I have said it before, and I will say it again.  The one thing I dislike most about my job is writing blog posts.  Seriously, as the technology teacher, this should be a major thing I can model for my students, especially since I am responsible for introducing them to the world of blogging.  But, I digress.  I am going to be more intentional this year about “just getting it out there.”  So this is what has been rummaging around in my brain the last week or so.

There are a lot of tasks that have to be completed to get ready for the new year:  classroom decor, students lists, organizational items, and the list goes on.  I have discovered a great tool (actually an add-on) that made part of those tasks so much quicker and easier for me this year.  It is the Document Studio add-on for google sheets.  Since I teach every student in the intermediate school, I need to be able to take the spreadsheet shared with me and create documents that would hold individual student information.  The images below give you an idea of what I am describing.

This is a sample of the spreadsheet info I receive.  When the spreadsheet comes to me, student name is in one column by last name, first name.  I use the sheets Add-On Split Name to separate the name into first and last name in their own column.  Very handy!  Then I use the Document Studio Add-On to take the spreadsheet information and place it on individual google docs (or you could make it a pdf) to print and give to each student to access in the computer lab, like this.

This add-on is like using mail merge in Excel.  It was very easy to use.  The free version limits you to 50 files a day, but the pro version is unlimited and only $29 a year.  To me, it was invaluable for printing the 350+ name cards I needed for the computer lab. If you need to do a similar task, I would highly recommend Document Studio.