Follow these steps:
WIN
1. Use the Faculty Access page in the WIN system to retrieve your class list for a given course including email addresses. WIN produces a class list in table format in your web browser. Use your “Select All” command found in the Menu Bar under Edit. Then under Edit again select the Copy command.
Word processor
2. Open up Microsoft Word and use the Paste command. Edit this text by deleting all text down to the headings that begin the student information section at the top of the table of student data. Only the table data and its headings should remain.
3. From within the Word program again use the Select All command. Under the Table command in the menu bar select Convert Text to Table and when it responds with a dialog box asking how many columns, indicate six, which is the number of columns of data created by the WIN system.
4. The display of text should look a bit odd in the table because numerous spaces that were produced in the WIN table are still there. Under the Edit command in the Menu Bar use the Replace command to replace all spaces with nothing, removing them from the document. Do this one more time, using the Replace command to replace all commas with a comma followed by a space. This step four completes the process of creating a table with student data. Save your word processor file.
Spreadsheets
5. To place this student data in a spreadsheet, use the Select All command in your word processor and then the Copy commands to copy all the student data in your table. Then open a spreadsheet in Clarisworks or Microsoft’s Excel. From the spreadsheet, use its Paste command (under Edit in the Menu Bar). This puts all the data neatly into rows and columns in the spreadsheet. Save your file. This allows you to put labels on additional columns and add record keeping data such as grades or save this file by a new name and use it to track attendance.
6. Once the data is in a spreadsheet or table you may find it useful to create an attendance sheet that you pass around your class which provides a column for students to add their signature after their printed name. Because the names are already in alphabetical order, once the sheet has gone around the class you can see at a glance who is absent and this order makes later attendance record keeping in a spreadsheet or database much quicker because of its alphabetical order.
To do this delete some of the columns that are not relevant here, especially the column with their social security number. It is campus policy not to reveal their SS to anyone.
Stretch an empty column after their name to be extra wide and label it on the top row for Signature. I also add an additional row at the top or bottom for the date of the class session and sometimes the section number. Then when I print out the sheet I change thid data for each class meeting or write it in by hand so that I can keep track of each class session.
Other spreadsheet columns could be used to track attendance or grades. A spreadsheet excels in doing basic grade averaging, including weighted grades.
Databases
Databases provides some additional very useful features. In particular, once the data is in the database, you can call up any students record without showing the data on other students. (This is a problem with spreadsheets.) There are other advantages to databases. It is much easier to set them up for comments after the grade for different assignments. Further you can create personalized form letters reporting student progress or provide complete end of the semester data. Through using form letters (mail merge) you can report the grade followed by your personalized comments (if any) for that exam or grading period. If you enter any comments during the grading process for each assignment, it goes very quickly.
To complete this 'transformation to database information" procedure, start from your spreadsheet data that you just organized. Use the Save As command. From a pull-down menu next to the place you enter the file name, select the command to save the data in DBF format, that is Data Base Format. Each column of your spreadsheet represents a field of data in your database. Note that there are six columns of student data provided by the WIN system.
For this next step, I will use the Clarisworks database. Open a new database. As it opens it asks you for the names of fields. Create the number of fields you want in the database, for example a heading that matches each of the six columns in your spreadsheet. But you could create less and the procedure still works. You do not have to merge all of the data selected in the spreadsheet. When you tell the database that you are done creating your fields, it is time to enter the data you saved in DBF format. From within the database application click on File and select Insert. Select the file that was saved in DBF format. The database responds by preparing to insert. It asks you which columns of data from the DBF formatted file you wish to be in which database fields.
At the bottom of the dialog box is a scan data button. Click on it to display the first set of data from the DBF file. Note that it may not match up with your field headings in the right hand column. Click and drag those field labels in the right column in front of the appropriate data in the right column. When you have made the matches you would like to make, click OK and the database proceeds to insert all the requested data from the spreadsheet into the database fields. To see all your data at once, click Layout in the menu bar and select the List command.
Other suggested database activities would include adding other field names to the database representing other kinds of information you keep on your students, from grades to commentary. You can also create fields which will serve the spreadsheet function of averaging your grades from different database fields, whether weighted or not.
This student record keeping example is just one of many possible uses of these information transformations. It would just as easy to construct different content area databases based on this same set of procedures. This work might be for research or for class instruction. An online database would provide a core set of data. You and/or your class would add more categories and data to make it even more relevant to your study.
Databases | Page Author: Houghton